Page 135 of Homeless

Darcy sighed and tossed his pen back in the ink well. Apparently, another grace period had drawn to a close, as well. He stood to button his jacket. “Show him up.”

Marchwood came in without a word of greeting and braced his hands on the back of the chair he had not yet been offered.

“You will forgive the intrusion,” he said, in a voice that did not ask forgiveness. “I find I have grown tired of waiting to be called upon, and have come to save us both the further trouble of it. You need not offer me a chair, for I shall not be long.”

Darcy inclined his head. “Of course, my lord.”

“I will come to it directly, for I dislike wasting an afternoon as much as you do.” Marchwood set his hat and stick on the desk, on top of the very papers Darcy had been failing to make sense of. “My daughter tells me you have not called upon her once, since you first returned. That you have sent no word, accepted no invitation, made not the smallest movement towards an understanding that I had every reason to believe settled between us before you went abroad. She was reluctant to say it — she dislikes spectacle, my Honoria, and would have kept silent longer than you deserve — but I asked her plainly and she would not lie to me. So?” He looked at Darcy with unblinking attention. “Perhaps you will do me the courtesy of an explanation, since you have not done me the courtesy of a call.”

Darcy glanced down and deliberately moved Marchwood’s walking stick and hat off his papers before speaking. “I have already tendered my apologies to Lady Honoria. She has behaved throughout with more grace than I have deserved. But I am afraid, my lord, that there can be no understanding between us of the kind you describe. I told your daughter as much, as gently as I knew how. My affections are engaged elsewhere, and have been for some time, and I cannot in honour pretend otherwise, to her or to you.”

“Your affections? What is that? Some dalliance formed abroad?” He scoffed. “Let me be certain I understand you, Darcy, for I confess I find it difficult. You have come home from Spain to find your affairs in the state we both know them to be in. You have been, these eight days — do not trouble to deny it, I make it my business to know these things — to Hoare's, and to two other houses besides, and to the Foreign Office, and you have got no further along than you were a month ago. In a fortnight, unless something changes, Pemberley will be sold over your head to satisfy a debt you cannot pay. Have I the particulars right?”

“You have them very right.”

“And I am standing in your study offering you the whole of it back. My daughter, who is amiable, and accomplished, and who thought well enough of you before you insulted her. Fifty thousand pounds, and my word in the right ears in the City, which turns your worthless claim into money the moment I choose to lend it my countenance. I am offering you your house, connexions to ensure your sister's future, to preserve the dignity of your name and your fortune, in exchange for behaving like a sensible man and marrying a perfectly agreeable young woman whom half the men in London would count themselves fortunate to have. And you are refusing me! For a feeling? For some female, God knows who or where you found her, in whose arms you amused yourself until you had persuaded yourself to call it affection! Have I that right as well?”

Darcy swallowed. He could end it in a sentence. All he had to say was that he was married, there remained no match to be had here. Three seconds, and the pressure would break like a wave on rock, because the earl could not press a married man towards his daughter.

But to tell Marchwood he was married was to hand him the one piece of information that would turn his displeasure from a general thing into a specific one. The moment he learned there was a wife — a nobody with no dowry, the thing standing between Marchwood and the valley he had schemed a year to acquire cheaply — his displeasure would find its target, and everything she had feared on a ship would begin to come true.

“I am sensible,” he said, “of exactly how the case stands, my lord. You have described it with more accuracy than I could myself. I know what I am refusing. I have counted the cost more times than you can imagine, and I am sorry — more sorry than I can say — that in doing so, I must disappoint you and injure your daughter, neither of which I ever wished. But I cannot marry Lady Honoria. Not for Pemberley. Not for fifty thousand pounds. It is not in my power to do it, and I will not pretend it is.”

Marchwood’s jaw ticked, and his brow pinched, but he made no outburst. He exhaled, looked towards the windows, and appeared to fall into thought.

Absurdly, hope flared for one traitorous instant. Marchwood might be persuaded to be reasonable. Darcy had not let matters get far enough to ruin his daughter’s reputation. He was respectful, more so than Marchwood deserved, for having unknowingly called Mrs Darcy a Spanish harlot. For half a heartbeat, Darcy actually pondered the notion — all need not be lost. If Marchwood would lend his name with the bank, Darcy could still broker a deal that would please him regarding the water rights. It would not be the familial, permanent sort of control the earl wanted. Not generational authority over the land, but he could still see that the earl came out well in the end.

