Smugglers’ business alert!

Darcy arrived at Rosings with Colonel Fitzwilliam. Fitzwilliam I had encountered once before, briefly, during one of his previous Easter visits to his aunt. He was a pleasant, sociable man with a soldier’s habit of reading terrain, which in his case extended to social terrain.

Darcy’s past visits to Lady Catherine had been very brief, and had occurred at moments in Eastertide when I was too busy to visit Rosings, either due to the free-trade or to parish work. I had met him in Hertfordshire at the Netherfield ball, where I had introduced myself with the full enthusiasm of Mr. Collins paying his respects to the nephew of his patroness.

Darcy had been gracious, after his fashion, but he had received my overtures with the expression of a man being rained on, who has decided that complaining of the rain will only make things worse. We had exchanged perhaps four sentences. He had removed himself from the conversation at the earliest opportunity, and Elizabeth had reproved me for encroaching upon him. It had been the one moment which made me wonder if she disliked him as much as the gossips of Hertfordshire claimed.

The dinner at which things shifted was a Thursday evening, perhaps ten days into Darcy’s stay at Rosings.

The dining room held its usual excess of candles and ancestral portraits, but the company was larger than our previous visits: Lady Catherine at the head, Darcy and Fitzwilliam adding two more to the table, along with Miss de Bourgh, Mrs. Jenkinson, Charlotte, Maria, Elizabeth, Annesley, and myself. Lady Catherine had arranged us with her customary attention to precedence. Darcy sat to her right, Fitzwilliam further down on the same side. I found myself across from Darcy, with Elizabeth two places to my left and Annesley positioned between us. Charlotte was near the foot of the table with Maria beside her. It was a configuration that allowed Annesley to address Elizabeth without having to project his voice down the table.

Darcy, on renewed acquaintance, was more or less what the Netherfield ball had suggested. He had too fixed a set of expectations about what a clergyman of my type was to see past the performance, which was useful.

Fitzwilliam was good company, easy at a dinner table, and I watched him charm Elizabeth. She responded with the ease she brought to anyone who made it clear they were worth talking to. Darcy, across the table, was saying less than the occasion required.

Annesley was in good form. This was, I had learned, the most dangerous version of him: when he was performing well, when the room was responding to him, when the combination of charm and family connection and physical ease was producing the effect he intended. He was funny, once or twice, genuinely so.

He had been watching Darcy since the latter’s arrival with envious eyes. Darcy had the kind of consequence that Annesley had grown up believing was his own natural destination, and Darcy wore it without effort or apparent thought, which was precisely the thing most calculated to irritate a man who had to work for the same effect.

The trigger, when it came, was Fitzwilliam, but not intentionally. He made a remark about the difficulty of managing large estates from a distance, the kind of remark a younger son with no such responsibilities makes without malice. It drew from Darcy a brief response about Pemberley’s management. The mention of Pemberley produced in Annesley a slight irritation. He covered it well. He turned the conversation toward land in Kent, his own family’s acres, the improvements he intended. He was fluent and easy and the table followed him without difficulty.

“Improvements,” said Elizabeth. “What sort of improvements are you planning?”

Annesley described them: drainage, primarily, and some work on the farm buildings, and the replanting of a copse that his grandfather had established and that had since gone to seed.

“Your grandfather established a great deal in this part of Kent, I collect,” Elizabeth said pleasantly. “One hears his name mentioned.”

Annesley accepted this with visible satisfaction. His grandfather was, as I well knew, a subject on which he loved to dwell, and he did so now. He spoke of the old man’s energy, his knowledge of the county, his head for enterprise.

“Enterprise,” Elizabeth said. “Yes, I have heard something of that.” A small smile. “It is interesting, is it not, how a family’s enterprises tend to continue across generations, even when the official record does not entirely reflect the nature of them.”

She said it with the air of a woman making a pleasant historical observation. Her eyes twinkled as she met Annesley’s.

The table continued. Lady Catherine said something about the importance of family tradition. Fitzwilliam agreed with her. Maria looked slightly confused, as she often did when a conversation moved faster than its surface suggested.

