Page 4 of Faceless

“The matter,” Darcy said, “is settled. It has been settled for some years. My aunt chooses not to accept it, which is her prerogative, but I am going to Kent to attend to her estate and nothing else.”

Fitzwilliam raised his hands in surrender, reached for his wine, and let it go.

The pudding arrived, and Fitzwilliam set to it with the gravity it deserved. “How is Georgiana?” he asked. “Her last letter said very little.”

Darcy set down his spoon. “She is well,” he said. “Better than she was at Christmas. Your mother says she is sleeping properly again.”

“She wrote nothing of that to me.”

“No.” Darcy turned his glass on the cloth. “She would not. I have been indebted to her for her delicacy.”

Richard grunted as he sipped his wine. “Is she going out at all?”

“Some. She went to the Ashton girl’s birthday assembly last month and stayed the full evening. Lady Matlock wrote to me about it at some length, as though Georgiana had stormed a French battery.” He smiled, but it did not sit entirely easily. “She has been at the pianoforte a great deal. Clementi, mostly. Your mother says she has nothing left to prove by it.”

“Well! That is all to the good. She writes me often enough, but there is seldom much substance to it. She did, rather oddly, ask after you,” Fitzwilliam said. “In her last letter to me. Not in the way she asks after people generally — not politely. She asked whether I thought you were well.”

Darcy scoffed. “I am perfectly well.”

“I know that. I told her so.” Fitzwilliam picked up his spoon again. “Go to Pemberley before July, Darcy. Not after. I think being home would do her good.”

Darcy did not look up at once. Outside, the wind moved through the street.

“I will collect her from Matlock in late spring,” he said. “Take her to Pemberley for the summer. There are affairs to settle in London first, after Kent.”

Fitzwilliam nodded and did not push, and reached for his wine, and the subject closed as cleanly as it had opened.

“Tell me about Haverstock,” Darcy said.

Fitzwilliam’s face opened into something considerably more cheerful. “Haverstock has been a nuisance since October. He arrived convinced that three months at a country house party had given him a thorough understanding of military strategy and spent his first fortnight telling anyone who would listen — and several who would not — that the regiment’s current approach to supply lines was, and I am quoting directly, inefficient and frankly rather old-fashioned.”

“Good God.”

“He was right about the supply lines, which was the trouble. He was simply so insufferably right that being right almost did him more damage than being wrong would have done.”

“What happened?”

“Marsh put him in charge of fixing it.” Fitzwilliam smiled. “Six weeks in a supply depot outside Ware. The supply lines came back considerably improved, and Haverstock had developed a much more nuanced understanding of the difference between knowing something is wrong and knowing what to do about it. He is going to be very good in another year or two. Once he has finished being twenty-three.”

“And Mallory? You have mentioned his hunters twice this evening.”

“Mallory,” Fitzwilliam said — he had been waiting for this question — “has acquired a grey. Sixteen hands, descended on the dam’s side from something that ran at Newmarket in 1798. He has ensured that everyone within ten miles is aware of it.” He looked up. “The horse is by all accounts completely unmanageable, and Mallory has not yet succeeded in staying on it more than twenty minutes.”

Darcy laughed. “Has he been injured?”

“Twice. Nothing serious. He is very cheerful about it, which is almost more alarming than the injuries themselves. He falls off, gets back on, and describes the experience at dinner as though being launched into a fence post is the most interesting thing that has happened to him in years.”

They talked about the regiment until the candles had burned down a good third of their length, the evening moving back and forth between them with the ease of men who had been talking to each other long enough that conversation found its own level without effort. Darcy refilled their glasses when they needed refilling. The fire held its warmth; outside, the wind was steady off the river.

“I had a letter from our aunt, by the by,” Fitzwilliam said eventually, when the regiment had been sufficiently covered. “It had been chasing me around three counties before it found me. She writes that her new parson is engaged to be married, and she writes about it in the manner of a woman who has personally arranged a match between two great houses.”

“Her information is old. Collins has been married some months. I had it from her in January.”

“Oh? Then I suppose you have had a dozen letters from her since, congratulating herself on the match.”

“The match was not precisely what she had intended for him. She did not dwell on it.” He reached for the bread. “Her more recent letter is considerably more cheerful. Mrs Collins’ father and her younger sister are to come at Easter.” He broke the bread and set it down. “And a friend from Hertfordshire. A Miss Bennet — I have a slight acquaintance with her, from when Bingley had Netherfield last autumn.”

His pulse went abruptly and entirely wrong.