Page 12 of Faceless

They stood as the stop was short. Fitzwilliam asked after their plans in London.

“Gracechurch Street,” Elizabeth said. “Cheapside. My uncle expects us for dinner.”

“Gracechurch Street. I know it tolerably well — my regimental tailor is at Leadenhall, two turnings off, and I have spent enough afternoons waiting on him to have formed opinions about every public house in a half-mile. Your uncle is in trade?”

“He is. Mr Gardiner, of the cloth warehouses — the house is above the counting-room, near St Peter’s.”

“Near St Peter’s.” Fitzwilliam considered. “The broad-fronted one, with the green door?”

“You know it?”

“I have passed it often enough. The flowers in the upper windows would be your aunt’s doing, I imagine — no warehouseman keeps geraniums without being compelled to them.”

“My aunt does not hold with the notion that a warehouse should keep her from her geraniums.”

“Mrs Gardiner sounds a spirited woman.”

“She is.”

Maria asked what else he knew of London, and Fitzwilliam obliged with good grace — the best shops for gloves, the hazards of Fleet Street after four o’clock, which squares repaid a stroll and which did not.

He was cheerful and good company. He was exactly as she had always found him. And yet when she glanced at him once — caught his face in the moment before he turned to answer Maria’s question about London — there was something running underneath the ease that had not been there at the parsonage on Tuesday. Not distraction exactly. Closer to the look that came of keeping something back and doing it well enough that he would have expected no one to see it.

She did not pursue it. It was not her business, and in another minute the horses were ready, and they were parting with the ease of people who have no reason to linger.

He crossed the yard towards his hired carriage and climbed in. Their own was ready then, the manservant handed them up, and they were moving again, the Bromley inn yard receding behind them into the April afternoon.

Webb arrived at half past three, slipping in through the printer’s yard while the street was still empty, and was gone again before the ink-stained apprentices and early clerks began to move through Fetter Lane.

“The arrangements at Deptford are made,” he said. He did not sit; he never sat. “The timing is tight but workable. Friday night, if the tide is right. It will be.”

Darcy did not ask how Webb knew about the tide. Webb knew about a great many things.

His father’s signet ring was on his right hand, where it had been since the morning after the funeral, when his uncle pressed it into his palm with nothing adequate to say. The Darcy crest was engraved deep enough that whatever survived a fire would survive with the crest still legible, still identifiable beyond any question. He turned it once on his finger.

“Must it be the ring?”

“The body must be identified as yours beyond reasonable dispute. The ring is the surest means. Once the identification is made, the warrant dies with you, the proceedings stop, your will enters into effect, and your sister is protected. The other provisions you have made secure her in any case. But yes. The ring is necessary.”

Darcy pulled it from his finger and set it on the desk between them.

“The Scottish solicitor has confirmed the trust instrument,” Webb continued, as though the thing on the desk were only another document. “The funds will be unreachable by Monday. Sterling’s people will find the English accounts frozen and nothing else.”

“And Georgiana’s additional settlement — has that been transferred to Matlock?”

“Yesterday. He will not know why until after word reaches him, and it is done discreetly enough that only he will know.”

“And the letters? You will send them after I…”

“Not until you instruct me to, or until—”

“Or until the verdict comes in.” Darcy set the pen down. “Yes. I understand the condition.”

“There is one further matter.” Webb set a folded document on the desk. “The title search is complete. The barony of Auchengray is entirely clear — no liens, no competing claims, no record of it in any register connected to the Darcy name. It passed through your mother’s family three generations back. The Crown’s investigators will search Derbyshire; they will search the Continent. They will not search Aberdeenshire for a minor Scottish title held through a maternal line that does not carry your name.”

Darcy did not touch the document. He had known this in the abstract since the Sevenoaks road, when the plan first assembled itself in the dark, and Auchengray became the answer to the question of where. His mother had spoken of it rarely — a tower house on the coast, remote and drafty, built for defence rather than comfort, her grandmother’s people; she had gone once as a girl and described the sea as the loudest thing she had ever heard. His father had never gone at all. That was the point. The English world had no map to it and no reason to draw one — a property outside the whole network of associations that constituted Fitzwilliam Darcy’s visible life, and that invisibility was worth more than stone walls.

“Can the servants be relied upon,” he asked, “if investigators make enquiries in the county?”