The Lock Turned from Outside
The smoke was thicker than it had any right to be for so small a fire.
Darcy registered this in the part of his mind that had spent five years cataloguing threats, even as the rest of him was already moving.
He seized the hearthrug and beat at the base of the curtain where the flame was lowest, driving it back from the floor; but the fabric above had caught fully now, and the fire ran upward with a steady confidence that told him someone had helped it along.
Not an accident. He had known it before the thought fully formed. Elizabeth was already at the door again, her shoulder against it, her weight behind it.
“It will not move,” she said.
Her voice was steady. He noted this without surprise.
“I know.” He crossed to her and examined the frame in the thickening air.
The lock had been turned from outside. Not jammed, not swollen with damp. Turned. Deliberately.
“Stand back.”
He put his shoulder to it twice. The frame held with the indifference of something that had been prepared to hold.
The window, then, if there was any way through the burning curtain and glass.
He turned to calculate it: the fire, the drop, the angle, whether there was sufficient foothold on the sill.
“Wait.”
Elizabeth was not looking at him. She was looking at the far wall. At the bookcase.
“There was another way out,” she said.
Darcy looked at her.
“When I was a girl. I do not know if I remember it correctly.”
“Where?”
“Behind there.”
He did not ask how she knew. He did not ask whether she was certain. He crossed the room at once and set his hands against the edge of the bookcase.
It did not move.
Elizabeth was beside him before he could tell her to keep back. “Not from the front. It is not built in. Or it was not. There was a door behind it once.”
“A door.”
“Into the billiard room, I think. Mr Robinson disliked the noise, and Mrs Robinson disliked the draught. The bookcase was put there to stop both.”
Smoke pressed down from the ceiling, making the air bitter. Darcy braced his shoulder against the side of the case and shoved. This time it shifted, but only an inch.
Elizabeth caught at the nearest shelf as several books slid forward. “Again.”
“Stand back.”
“No.”
He looked at her.
“I know where it is,” she said. “You do not.”
That was true. It was also intolerably brave.
“Then stay low,” he said.
They pushed together. The bookcase gave with a long, protesting scrape, dragging across the carpet inch by inch until a strip of darker wall appeared behind it, and then the edge of a narrow door.
For one suspended second, hope was almost worse than fear. Darcy seized the old handle. It did not turn. From the other side of the library came a violent blow against the hall door. Elizabeth started.
“Mr Darcy!” a man shouted. “Sir, are you within?”
Henderson. Relief struck him so sharply that for a moment it was almost another danger.
“Here!” Darcy called. “The lock is turned from the outside.”
“We are trying, sir,” came the answer, followed by another crash that shook the frame but did not open it.
Darcy looked back at the narrow old door behind the bookcase.
“No,” he called. “Go round. There is a door into the billiard room behind the far bookcase. Force it from that side.”
There was the briefest pause.
“The billiard room, sir?”
“Yes. Now.”
Footsteps sounded in the passage, rapid and purposeful, then receded.
Elizabeth looked from the hall door to him. “Will they find it?”
“They will find the billiard room. The rest is our task.”
The heat behind them deepened. The burning curtains had begun to fall in blackened strips, and smoke crawled lower, dirty and bitter.
Elizabeth coughed into her sleeve. “It may have swollen in the frame.”
“Then we break it.”
He set both hands against the old door and drove his shoulder into it. It held.
From somewhere beyond the wall came a shout, then the sound of furniture being dragged across the floor.
“They have found it,” Elizabeth said.
Darcy struck the door again.
This time, from the other side, something answered. A blow. Then another.
The old frame shuddered between them.
The third blow split something in the frame.
Darcy felt it give before it moved, a shudder through the wood, a crack of yielding, and then the door swung inward with a grinding protest and a rush of cold, clear air.
Henderson was on the other side, his coat off and his sleeves rolled, with two other men behind him and a branch of candles casting long shadows across the billiard room floor.
He took one look at Darcy and then, immediately, at Elizabeth.
“Miss,” he said, and stepped back to let her through first.
She came through without hesitation, her hand briefly on the door frame as she steadied herself, and then she was in the clearer air of the billiard room and coughing properly for the first time, bent forward with one hand pressed to her chest.
Darcy came through behind her and pulled the door shut.
Henderson was already moving. “The fire, sir?”
“Library. The curtains. It will have spread.”
