Page 13 of Faceless

“The Scottish solicitor was in no doubt. He said a housekeeper once loyal to a lady would be doubly loyal to the lady’s son, and seemed to consider it a point requiring no further argument.”

Webb did not move immediately. “There is one thing I have not entirely resolved. Auchengray was your mother’s inheritance. If your family’s solicitors are thorough, if Lord Matlock or Lady Catherine ever think to review the full Fitzwilliam settlement, the property will surface. It would come back to them or be transferred to Miss Darcy upon your decease.”

“When was the last time anyone in my family thought about Auchengray?”

“I could not say.”

“I can. My mother’s marriage portion was signed thirty years ago, and neither my uncle nor my aunt has set foot in Aberdeenshire in living memory, nor had any reason to. They will not think of it — not in the first months, not while the grief is fresh and the proceedings are still being unwound. And if they think of it eventually, I intend by then to be in a position where it no longer signifies. Is there anything in the solicitor’s records connecting the barony to the trust?”

“Nothing a casual review would find. And the Edinburgh firm has no standing instruction to notify anyone in England of developments at the property. No one in London will receive an unsolicited reminder.”

It was not perfect; it was the best available, and the best available would have to be enough. “Very well.”

Webb left.

He sat for a while in the lamplight with the city beginning to stir outside the shuttered window, then pulled the first sheet towards him and began. He set it aside at the salutation.

A letter found afterward would tell Sterling’s people what the ring was meant to conceal — that he had known, that he had arranged the thing, that the corpse at Fetter Lane was not what it was presented to be. Anything in the nature of a farewell, found, would dismantle the plan before it had begun. He was not permitted to say goodbye. He could write only what he might have written anyway — what his uncle, his sister, his cousin would expect from him in April of an ordinary year, and nothing beyond it.

His uncle was the easiest. The Earl of Matlock liked routine reports, and Darcy wrote one — the Rosings visit, his aunt’s opinions on the Hunsford road, the estate agent’s proposal in the home-farm matter, a line of thanks for a loan of horses in February, the expectation of seeing his uncle and aunt at Pemberley for the August shooting. He signed it as he always did. It would go in the pile with every letter he had written his uncle in fifteen years and tell Sterling’s people nothing.

Georgiana took longer. He burned the first attempt — too full of the things a brother writes only when he is taking his leave — and the second was worse. The third, he began by forcing himself to remember that his sister was at Matlock, aged sixteen, and to write her only what she would hear from him in an ordinary April.

He wrote her about Kent — Lady Catherine and the Hunsford road, Fitzwilliam being tolerable company in spite of himself, Mr Collins’ oratory on the subject of salt-cellars, which he thought would make her laugh. He told her he had been thinking, for no reason he could account for, of the summer he had taken her to the Lakes — her observation at Windermere that the world had not been finished yet, which had returned to him this week more times than he could account for. He told her she had worn out Clementi by now and ought to try Haydn. He added — for she would have asked — that Miss Bennet had been among the parsonage party, and that the weather had been dry enough for walking. He told her he expected to collect her for Pemberley by July.

He read it back and found that, almost against his will, he had written her a true letter. The Windermere line carried everything it had ever carried and nothing an investigator would see. The line about Miss Bennet was a seed for a future he had no right to claim, and he had planted it anyway. He signed it Your most affectionate brother, which was the only farewell he could afford.

He folded both letters and set them aside for Webb, who would see them posted from Kent, as though they had been written there with the rest.

Then he wrote a third, shorter and plainer, to Colonel Fitzwilliam — not the truth, not Auchengray or the alias or any of it, only that if the worst came to pass, the colonel should apply to Webb directly, and Webb would know what to tell him. He folded it separately, marked with an instruction that it was not to be sent unless Darcy himself gave the word. Fitzwilliam could not know, and that was the only mercy Darcy could offer him; but if everything else failed, he wanted one door left open, held ajar by a man who asked no questions and kept everything.

Then he pulled a fresh sheet towards him and stared at it for a long time. He had not planned to write this one. It was not logical; it served no practical purpose; it was in every measurable sense a waste of the time he did not have. He wrote it anyway — not the way he had rehearsed the proposal at Rosings, with the careful construction of trying to find the right words, but the way the letter to Georgiana had finally come, without deciding to, without knowing what it would say until it was already said.

He told her that he had intended to ask her something, that he had been a day away, perhaps less, and that he had been quite certain of what she would have said — that the certainty was one of the few things he was taking with him intact. He told her that he had never met anyone who argued the way she argued, which was a strange thing to put in a letter but was also, in his experience, the truest measure of a mind worth knowing. He told her that when she had said most people are rather sturdier than the men protecting them tend to suppose, he had known she was right and had not been able to say so, and that he was sorry for it. He told her that whatever she made of the world without him in it, she would find it inadequate to her.

He read it back once, folded it, and did not set it with the letters for Webb. He put it in his breast pocket instead, next to Webb’s letter, where it had been pressing against his ribs for four days. Webb could not have this one.

VI

No Grander than This

Maria had been talking since Bromley. By the time they reached Gracechurch Street, she had covered the roads, the weather, Mr Collins’ farewell address, and the general excellence of Kent in April, and had arrived, with the momentum of having saved the best for last, at the subject of Rosings’ visitors.

“Mr Darcy was there the whole time,” she told Jane over the tea things, with the satisfaction of delivering news of genuine consequence. “And Colonel Fitzwilliam — very agreeable — but we saw Mr Darcy more. He walked out every morning, practically.”

Jane’s eyes moved to Elizabeth.

Elizabeth reached for her cup.

“Every morning?” Jane asked pleasantly.

“Nearly. Did he not, Lizzy?”

“He walked in the park,” Elizabeth said. “It is a pleasant park for walking. We encountered one another.”

This was accurate and said everything and nothing. Jane took it in without a flicker, which meant she was noting it for later, and the conversation moved on — Maria’s ribbon, the gloves their aunt wanted on Oxford Street, whether the journey home to Hertfordshire might be made on Thursday or Friday. Elizabeth contributed to all of it with perfect self-command.

Jane found her that evening, when their aunt was occupied with the household accounts, and Maria was writing letters home.