Miss Bennet was not in the room. Darcy had asked her to wait in the parlour, and for once, she had not argued.
Darcy laid it all before Ellison as one tells a surgeon what is broken. The debt. The entail. Collins’s proposals under clerical varnish and mercantile threat. Gardiner’s attempts. The forged acknowledgment. The altered memorandum. The flight. The inquiries north. His own knowledge and its source. And the likelihood that Collins, uncertain but encouraged by feminine vulnerability and geographical distance, had preferred private probing to open process.
Ellison read every paper once. Then again. Then Collins’s letter a third time, with the particular interest of a legal man discovering that sanctimony often provides better evidence than honesty, because it cannot resist documenting itself.
At length he said, “The forgery is plain enough to be dangerous, and not plain enough to be simple. Which, for our purposes, is useful.”
Fitzwilliam, ordered to silence and obeying with visible suffering, made a sound in his throat.
Ellison ignored him.
“If the matter were publicly charged at once,” he continued, “Miss Bennet could be placed in grave peril, especially if the instrument were framed as designed to obtain property or defeat lawful claim. Yet the papers have not been used to transfer title, seize goods by force, or extract money from the lender’s heirs. They appear instead to have beenretained and carried, which is bad but not as bad as profitable use. More importantly, this letter—” He touched Collins’s pious extortion with one finger as if contamination might pass through paper. ”—is poison to any party wishing to present himself as the clean guardian of legal order.”
“Not poison enough to keep her from a cart,” Darcy said, “if some magistrate wishes to display zeal.”
Ellison looked at him directly for the first time. “No, sir. I am a lawyer’s clerk, not an angel. I do not promise innocence where guilt exists. I promise only advice.”
“A comfortingly infernal distinction,” Fitzwilliam said.
Darcy’s mouth almost moved.
“We must move quickly,” Ellison continued, “and keep the matter from broadening. Mr Wainwright will write at once to counsel in Derby. He will also engage a friend in Lambton to ascertain whether Miss Bennet’s uncle, Mr Gardiner of Cheapside, is presently in London; and, if he is, whether he is a man upon whose discretion and disposition we may depend. Simultaneously, a letter shall be prepared to Mr Collins—not from Miss Bennet, and not yet from you, sir, though your support will be understood—informing him that certain communications of his, along with evidence of financial pressure on ladies under recent bereavement, are in counsel’s hands and will be produced if he pursues any public accusation touching irregular household papers.”
“You mean to blackmail the blackmailer,” Fitzwilliam said.
Ellison blinked once. “I mean to remind him that litigation is expensive and reputations porous. Men like Mr Collins usually prefer oppression to contest. Contest can be seen.”
Darcy said, “And my exposure?”
At that, Ellison folded his hands.
“Less than might have been, more than comfortable. You did not forge the paper. You did not solicit its making, so far as evidence shows. You did, however, shelter Miss Bennet after suspicion of illegality became substantial. If all were dragged into open court by a determined enemy, your conduct might be painted as accessory after the fact, or obstruction, by gentlemen less scrupulous than careful. It would not end there. Questions would arise in public about how long she lay under your roof, what your servants knew, whether your sister’s household was cover for concealment, and whether a gentleman’s consequence served to put soft cloth over felony. You might survive the law of it, but your name and house would not emerge untouched. Yet because you have now produced thepapers through counsel before any warrant or search, and because you seek advice rather than concealment henceforth, your risk lowers considerably. Not disappears. Lowers.”
“Lowered is sufficient,” Darcy said, “if the lady’s is lowered first.”
Ellison’s expression did not change. The Colonel’s stillness broke.
Fitzwilliam swore under his breath with such violence that even Ellison glanced at him.
“If Collins had forced it into public hearing, he might have had Miss Bennet in a cart, Darcy named harbourer to a felon, and every county gossip feeding on my cousin’s judgment like fair-day sport. He set private spies about vulnerable women and meant to make respectability do the strangling for him.”
Ellison’s expression held. His eyes did not.
He turned back to Darcy.
“There remains one piece of counsel, sir, in which the firm is unanimous and which I am instructed to put plainly.”
“Which is?”
“Your exposure may be substantially reduced—perhaps to a sustainable margin—by establishing visible distance from Miss Bennet at once. Removing her to her uncle’s care in London by tomorrow’s post, if she is fit to travel. If she is not, removing yourself, and giving out that her residence here is a charity of Mrs Marsden’s, with Mrs Marsden returned in residence as principal. A note to that effect to Mr Wainwright by tonight’s post would alter the record we may be obliged to defend.”
“No.”
Ellison did not at once respond. He set the papers in their order on the desk with the care of a man who had not been refused an instruction in his hearing in a long while.
“Mr Darcy, the recommendation is not personal. It is the calculation of a clean defence against a willing prosecution. The longer she remains under your roof in your demonstrable knowledge of her circumstance, the more—”
“No.”
