Page 16 of Faceless

“Yesterday afternoon. I told him there was no one here but the servants. As usual.”

The packet sat unopened between them. Darcy considered it and thought about a county factor — the man whose job was to know the state of every property in the district, who reported to Edinburgh, who expected to be received — and about what as usual meant coming from a house with a new baron in the title never announced, never seen.

“What did he want?”

“To pay his respects. To confirm all was in order.”

“Is there anything else?”

“The Reverend Innes has called once. And the village has noticed the lantern.”

Darcy stiffened. “Which lantern?”

“The one you had in the upper rooms. Several nights last week. A man on the cliff path going home from the fishing said he had seen it last Tuesday. He mentioned it at the inn.”

Darcy turned to the ventilation slit in the wall of the mural chamber. Tuesday. The fourth report from Webb. The part he had read three times, trying to find the thread that connected the forged signatures to the warrant, his attention narrowed entirely to the page, the lantern burning on past the hour he should have shuttered it.

Servants used candles to move about, not study lanterns that sat on a desk. And not in the upper rooms, and not at that hour. Anyone in a fishing village on the Aberdeenshire coast who had grown up watching which windows lit and when in the houses along the headland could tell a housekeeper’s kitchen light from a lantern burning past midnight in the baron’s chambers. The village had drawn the only conclusion the evidence supported — someone was in the house. And Angus had told the factor there was no one but the servants.

The factor would hear what the fisherman had said at the inn. He would call again, and the second visit would not be satisfied with the same answer as the first.

Darcy pushed back from the table, stood, walked to the narrow window and back — four steps in each direction, which did nothing except prevent him from sitting still. A man in the factor’s position did not let inconsistencies accumulate quietly. He noted them, and what he noted did not stay with him.

He needed an account that reconciled the lights with the denial — one that made Angus’s answer honest in its way and the Baron’s invisibility a matter of temperament rather than concealment. A man who had arrived quietly, too deep in grief to announce himself, wanting no company and giving none. The servants had said what they always said because he had not yet instructed them otherwise. It was untidy enough to be plausible.

“When the factor calls again, tell him the Baron arrived some days ago and is not receiving visitors. His grief has been considerable, and he requires solitude. The Reverend Innes may be told the same.” He turned back from the window. “And put the shutters on the upper rooms after dark.”

Angus went without another word. Darcy picked up the Aberdeen packet, held it, set it down again, listened to the sea coming in off the headland. Three weeks of carelessness with a candle, and the cover story he had counted on lasting months had been needed before the end of May.

The factor called again ten days later.

By then, Darcy had found the Laird’s Lug.

He had discovered it by accident. One morning when the walls of the mural chamber seemed closer than usual, he had taken a candle into the hidden passages merely to move, following the secondary stair downward, then sideways through a passage he had not tried before, pressing his free hand along the stone, feeling — faintly, unmistakably — a change in temperature. A draught from somewhere.

He followed it to a low door in the passage wall, barely a door, more a section of stone that swung inward on a pivot; and beyond it a chamber so cramped he could not stand upright — perhaps four feet across, a rough stone floor, a ceiling that sloped down to nothing at the far end. And in the outer wall, at roughly the height of a man’s ear if he lay on the floor, there was a slit. Narrow, disguised on its outer face as decorative stonework. Designed, he saw the moment he lay down and put his ear to it, not to let in light but to let in sound.

Below him, clear and close as if the floor between them were paper rather than a foot of solid stone, he could hear the Great Hall.

He lay there for a long time, listening to the empty room below breathe.

When the factor knocked at the gate ten days later, Darcy moved to the Lug, flat on the cold stone, his ear at the slit. He heard Angus greet him. He heard the factor’s voice — unhurried, civil, the authority in his tone; he had been doing this long enough to know that patience was more effective than insistence. He heard Angus’s responses, brief and careful. He heard everything.

The factor said he was pleased to have a resident in the house once more, though dismayed at being turned away without meeting him. He asked after the baron’s health. He said he only needed to confirm, as was his duty, that all was in order.

Angus said all was in order.

The factor said he would look forward to paying his respects to the baron in person, when the baron was equal to receiving callers, and left.

Darcy lay on the stone, his eye on the ceiling, and dwelt on the phrase in the dark — when the Baron felt equal to receiving callers. The man had said when, not if; he had left no room for the other word. The factor would come back. Next time, he would expect to be received. If he was not received, he would go away and write something down; eventually, that something would be read by someone. Darcy had no way of knowing, from a stone chamber in Aberdeenshire, where that chain ended.

The thought arrived before he could stop it — he needed a presence at the house. A face in the Great Hall, a voice the village could attach to a name; someone seen at the kirk on Sundays, encountered on the cliff path, noted without alarm as belonging to Auchengray. If there were someone — anyone — to stand in that place, the cover story would sustain itself without effort. The baron in mourning. His household in order. Nothing to investigate.

There was no one.

Not because he could not think of a name. Whoever stood in that place would be standing in his life, and his life was forfeit if he was found. Harbouring a man under warrant for high treason was not a misunderstanding that could be smoothed over. It was a charge. He would not do that to anyone, and there was no one he would ask it of, in any case.

Of course, he could just take his chance. Greet the factor casually, pass himself off as George Carlisle of nowhere but here. But his face was known. Not here, no. Not yet. But in London, in Kent, in Derbyshire, in every drawing room and club and shipping office where Fitzwilliam Darcy had ever stood.