Chapter 42 #3
“My solicitor, Mr Abbot, is examining the original trust deed in its entirety. Not the summary the trustees provided, but the full document, including the codicils.” He returned the notebook to his pocket.
“He will want to know of your appointment. It may bear upon certain provisions he has not yet finished reviewing.”
Darcy waited for more. None came. Gardiner rose, and the gesture ended the business portion of the conversation and returned them to the niceties of a social call, to the ordinary demands of courtesy between people who had not yet decided what they were to one another.
“You will stay for tea, Mr Darcy?” Mrs Gardiner asked.
He stayed, and it was easier than any hour he had spent in London since his return—easier than Lady Matlock’s drawing room, easier than the solicitor’s chambers, easier than the empty dining table at Berkeley Square where he sat each evening with his correspondence and his conscience for company.
These were Elizabeth’s people, and he belonged to her, more than to anyone else.
The tea was poured, the conversation turned from Darcy’s business to the ordinary exchange of a household receiving a guest, and he found himself answering questions from the two young women who had been watching him from across the parlour for the better part of an hour and had clearly been storing up their curiosity for this occasion.
Kitty was the bolder of the two, despite her cough.
She asked him about Northumberland—the weather, the coast, the village—with the appetite of someone who had been confined too long and wanted the world brought to her since she could not go to it.
She had Elizabeth’s directness without Elizabeth’s clever subtlety, and when she asked whether the tower was truly as cold as her sister claimed, something in the phrasing—her sister claimed—told him that Elizabeth had written more about the keeper and his tower to her sisters than the Gardiners perhaps suspected.
“Lizzy says the wind comes through the gallery like a living thing,” Kitty said, watching his face. “She says you can hear it change direction before you feel it.”
He had taught her that. The memory of it—Elizabeth standing in the gallery with her hair loose and her hand raised, turning her palm to find the shift—came to him so completely that he had to set down his cup.
“Your sister is a quick study.”
“Lizzy says the keeper taught her everything she knows about the lantern.” This from Mary, who had left the piano and taken the chair nearest the fire with the air of someone who intended to participate in the conversation on her own terms. She had Elizabeth’s dark eyes but used them differently—where Elizabeth observed and withheld, Mary observed and delivered. “She says he is very exacting.”
“I believe she used the word tyrannical,” Kitty added.
“She would,” Darcy said, and something in his voice—or perhaps in the way he said it, with a familiarity that belonged to a man who knew exactly how Elizabeth Bennet deployed the word tyrannical—made both sisters look at him, and then at each other, with the swift silent communication of siblings who have just confirmed a theory they had been developing by letter for months.
Mrs Gardiner poured more tea and said nothing, but her hand on the pot was steady, and her eyes, when they met her husband’s across the room, carried a conversation of their own.
When he rose to go, Mrs Gardiner walked him to the door herself, which was not customary and which she did, he suspected, because she had something to say that did not belong to the parlour.
“Mr Darcy.” She stood in the entrance hall, one hand on the newel post, her voice lowered.
“Elizabeth has not written to us of you by name. She has mentioned the tower’s keeper, and she has mentioned his departure, but never a name or any sort of description of your person.
The manner in which she has not mentioned both tells me more than she perhaps put down on the page. ”
“She is a woman of discretion, Mrs Gardiner.”
“And you?” She met his gaze. “If you are the man I believe you to be—if you are the reason my niece has chosen to remain on that cliff through a winter that would have driven a lesser woman south—then you owe her the swiftest return you can manage.”
“I know.”
“Then go.”
He dipped his head dutifully. “As fast as horseflesh can carry me, Mrs Gardiner. But... I wonder if you would do me one service.”
Her brows lifted faintly. “Yes?”
He named his request, she heard it with an expression that turned slowly from puzzlement to certainty, and he accepted her promise that it would be done.
Then, he descended the steps into Gracechurch Street with the cards still in his pocket, unused, and the stone warm from his hand gripping it.
And a timeline that had contracted so violently that the city around him—its carts, its commerce, its indifferent thousands—was already receding into obstacle, into distance, into everything that stood between himself and the narrow stair he should never have descended without her.