Yet if Gardiner’s business had truly been broken by the floods, Darcy knew he would do what he could. A letter to Matlock, perhaps. An introduction. A loan stretched beyond prudence.Something.
“Can I help you, sir?”
The voice came from behind a crate. A young man emerged carrying a ledger nearly half the size of his chest, spectacles slipping down his nose and ink staining two of his fingers. He looked more clerk than laborer, though his sleeves were rolled back and his waistcoat bore evidence of recent work.
Darcy inclined his head. “I am looking for Mr. Gardiner. It is a matter of business.”
The young man’s mouth fell open. For several seconds, he stared as though Darcy had asked to speak with Julius Caesar.
“I—Mr. Gardiner?” he stammered.
“Yes.”
The clerk swallowed, glanced toward the open door, then back at Darcy. “Wait here, sir.”
Before Darcy could ask another question, the young man set the ledger down upon a crate and hurried away.
Darcy frowned. That was not the reaction he had expected.
He had nearly decided to leave when the clerk returned, this time accompanied by an older gentleman whose plain dark coat and steady manner suggested neither merchant nor servant. The man’s face was lined with fatigue, but his eyes were sharp.
“Mr. Darcy?” the man asked.
Darcy turned fully toward him. “Yes. I fear there may have been some misunderstanding. I was seeking Mr. Edward Gardiner.”
The older gentleman lowered his head briefly. “I am sorry, Mr. Darcy. My name is Philips. I was Mr. Gardiner’s brother by marriage and have been assisting with his affairs. Mr. Gardiner perished in the floods.”
Darcy went still. The noises of the warehouse seemed to recede—the scrape of wood, distant voices, the drip of water from some unseen beam.
“Perished?” he repeated quietly.
Mr. Philips nodded. “He was caught near the warehouses when the waters rose.”
Darcy looked across the half-empty warehouse, and the loss before him changed shape. It was no longer merely a business injured by water. It was a dead man’s work, being sorted by those left behind.
“I am very sorry,” he said, and the inadequacy of the phrase struck him even as he spoke it. “Mr. Gardiner once showed me a kindness when I had little right to expect it. I came to see a debt settled.”
Something softened in Mr. Philips’s face, though sorrow remained. “That sounds like Edward.”
“His wife,” Darcy said after a moment. “Perhaps she—”
Mr. Philips closed his eyes briefly.
Darcy understood before the answer came.
“The shock of her husband’s death brought on her confinement too early. The child was born too small to survive, and Mrs. Gardiner passed soon after.”
Darcy felt the words physically. A good man drowned in the flood. His wife dead of the shock. An infant gone before life had properly begun.
“Were there other children?” he asked, his voice lower than before.
“Three.”
“Orphaned, then?”
“Yes.”
A cold, urgent anxiety rose in him. Three children, suddenly without parents. A business injured. Servants frightened. Legal affairs uncertain. He thought wildly of workhouses, of distant relations unwilling or unable to take them, of fortunes swallowed by water and creditors. He had not the means to take in three children. He could scarcely keep Pemberley’s accounts breathing. Yet the thought of Gardiner’s children being left to charity after their father’s kindness to him felt intolerable.
