Page 122 of Homeless

Bramwell gave a careless wave of his hand. “Marchwood attends to what serves Marchwood. Like many others, I suppose, he has his own interests. He is a great landowner whose wealth has been increased in cooperation with his foreign undertakings; wool chiefly, with long interests in Spain — he has traded there for years, has a name there, and is by way of being one of the largest men in the English trade besides. There is a good deal of talk that he means to enlarge himself at home — that he is buying land, and looking hard at water and mill-sites, with a view to weaving his own wool rather than depending on the Spanish clip, which the war has made a chancy business. Whether it is true, I could not say. But it is the sort of man he is. He looks a long way ahead, and always to his own advantage, and he is very good at it. If you can show him that hurrying your uncle serves his interest, he will hurry your uncle. If you cannot…” Bramwell lifted one shoulder. “Then he will be perfectly civil, but not exert himself unduly, and you will never be able to say he refused you.”

Elizabeth was clasping the rail with both hands now. “Indeed,” she said in a voice gone husky. “I have no means to move such a man.”

Bramwell turned back, as if suddenly recalling. “Oh, but if memory serves, he has a daughter near your age. Fine creature, I believe my younger son had been in company with her a year or so ago, and spoke well of her. If the daughter of Lord Marchwood were to befriend Mrs Darcy, I think that might recommend you warmly to his interests.”

Darcy’s cheeks were scalding now, and he did not dare to look at his wife. He stared very fixedly at the sea, but he could sense the weather changing at his side.

He knew her mind. He had watched it work for three months, across ledgers and border-posts and the ruin of a moneychanger's shop; he knew the sound of it, almost — the small, dreadful click of pieces meeting. He could hear her setting them beside the one piece she already held and had never understood — the piece he had never fully explained, because it would have meant explaining a great deal he had hoped to leave in England where it belonged.

At last, she turned a smile on Bramwell. “Marchwood,” she said. “I shall remember it. Thank you, Lord Bramwell. You have told me more of use in a quarter hour than I have learned in three months, and set my mind at ease about my uncle besides.”

“I am glad of it.” Bramwell touched his hat. “The papers being in order is the primary factor, Mrs Darcy. Everything else is only speed.” After that, he made his unhurried way down the deck to rejoin his party, with the best will in the world and no notion whatever of what he had done.

They did not speak on the way down. Elizabeth went ahead of him through the low door and stood in the middle of the cabin with her arms crossed over herself. She waited while he came in and shut it behind them before she turned to face him.

“I think I worked it out on the way down,” she said. “You had better hear me out, and tell me where I have gone wrong, because I would very much rather be wrong.”

“Elizabeth —”

“You admitted, in Vitoria, that you had meant to marry Marchwood's daughter for his influence with the bank. His name behind you, the paper rolled over, the whole thing made salvageable by an earl's countenance. I understood that. It is an ugly way to save an estate, but it is a common one, and I did not think the worse of you for it.”

“You did not? Then you had me fooled. At the time, it sounded very much like an indictment.”

“Because I was drunk and you were…” She held up a hand towards his person. “You were beyond drunk, I think.”

He stepped closer, almost touching her hand. “So were you.”

“That is not the point! I have just spent a quarter of an hour listening to Viscount Bramwell, who does not gossip and does not exaggerate and reports to the man himself, describe an earl who accumulates wealth and control like a marchant, who means to weave his own wool and be free of Spain, who looks always — his word, not mine — to his own advantage, and is very good at it.”

“As any clever man does, Elizabeth. Would you expect him not to?”

She shook her head. “But that is not a man who lends his name to save a drowning gentleman out of Christian feeling. That is not even a man who does it to see his daughter a mistress of Pemberley. Men like that do not rescue people, Fitzwilliam. They acquire them. So, I find I have a question I never thought to ask, because I was too busy being ashamed of the answer I assumed.”

His mouth hardened, and he drew back. “Ask it. I already know what it is.”

“Very well, then. What did Marchwood want from you? Because he wanted something. I have only just understood that he must have.”

He was quiet for long enough that she thought had her answer before he gave it.

“The water,” he said.

Her brows rose. “I thought you would say ‘the land.’”

“That too. Pemberley sits at the head of the Derwent valley. The whole of the textile country is downstream of me — the mills, the works, the fortunes being made in cotton and wool from Cromford to Belper and beyond. And all of it runs on water. Weirs, and mill-races, and the land that governs where the river may be dammed and drawn. I own a great deal of that land. The land that decides whether the man below me has water to turn his wheel or has not.”

Elizabeth put a hand to her mouth. “That is… considerably more, even, than I had supposed.”

He turned away from her to pour a glass of wine from a bottle he had got on board. He was half a minute in staring at it, not even drinking, before he said more. “A man who owns the river above your mill owns your mill. Marchwood has wanted the Derwent water since before I ever knew his name, and he could not have it, because I would not sell — a gentleman does not put mills in his own valley, and I did not choose to be the man who turned Pemberley's water into someone's account-book.”

“So he could not buy it,” Elizabeth said slowly. The cabin tilted under her, or the ship did. “He could only…”

“Marry it.” He finally tipped back his glass. “Yes.”

She crossed her arms and huffed in amazement. “All this time,” she murmured, “I thought it had been your notion. Your scheme, your reaching — the ruined man grasping after the earl's money and the earl’s influence. I let myself think it was that. It was easier, somehow, to think of you as a man who would sell himself to an heiress because he was, at the end of the day, the one still commanding his future and making his own choices. I had not thought of you as…” She stopped. “It was not your notion at all, was it? You did not go to him.”

“No.” He was still turned away from her, and he took another drink. “He came to me. Last winter.”

Elizabeth moved to sit on the berth. “And? How did he present his proposal?”