Smugglers’ business alert!

We did it on a Thursday, three days after the abduction of Elizabeth Bennet.

Three days was the right interval: long enough for Darcy’s anger to cool somewhat, long enough for me to have the conversations that needed to be had with Lady Catherine and with the Annesley family’s representative. This was a cousin from Maidstone who arrived on Tuesday. The conversation with him was brief and entirely civil, and it arrived at the conclusion I had intended it to arrive at before he sat down. He left on Wednesday looking no more cheerful than he had arrived, but considerably more clear about what the available options were.

Lady Catherine I dealt with in person, on Wednesday afternoon, in the east garden at Rosings where the topiary provided sufficient privacy and the distance from the house was sufficient to ensure we were not overheard. I told her the minimum necessary and watched her face do the things it did when she was receiving information she found deeply inconvenient. She asked two questions, both precise. I answered them. She was silent for a moment, looking at the topiary.

“The Maidstone cousin,” she said at last.

“Has been spoken to. He understands the situation.”

“And the…resolution,” she said, in the tone she used for things she was not going to name directly.

“Thursday. It will be done cleanly.”

She looked at me then, directly, with the expression she used when she was saying something she could not say directly and required me to understand it without assistance.

“I was not aware,” she said, “that Gerard…was capable of anything like this.”

“I know that, your ladyship.”

She received this with a look that meant she was grateful for something and would not be saying so. “See that it is done cleanly,” she said again, and went inside.

The location was a barn near the coast, three miles from Hunsford, that the network used for our larger assemblies. It stood on the land of a farmer who had been with the network since before my time, perhaps a quarter mile from the beach where we ran the goods. The barn was set back from any main road and accessible by a network of cart tracks that ran through the fields and woods between Hunsford and the Elham valley. A man could reach it from half a dozen directions without being seen from any public way, which was why we used it.

I had used it twice before for matters of internal discipline, neither of which had required the full theatre of what I was planning for Thursday, but the theatre was the point.

Gerard Annesley had frightened people. He had made the operation a target of Darcy’s wrath, and very nearly a target of the magistrate, for a crime less easy to forgive than tax-free lace and brandy. The remedy for that was not a quiet word and a reduction in authority, but something that would be remembered and retold. Something that would settle the question of what happened to free-traders who threatened bystanders like Elizabeth.

The theatre required preparation. Pyke handled most of it, with the efficiency he brought to everything, and reported to me on Wednesday evening that the arrangements were made. I thanked him and went to the barn myself to check, because I always check, and found them satisfactory. The barn was old timber, built in the last century when the farm had been prosperous, large enough to hold fifty men comfortably and twice that if needed. The roof was sound and the walls were solid, admitting no light from outside, which mattered more for our purposes than the state of the interior. Pyke had cleared the floor and positioned the lanterns on posts driven into the earth at the center. The perimeter remained in darkness, empty enough that shadows moved across bare walls rather than stored goods. It had the quality of a space prepared for a single use and nothing more.

I went home and wrote the last of the necessary correspondence and went to bed at a reasonable hour.

Darcy I had informed on Wednesday morning. He asked no questions about the arrangements. He asked only what time and where, and I told him, and he said he would be there, and that was the extent of it.

Charlotte knew the outline. She did not ask for more than the outline, which was correct, and she told me on Wednesday evening that Elizabeth was recovered and composed and had said nothing further about the operation.

Thursday came in cold and clear. The morning was bright and still, the kind of weather that makes sound carry, which was one reason we had chosen ten o’clock rather than an earlier hour when the roads would be busier. We assembled at the barn at ten o’clock. The free-traders came in ones and twos, by the routes they knew, and arranged themselves in the darkness with the trained quiet of men who have done this before. I counted twenty-three, which was most of the active membership and sufficient for the purpose. The Annesley men were present, which I had required. They needed to be here to see what Annesley’s choices had led to.

Darcy arrived at five minutes to ten, alone, with a scarf already wrapped and his hat pulled down and the stance of a man who is determined to face something ugly without flinching. He positioned himself near the back without being directed.

Pyke had arranged the lighting: two lanterns, positioned to illuminate the centre of the space and leave the perimeter in darkness. The effect was exactly what I wanted: the sense of something formal and bounded occurring within something much larger and less controlled.

They brought Annesley in at eleven o’clock precisely.

He had been held, since the abduction, in conditions that were uncomfortable without being cruel: locked in a cold barn, under guard, with adequate food. He came into the circle of light between two of the free-traders, blindfolded and with his hands bound.