Annesley said nothing for a moment.

It was a short moment. He recovered smoothly, agreed that family tradition was indeed important, and redirected toward the drainage. But the moment had existed, and I had seen it. He was deciding whether Elizabeth was a problem. I already knew that whether she was or not, she was not his problem to solve.

Elizabeth had not noticed. She had said what she said because it seemed to her an amusing observation, and she had already forgotten it.

I said something about the excellence of the fish course. No one attended to it.

After dinner, the company returned to the drawing room and dispersed into its usual configurations. Lady Catherine claimed her chair near the fire, Miss de Bourgh beside her. Fitzwilliam had engaged Elizabeth in conversation near the windows, making her laugh with something about his regiment. Darcy had taken a chair at some remove from the fire, observing the room with his customary reserve. Maria sat with Mrs. Jenkinson, looking slightly overwhelmed. Annesley positioned himself where the decanters stood, helping himself to brandy with the ease of a man entirely at home. I moved to Charlotte’s side by the fireplace and stood beside her in the way we had developed of standing together when there was something to communicate that could not be said in company.

“Annesley,” I said, at a volume only slightly above the crackling fire.

“I saw,” she said, at the same volume. “What are you going to do?”

“Watch. For now.”

She was quiet for a moment. “Elizabeth may have heard talk about old Annesley, but she doesn’t know Gerard is in the same line.”

“No. She wouldn’t.”

“Should I say something to her?”

I thought about this. “Not yet. I’ll speak to Pyke tomorrow. If anything moves I’ll know about it.”

Charlotte accepted this with a small nod and turned to speak to Maria, and I turned to respond to something Fitzwilliam had said, and the evening continued its course. I watched Annesley be charming and sociable and entirely pleasant for the remaining hour until the carriages were called.

On the walk back I contrived to fall into step near Elizabeth without it being arranged. She was talking to Fitzwilliam, who was saying something that made her laugh. Darcy was slightly ahead with Charlotte.

I did not warn her. Anything sufficient to make her careful would be sufficient to make her ask questions, and the kind of questions Elizabeth Bennet directed at anything serious were not something I was prepared to manage at this stage. What I could do, and did, was ensure that when she and Maria went ahead through the parsonage gate I was the last one through it, and I stood in the lane for a moment before following and looked back at the road. I would be out again on it after midnight. I had not planned to watch this particular transfer of goods, but Annesley’s behavior at dinner had made it necessary.

The boats came in at two, which was the arranged time, and they came in cleanly, which was not always the case in March. The sea had been rough earlier in the evening and I had spent an hour at the study window watching the weather, and had arrived at the conclusion that the window between the squall’s passing and the tide’s turning was sufficient if the boats were prompt. The boats were prompt. I noted this with satisfaction and filed it as evidence that the Continental end of the operation remained sound.

The beach was a quarter mile of shingle below a low chalk cliff, accessible from the cliff top by a path that required knowing where it was and possessing sufficient confidence in the dark to use it. I had come down it perhaps thirty times and still used my hand on the cliffside in the steeper sections, which I considered appropriate caution rather than weakness. The sword cane was useful here for reasons that had nothing to do with its other function.

Gofton’s whistle came from the cliff top to the east as the first boat’s keel found the shingle: two short notes, the all-clear, meaning the cliff road was empty in both directions and the Revenue were nowhere near. I had stationed him up there an hour before the boats were due. He had the instincts for the work that some men are born with and cannot be taught, and his name in free-trade was Plough. The whistle died and the night was quiet again except for the sea and the sound of ten men moving with practiced efficiency from the shadows of the cliff base toward the waterline.

Pyke was masked, as were all the men here. At the moment, he answered to Spade. He was already directing the unloading, which was his function and which he performed quickly and quietly. The casks came over the boats’ sides in a rhythm: two men in the shallows receiving, two more on the shingle passing back, the chain of it efficient and nearly silent. The pack ponies stood in a line against the cliff, held by a boy who knew how to manage them in the dark.

