As we rode, I thought about what was coming. Darcy had just discovered that his aunt was a client of a smuggling operation run by her own clergyman. He had ridden out with said clergyman and a collection of masked men to rescue the woman he was in love with, and he had agreed to discuss none of this until after. “After” had arrived. The agreement was about to expire and I had perhaps twenty minutes on the road to determine how I was going to handle the expiration.
This was not going to be easy. Darcy had seen too much. He could not be threatened and could not be bought. He was Lady Catherine’s nephew, which meant he had a family claim on the situation that I could not dismiss. He was also a man whose fundamental instinct was toward the correct thing, which was both his best quality and his most dangerous one, because the correct thing from where he was standing might very well be the magistrate.
Against this: he had covered his face when asked. He had kept his end of the bargain on the road. He had hit Annesley with the efficiency of a man who had made a decision and executed it cleanly. These were the actions of a man who valued some things more deeply than law and order. Whether I could work with it was the question I had not yet answered when we came through the Hunsford gate.
The ride back had been slower than the ride out, the cart setting the pace. The morning had advanced toward midday, the April sun climbing and taking some of the chill from the air. Annesley lay silent under the blanket in the cart bed. Pyke and I rode ahead. Behind us, Elizabeth drove with competence, and Darcy rode beside her. The village lane was quiet as we came through, the few people who saw us having the good sense to find business elsewhere. Charlotte was at the door before we had fully stopped.
She looked at Elizabeth first and seemed relieved. She came forward and took Elizabeth’s arm with quiet efficiency. The hall behind her was dim after the brightness outside, the morning light from the window doing little against the dark paneling. Maria stood near the stairs with an expression of wide-eyed alarm.
“Come inside,” Charlotte said, to Elizabeth, and then to Maria: “Put the kettle on, if you please.”
Maria went. Charlotte steered Elizabeth toward the sitting room. Elizabeth went, which told me she was more shaken than she was showing, because Elizabeth did not generally allow herself to be steered.
Halfway down the hall, she stopped and looked back at Darcy, who had followed us in and was standing near the door, unwinding his scarf from about his face. It seemed important to her that she watch him unmask, and Charlotte did not try to hurry her along.
“Thank you,” she said. Her voice was quieter and more direct than when she had thanked him for untying her.
Darcy said nothing. He gave a brief, tight nod, the nod of a man who does not trust himself to say more than that at present.
Elizabeth went into the sitting room. Charlotte, a step behind her, caught my eye over Elizabeth’s head with an expression that said: “I will find out what she thinks and I will tell you when the time is right.”
Then she was gone too, and the hall was quiet, and it was just Darcy and myself. We went into the study.
The study was warmer than the hall, a fire burning in the grate that someone had laid while we were gone. The room held the ordinary disorder of a morning interrupted: correspondence still on the desk where I had left it when Pyke arrived with his news.
He did not sit when I gestured to the chair. He stood in the middle of the study and looked at me with the expression of a man who has been patient long enough.
“The magistrate,” he said. It was not a question.
“Yes. I expected that would be your position.” I sat down, because sitting down when the other man is standing is a choice that costs nothing and communicates something useful. “Sit down, Mr. Darcy.”
This time, after a moment, he did.
“You are running a smuggling operation, out of a living provided by my aunt, with the apparent knowledge and cooperation of my aunt, and a man connected to my aunt’s late husband’s family has used it to abduct a gentlewoman of my acquaintance.” He said it with the flat precision of a man who had been organizing his thoughts on the road. “You will understand that I find this difficult to leave with the parties involved.”
“I understand it entirely. I would find it the same way in your position.” I looked at him steadily. “I am asking you to leave it with me regardless.”
“On what grounds?”
“On the grounds that what happened this morning was not the operation. It was one man acting outside his authority, against my explicit instructions, for reasons that had nothing to do with the operation’s purpose and everything to do with his own judgment, which has been deteriorating for the past two months. He will be dealt with. I give you my word on that.”
“Your word?” Darcy asked sceptically.
“My word,” I said, unoffended. “You may rate its value as you see fit. I would suggest that a man who has stood between you and a knife in the back has some claim to being taken at his word, but I recognize that this is not a conventional basis for trust.”
Darcy was silent for a moment. “Now that I know more of you, you do not seem to me to be either a stupid man, or a dishonorable one. Why are you so determined to protect this criminal enterprise?”
“For the sake of the parish,” I said. I told him of the seven families. The eight beyond them. The Goftons, four children, the youngest not yet two when I arrived, the roof that had held this winter because there was money to repair it. The three years of runs without serious incident, without violence, without anyone killed or imprisoned. The nature of life in Hunsford parish now, compared to the nature of life in Hunsford parish before, which any man who cared to enquire could verify for himself.
Darcy listened. From what he had said of Pemberley during various dinners at Rosings, I think he understood the obligations of the gentry towards those less fortunate better than, say, Lady Catherine did.
