His heart was doing something else entirely.
Lady Catherine surged to her feet, the tip of her cane biting into the carpet with every determined step. “You may be one signature away from disaster,” she snapped, voice rising. “That girl’s father has never stood firm in his life, and now you intend to bind yourself—publicly—to a reed!”
Darcy looked up just in time to see her advancing.
But she did not reach him.
The dowager, still seated, extended her own cane like a fencer unsheathing a blade. “Sit down, Catherine,” she said crisply. “Or I shall be forced to recount that unfortunate business with the vicar, the punchbowl, and your third-best hat. You remember the one.”
Lady Catherine stopped mid-step, turned a dangerous shade of red, and sat with the weight of a toppled statue.
“Good,” said the dowager, returning to her knitting. “We are all much more agreeable when seated.”
The clerk, caught between noblewomen and temperaments he could not rank, shrank closer to the table, eyes fixed on the documents as though they might shield him.
Darcy signed the final page.
“She will not be the last to regret it,” he muttered.
The wax seal hissed as it met the paper.
From the corner, the dowager resumed her knitting with a rustle of wool and disdain. “If paper could save a marriage, we would all live in perfect harmony. But no parchment ever held more weight than a breath withheld at the wrong moment.”
Darcy cast his pen aside on the desk, not even bothering to put it up properly.
His head lifted slowly. “Yet some breath must be withheld. Or all is lost.”
The fire crackled. The dowager’s eyes narrowed.
A knock sounded at the door.
Darcy looked up at once, spine tight. “That must be him.”
The clerk glanced at the mantel clock and nodded, relief loosening his shoulders. “Yes, sir. Nearly to the minute.”
Darcy stepped back from the desk, jerking his waistcoat, and motioned for Jackson.
The butler opened the door—and did not step aside.
Instead, he turned and held out a single envelope, crested in wax and mottled by the rain.
“Delivered by a footman,” Jackson said quietly. He extended a folded letter, the Ashford crest waxed in dull green at the seal.
Darcy took it, staring for a moment at the seal. A footman. Not even a secretary. Not a message delivered hand to hand, but dropped like an afterthought at the door.
He cracked the wax and read.
The words were brief. Insufficient. Ashford regretted the inconvenience. Circumstances had changed. The match would not proceed.
No signature. Only a stamped card.
Lady Catherine surged to her feet in a magnificent sweep of rustling skirts, her cane striking the floor like a gavel. “It is exactly as I predicted. The Ashfords have shown their true breeding—or lack thereof. No spine, no honor, no sense of obligation. And you—sitting here like a clerk, arranging papersand signatures, thinking duty can be scribbled into permanence! You thought a contract would secure loyalty? You thought paper could stand where character failed?”
She turned on him fully, her eyes blazing. “But we shall repair this. You will announce the engagement to Anne by week’s end. You shall accompany her to Matlock, be seen, be quoted. The gossip will pivot before the banns are barely cold. We shall salvage what you have so grievously mismanaged. A man betrayed by his bride commands sympathy. A man betrothed to his cousin commands deference.”
“Catherine!” the dowager warned.
“Nonsense! Darcy, you will propose to Anne. Today. Before your wits escape you again. You have delayed long enough. The time has come to fulfill the expectations set down since your cradle!” She was already striding toward the door, calling for Jackson to fetch her daughter, demanding the green silk and the pearls.