And if he were so disposed, perhaps he could even ask for his help with Gardiner’s case. Elizabeth’s note from yesterday had been so discouraged… might not Marchwood be able to salvage —

That was when the earl turned back to him with eyes that glittered and teeth set on edge. Darcy killed the notion at once. To ask this man — refused, affronted, his will thwarted, his year's scheme in ruins — for a favour, was to hand him a lever, and Marchwood was precisely the man to use it: reconsider my daughter, and we shall see what may be done for your friend.

Worse — infinitely worse — to plead for a Cheapside merchant with any warmth was to invite the question, “And what is this Gardiner to you?” There was no answer to that question that did not unravel the very thread that led to Elizabeth, and then Gardiner’s case would be nearly forfeit as well.

Marchwood picked up his hat and stick. “You are a greater fool than I took you for. And I do not, as a rule, misjudge men. I took you for one who knew his own interest.” He settled the hat. “You will pardon me if I do not wish you joy of your… affection. Affection is a poor thing to warm oneself by in a house that belongs to someone else.”

He moved to the door, paused there, and looked back. “I had meant to be of use to you, Darcy, in the matter of that claim of yours. You will understand if I no longer feel the same inclination to trouble myself on behalf of a man who has used my daughter so ill. I perceive that your interests and mine no longer run together. Good day.”

Elizabeth sighed as the light broke through her window and rolled over, her hand spreading over the empty pillow beside her. Even after more than a week, she still reached for him, expecting…

Her head came up as the rest of her woke to a sensation — one she knew all too well. She shut her eyes again.

Her courses had come.

She covered her eyes with one hand and her stomach with the other, and was surprised — she who had thought herself past being surprised by any grief — at how much it hurt. She had not known, until it was gone, how much she had been hoping for the other possibility. Not hoping, precisely; she had not let herself frame it as hope, not with everything else pressing. But somewhere under all that, there had been a tiny, unspoken perhaps — perhaps there was already, this moment, some part of him growing in her, some piece of Fitzwilliam Darcy that would be hers to keep even while they were parted.

But not now. Her body had told her so in the night, in a way that brooked no argument. The hand over her eyes clutched a little tighter until a thoughtless tear squeezed between her fingers.

They had been so much together! That was the thing that made it strange, that pricked at her even through the cramping in her stomach. They had been intimate so many times, this last impossible month, more times than she could have counted or would have owned to anyone, on the ship and in the good Santander bed and a dozen other places in that room, at exactly the season when such things came to something if they were going to.

A dark thought slid in under the sadness before she could stop it. Perhaps there is something wrong with me. Perhaps she was one of those women. Jane had been married two years with no child of her own. Perhaps she had trapped a good and honourable man into marriage with a woman who had not only ruined him, but could offer him no lasting joy of the other sort, either.

She shoved the thought away because it did not deserve the dignity of her tears, and because it was very likely not true. They had both been so ill. She had been able to count her own ribs not a month past, and he not much better, both of them worn down to nothing by fever and everything else. A body so ill-used could hardly be expected to be ready for such work at once, whatever the heart wished. And it had been only the one month, truly, because one night at Vitoria hardly counted. A woman's body did not always keep tidy time even in the best of health, let alone after a summer like this one. There would be more chances.

She rose eventually, because there was her aunt and the children to breakfast with, and a face to put on. She washed and dressed and dealt with the practical business of the morning, and it was only afterward, sitting at the little table where she wrote her daily note, that she came to the question she had been avoiding.

Should she tell him?

He would want to know. He would have been counting; she was certain he had been counting the days since they had landed and the weeks before, and reaching the same uncertainty, because her own reckoning this summer had been so scattered that even he, who forgot nothing, could not have made it come out clean. She had known that he was hoping, that he wanted this as much as she did, perhaps more — a Darcy of the next generation, the future his whole ruined inheritance would have been for. He would be fretting himself over the business by now until he could not help but ask after her health before long. He would be gentle about it. He would write back something kind, something about there being time later, something that turned her grief over and made it bearable, because that was what he did. He took the weight from her and carried his half.