“And what of my aunt?” he asked.
“Your aunt has received certain goods from the Continent that the legitimate market could not provide to her satisfaction. She has done so with the care of a woman who understands that there are things it is better not to formally acknowledge.” I met his eyes. “She did not know what Annesley did this morning. She will not be pleased when she finds out.”
Darcy looked unhappy. He had respected his aunt, and perhaps loved her. I think he would have preferred not to know these things about her. Then a new and terrible thought seemed to occur to him. “She introduced him to you,” he said.
“She did. Under family obligation, I believe, rather than genuine enthusiasm. She has been finding him…trying, of late. It was not her fault. The responsibility for what he did this morning is mine. I did not move against him quickly enough.”
Darcy looked at me for a long moment. He was grappling with all that he had learned, which was what I had hoped for and had not been certain of.
“You said Annesley will be dealt with,” he said. “How?”
“In the way these things are dealt with, among the free-traders. Without the magistrate. Without bloodshed.”
“I have only your word for that as well.”
“I have nothing else to offer you at present. The alternative is the magistrate, who will inconvenience a great many people who have done nothing to deserve it. He will almost certainly take no action against Annesley, given the difficulty of getting witnesses to testify and the family connections involved, but he will destroy something that has taken three years to build and that matters to people who have very little else that matters to them.”
I looked at him.
“I am not asking you to approve of what I do, Mr. Darcy. I am asking you to consider the consequences of the alternative before you decide.”
The silence that followed was longer than the previous ones.
The door opened, and Elizabeth came in.
Her hair was put up and she was composed in the way that Charlotte is composed: not the absence of feeling but the complete management of it.
“Charlotte tells me,” she said, “that you are probably discussing whether to go to the magistrate.”
“Charlotte is correct as usual,” I said.
She looked at Darcy. Darcy looked at her in a way which spoke volumes.
“Don’t,” she said.
“Miss Bennet…” Darcy began.
“I have met the Gofton family,” Elizabeth said. “And Charlotte mentioned them again just now, when she explained what would happen if you went to the magistrate.”
Darcy said nothing.
“You have been wronged this morning,” Elizabeth said. “You were almost stabbed in the back. I have been wronged this morning, rather more directly, by being kidnapped. I must tell you that going to the magistrate is not the remedy I want.”
“The man who took you,” Darcy said, with careful precision, “is currently in this building.”
“I am aware of that. But Charlotte believes that Mr. Collins will deal with him as he deserves, and I find that I am inclined to believe her.”
Darcy looked at Elizabeth for a long moment, and then he looked at me. Outside the study window the April morning had become the April afternoon, the light shifting in the way it does in Kent in the spring, clear and not quite warm.
“I will not go to the magistrate,” Darcy said. “On the condition that I may witness Annesley’s fate.”
“Agreed,” I said.
He stood up and produced a letter from his coat.
“Miss Bennet, I wrote this with the idea of giving it to you this morning. Our conversations since then have rather overtaken it, and now I find it…ungraciously expressed. Do you have any objection if I burn it here unread?”
“If our host has no objection, then I have none,” Elizabeth answered.
“Please, burn what you like here, within reason,” I told him pleasantly.
He tossed it onto the fire. I glimpsed only a few words before the letter was destroyed: “Be not alarmed, madam…”
“I will call tomorrow,” he said, to the room generally, and went out.
Elizabeth and I stood in the study for a moment after the door had closed.
“Charlotte,” she said, “told me rather more than the minimum, I think.”
“She was correct to do so,” I said.
She nodded. “You may find it difficult to believe that I am in need of fresh air and exercise after this morning, Mr. Collins, but nonetheless, I feel the need of a walk to clear my thoughts.”
“Certainly,” I said.
We left the study together and found Charlotte in the hall. Elizabeth said a few words to her, and then went out again.
“Is the magistrate coming?” Charlotte asked. She spoke lightly, but there was the same worry I had seen in her face when she asked if I expected a certain invitation from my wife on her first night at the parsonage.
“You convinced Elizabeth that it would be unwise, and she convinced Darcy,” I said. “Thank you.”
Charlotte put her hand on my cheek, which startled me almost as much as if she had drawn a knife, but it was a pleasanter kind of startlement. “Elizabeth tells me you that you cut quite a figure this morning. I would have liked to have seen Annesley with your blade at his throat.”
“I’m sure you would have been quite entertained by this morning’s work. Perhaps I should have asked you to come along, to bear Elizabeth company on the road back.”
Charlotte smiled. “It seems Darcy bore her company, with good results.”
“Indeed.”
Her hand dropped to my chest. “I think tonight would be a good time for you to come to my room,” she said. “After…everything else. I know you still have much to do.”
“I would be honored,” I told her firmly. She left me then, and I went in search of Pyke. As Charlotte had said, I still had much to do.
Jaglion Press 