I stood at the cliff base and watched and counted and did not intervene, because intervening when things are going correctly is a failure of management. By the light of a shrouded lantern set on a tall rock, I reviewed the manifest. Fourteen casks in the first boat, which matched the manifest. Twelve in the second, which was two short, and I noted this and would establish the reason afterward. The third boat had not yet beached.

The third boat was Annesley’s.

He brought it in with competence. His two men were efficient on the unloading. The casks matched his manifest. He directed the transfer to the ponies with the authority of a man who has done this enough times to have stopped being frightened by it, which was genuine progress from eighteen months ago.

He came to stand beside me when the transfer was complete, in the way that men come to stand beside the person in charge when they have something to say and are working up to saying it. I could not see his face beneath the mask. I did not need to. I waited for him to speak.

The work continued around us: Spade moving along the pony line checking the loads, the boat crews pulling their craft back into the shallows for the return crossing, the men on the shingle breaking into the smaller groups that would take separate routes inland.

“The woman,” Annesley said.

I looked at the manifest rather than him. “Which woman?”

“The one at dinner. That chit of a girl knows something. Or she’s guessed something. The way she spoke about the family enterprises…” He stopped, then started again. “Someone should have a word with her. Warn her off. Or frighten her a little, if she doesn’t take the word.” His voice had been steadily climbing, louder than is wise in this work.

The beach was quiet, except for the sea and the sound of the operation winding itself down with its customary efficiency. I was aware of Pyke, twenty yards away, who had stopped moving along the pony line. I was aware of two of the men, who had not yet moved off to their inland route, and were attending to our conversation.

I looked up from the manifest. “I don’t think that she frightens easily.” I said it in the tone of a man making a professional judgment.

I tucked the manifest under my arm, and then I raised my sword cane and turned it, ostensibly looking at a piece of wet grit on the ferrule, the kind of thing a careful man sees to.

The men who were watching went very still. They perhaps remembered the last time I had used this as a weapon. A man in the operation had tried to transfer his attentions from a barmaid who was willing, to one who was not. I had dealt with the matter. I do not allow my people to be harmed, and I do not trust men who cannot control their impulses.

Annesley turned his head from the cane to me, and then back to the cane. I did not need to see his face beneath its jaunty red scarf to know what was in his mind.

The sea came in and went out.

“I suppose you know best, Captain,” Annesley said in a truculent tone.

He was only checked, not checkmated, and I resolved to have someone keep an eye on Elizabeth whenever she was away from the parsonage. I had certain responsibilities towards my guests.

“The short load on the second boat,” I said. “What was the reason?”

“Two casks were damaged on the crossing.” His tone was the tone of a man resuming business as usual with a certain amount of relief. “Hargreaves saw it when they cleared the French end. We heaved them overboard.”

“Good. The client will want a note explaining the shortfall.”

“I’ll see to it,” Annesley said.

“Spade will see to it,” I told him. “You have the inland route.”

It took Annesley a moment to absorb the correction.

“As you say.” He went to find his ponies.

I stayed on the beach until the last boat had cleared the shallows and the last man had taken his inland route and the shingle was empty of everything except the sea and the dark and the normal sounds of a March night on the Kent coast. Pyke remained with me, which was his habit. He and I were the last off the beach, a practice we had arrived at independently and had never needed to discuss.

We stood for a moment in the dark.

“The Cornet,” Pyke said.

“I know.”

He was quiet for a moment. The sea came in and went out. “The men noticed.”

“They were meant to.”

“The woman he mentioned,” Pyke said. “Who is she?”

“She is not a problem.”

“No,” said Pyke, after a moment, in the tone of a man who is taking this on authority and reserving his own judgment. “As you say, Captain.”

We went up the cliff path and parted at the top without further conversation, and I walked back to the parsonage along the coast road with the sword cane in my hand, the manifest tucked inside my coat, and the March wind off the sea at my back. I thought about Annesley and about what he had said about frightening her. I remembered a woman I had once proposed to, who had unwisely tried to be kind in refusing me.

I let myself into the parsonage quietly, because the hour was late and Charlotte was asleep, and went to the study and put the manifest in the locked drawer and went to bed.