Darcy let the words settle.Your cousin.In London, Edmund had existed mainly as a dead connexion whose death produced legal inconvenience and an unexpected house. In Northmere, the dead had local afterlives more troublesome than any probate paper.
“You speak of him as though with inconvenience rather than grief,” Darcy said.
Hadley threw a sideways look under brows pale with weather and age. “Would grief mend a hatch?”
“No.”
“Then there is your answer.”
They reached the weir, where the water narrowed between stone cheeks dark with damp. The sluice gate was crusted along the lower edge with frozen mud. Hadley set down the spade, crouched, and drove the blade under the lip with expertise that made the movement seem insultingly easy. When the iron lifted, black water surged with a sudden thick sound, carrying a rope of brown weed and silt after it.
“There,” Hadley said. “That should have been done by Advent. Nearly Candlemas now. Judge the late master’s standards for yourself.”
Darcy crouched beside him. The water smelled of stone, mineral, and rotted reed. Not foul, simply old. He watched the flow take the cut and find its way into the carrier. “His steward did the estate no favours, either.”
Hadley grunted. “Aye. Wickham… Came with a great fat purse and a high opinion of himself. Said he'd been brought up to a great house. Only thing great about him was his love of the master's cellars and his purse.”
Darcy winced. That had been his father's doing—recommending George Wickham to Edmund as steward. On paper, the notion made sense. But in practicality…
“Was it truly idleness and incompetence?” he asked. “Or want of money?”
Hadley spat aside, not from vulgarity but to clear the wind’s taste from his mouth. “You ask as though the two could be parted. Edmund Darcy had money when paying would have spared others trouble. None when it fell on us. Men were told wages had been entered against books, and the books showed no such thing to eyes that knew figures. Stone ordered for the far wall never came, though the steward swore he sent for it. Repairs promised. Timber charged. Nothing done. If laziness alone, we’d have called him useless and moved on. It was the explaining after that soured the valley.”
The explaining after.
That had been the most intolerable part—not just here at Northmere. Pemberley had suffered similar oversights, similar excuses, similar twists upon the truth. Not the theft, not the length, but the explanations layered over it as if words might alter arithmetic. Under-paid. Owed. Misremembered. Temporary deficiency. A steward could only be expected to be accountable for so much—so he had been told. Darcy had been twenty-two and grieving, and learned in six months that grief did not excuse bad sums or lying men.
He rose.
“Who kept the books here?”
“Mr Wickham did, when sober enough. When not, Mrs Bannon could tell you what had gone in and not because she has eyes, though she would rather die than call it bookkeeping. Ashby might tell more about stone and timber. He faced men who came for wages and were told the house had no ready cash after all.”
The name went into the cold air. Darcy did not, in any particular Hadley would see, react. He had not heard it spoken in this country in some years, and the absence had not been a hardship. The books had been the books of a man too close to his cousin’s London circle to be a surprise. That his cousin had let the man to the books was less a surprise than the fact of the books at all.
“And yet you stayed.”
Hadley rested both hands on the spade head and looked not at Darcy but at the lower meadow, where newly freed water darkened the frozen grass in a long irregular line. “My father’s father set this water. My father after him. There is leaving, and being the man whose leaving means the next fool knows less than you. I had a wife. Children. A brother in the mine. A patch beyond the church road. More reasons to stay than go, and staying kept the meadows alive enough that the village did not forget what they were.”
Darcy had no answer equal to that. They walked on. Hadley showed the lower carrier, half-collapsed under a slide where roots had gone wild through untended stone. He showed the meadow gate hanging one hinge short. The place where, in a wet year, water would spread right, and in a badly kept year, cut wrong and swamp grass meant for ewes.
By the time they turned back, Darcy had mud halfway up his boots and the clear outline of six separate expenses.
“How many men can Ashby spare?” he asked.
“Two, if the mine doesn’t take one back by week’s end. Four if you pay fair and mean it. More if your London letter travels quicker than most London letters and you do not ask village men to stake February labour on March promises.”
“I do not.”
“Good. Because they’ve had enough.”
They climbed the slope. The house rose above them, grey and square and less ornamental the closer one came. Smoke rose from two chimneys. One upstairs window stood open an inch at the top despite the cold, Reynolds’s old principle carried north that sickrooms must have air whether patients thanked one or not. Darcy’s eye turned at once to it—Georgiana’s south chamber—then to the lower range where the parlour windows caught pale noon light. One curtain had been drawn back farther than before.
“Mrs Hadley has gone up,” Hadley said, following his glance. “My wife will tell you what is needed.”
Darcy nodded, and they came on toward the house through the thinning cold.
At the door Hadley re-set the spade upon his shoulder. “I will look first at the lower carrier before dinner. If Ashby is there, I shall set him to measuring stone.”