I stepped into the light.

The barn went very still, with the silence of twenty-odd men in darkness recognizing that something they have all agreed to is now occurring, and that they are witnesses to it. It had a weight to it, that stillness, that no amount of formal legal proceeding has ever quite replicated in my experience.

I read the charge. I kept it brief and I read it without heat, because heat would have made it personal and it was not personal. It was operational. He had taken an unauthorized action that had endangered a civilian and compromised the network. He had done this in defiance of my instructions. The network had rules. The rules existed because without them people got hurt. He had broken them and people had nearly been hurt and the consequence was the one that had been agreed to when he joined.

I asked if he had anything to say.

He said something. I will not record what he said, partly because some of it was addressed at me in terms that reflected poorly on his situation and partly because the substance of it was nothing that required a response. He claimed that he had a right, that his family’s history gave him a claim, that I was a nobody clergyman who had taken what was rightfully his.

I let him finish.

Then I said: “The verdict of this assembly is guilty. The sentence is death.”

The stillness in the barn deepened, and then was broken by the sound of a man gagging Annesley and three more stuffing his struggling self into a sack.

Pyke brought the rope.

What followed required the smooth exchange, in the darkness at the edge of the lamplight, of one sacked figure for another. Annesley was removed through the back of the barn by two men I trusted absolutely while a second sack, filled with turnips of approximately the right dimensions, took his place in the circle of light. Pyke had rehearsed this and it showed. The figure in the sack was handled with sufficient solemnity to be convincing and sufficient efficiency to be over before the assembled men had fully understood what they were witnessing.

Then it was done and the lanterns were brought up and the barn had the quality of a space in which something significant has just occurred.

I looked at the assembled men in the fuller light. They looked back at me with the expressions I needed them to have: sober, convinced, aware that the thing they had agreed to was real. The Annesley men looked worried, but thoughtful. This was the intended outcome.

“The network’s rules exist,” I said, “to protect everyone, both inside the organization and outside it. This is what happens when they are broken. We will not speak of this again.”

I dismissed them in the usual order, by route, at intervals. Pyke managed this with his customary efficiency. The barn emptied in twenty minutes and was quiet.

Darcy had not moved from his position near the back wall. He was still there when the last man had gone, in the dimmed lamplight, with the scarf still wrapped and his hat still down. I led him outside to the back of the barn. The sack there was moving slightly: Annesley, bound and gagged and very much alive, apparently still in the process of working out that the morning had not gone as he had feared.

Darcy was watching the sack.

“Where will he go from here?” He asked.

“To the dock at Folkestone, tomorrow morning. There is a boat going to Calais. The Maidstone cousin has made arrangements on the other end.”

“He is alive and unharmed,” Darcy said. It was not quite a question.

“As you say. Annesley is in rather less comfort than he is accustomed to, but he has nothing else to complain of.”

The sack squirmed again.

Darcy was quiet for a moment. “You planned it this way from the beginning,” he said.

“From the moment we overtook the cart,” I said.

Another silence. “Neatly done,” he said, quietly. There was a note of mild disapproval that contradicted his words, but if that was the worst objection his conscience could make to this morning’s work, I had no need to fear what he would do next.

“Thank you,” I said. He seemed slightly surprised by that.

We walked away from the barn together into the cold Thursday morning, leaving Pyke to manage the rest of the business, and rode back toward Hunsford without saying very much.

At the Hunsford gate Darcy pulled up. “Goodbye, Collins,” he said. “If there is anything…”

“Not for myself or Charlotte,” I told him. “But your cousin Anne DeBourgh writes children’s books. I think she would be glad of your help in convincing her mother to permit their publication.”

He sat on his horse for a moment, perhaps weighing up the mood his aunt would be in, after the shame of Annesley’s crimes. Then he nodded. “I will see what I can do,” he said.

“Goodbye, Mr. Darcy,” I said.

He rode on. I watched him go for a moment, in the cold April morning, and then went inside.

Charlotte was in the sitting room with a candle and her sewing. She looked at me when I came in with the expression of a woman who wants to ask a question and is deciding whether to ask it now or in the morning.

“Done,” I said.

She set down her sewing. The question she had decided not to ask was visible in her face for a moment and then she folded it away with the same neatness she brought to everything.

“I think Darcy will be calling tomorrow,” I said.

She was not at all surprised. “Good,” she said, and picked up her sewing again.