“We have men on it.” Henderson glanced towards the passage. “Mr Bingley has been roused. The household is up.”
“Good.” Darcy looked at Elizabeth, who had straightened and was pressing her sleeve to her eyes. Not weeping. Smoke. “Miss Elizabeth needs air. The garden door.”
“This way, miss,” said one of the other men, already moving.
Elizabeth looked at Darcy once before she followed.
He held her gaze for a moment.
Then Henderson said, quietly, “Sir. The lock.”
“I know,” Darcy said.
The passage was chaos. Bingley was in the doorway of the drawing room in his shirtsleeves, his face pale now that he understood something had gone very wrong in his house.
Mrs Hurst stood behind him with a candle.
Miss Bingley, rather further back, had achieved a remarkable composure for someone whose library was on fire.
“Darcy.” Bingley crossed to him at once and gripped his arm. “Are you hurt? What happened? Henderson would not tell me anything, only that there was smoke. Good God, man, your coat.”
“I am not hurt.” Darcy looked past him. “Miss Elizabeth.”
“Here,” said Elizabeth, from the garden passage doorway. She was pale, a streak of smoke across her temple, but upright and clear-eyed. “Jane. Someone must go to Jane. She will have heard the noise.”
“I will go,” said Mrs Hurst, with unexpected decisiveness, already moving towards the stairs.
Bingley looked between them with bewilderment rapidly giving way to something more serious. “Darcy. What is happening?”
Miss Bingley had drifted closer.
Darcy looked at his friend. “Later,” he said quietly. “Not here.”
Morris appeared at his elbow. “Fire is out, sir. Henderson has secured the room.”
“The lock.”
“Turned from outside, as you said. And the bell pull: the cord has been cut, sir. Not frayed. Cut.”
“Someone was in that passage,” Morris said quietly. “While you were within.”
Darcy stepped through the garden door. The night air was cold against the back of his neck. Across the garden, Elizabeth stood with her face tipped up towards the sky, breathing steadily. One of Henderson’s men stood at a careful distance.
She was safe. She should not have needed to be made safe. She should never have been in that room.
He had let his guard down. He had lingered in that library, talking about books and corners and reassurance, while someone waited in the passage outside.
Across the garden, Elizabeth had turned slightly, her profile pale in the darkness, and he watched her breathe the clean air that she had needed because of him. Because she had been in that room. Because he had not told her to leave when she arrived. Because he had not wanted her to leave.
He had spent five years being careful. Five years cataloguing threats and managing appearances, and never allowing himself anything that could be used against him.
He had come to Hertfordshire with Richard’s men in place and letters routed through Edward’s office and every precaution he could think of, and he had undone all of it in three weeks by sitting in libraries and walking in gardens and forgetting, for hours at a time, that Wickham existed.
Elizabeth had nearly died tonight. Not Darcy.
Elizabeth. The locked door had not cared which of them it trapped.
The fire had not distinguished between the heir to Pemberley and a gentleman’s daughter from Longbourn who remembered the old blocked door and had pushed a bookcase through smoke without being asked.
She had saved his life. And he had put hers at risk. He thought of the curricle wheel. The bridge. Caesar and the saddle. Each one deniable, each one arranged to look like accident. This had not looked like accident. Whoever had turned that lock had not been subtle. They had been desperate.
Desperate men did not stop. He looked at Elizabeth one last time. Then he turned back towards the house, and the warmth of the evening, and everything it had been, was behind him.
“Mr Darcy.”
Her hand caught his arm before he had taken two steps. Not tentative. A grip. He stopped. She came around to face him, which meant he had to look at her, which was what he had been trying to avoid.
“You knew,” she said. “When you examined the lock. You knew it had been done deliberately. And those men.” Her eyes moved briefly towards Henderson’s man at the garden’s edge, then back to him. “They are not ordinary servants. You gave an order and they obeyed it without question.”
“Miss Elizabeth.”
“I am not asking you to explain it tonight,” she said. “I am only telling you that I am not a fool, and I do not intend to be treated as one.”
The night was very quiet around them.
“No,” he said at last. “You are not a fool.”
“Good.” She released his arm. Her hand was steady. “Then we understand each other.”
She went inside without waiting for his answer. Darcy stood in the cold garden for a long moment. Morris appeared at his elbow.
“Write to Colonel Fitzwilliam,” Darcy said. “Tonight.”
“Already done, sir,” Morris said quietly.