Page 29 of Faceless

He tipped his hat. “Good day, Miss Bennet.”

“Good day, Colonel.”

Her gaze followed him as he walked away down Gracechurch Street, his pace unhurried and his back very straight.

She put her hands in her lap, and her eyes fell to the ground, fixed on nothing. She did not allow herself to think about what Fitzwilliam had not said — about the names, about the colour leaving his face, about there is always gossip spoken so carefully. There was nothing to be done about it. Thinking about it would not help anyone. She had promised herself she would not fall apart on the steps of her uncle’s house a second time.

She fell apart on the steps of her uncle’s house a second time.

XIII

The Reckoning

The Aberdeen packet arrived on a Thursday. Darcy read it in the mural chamber with the candle burning, his notes pushed to one side, his pen untouched. When he finished, the letter slipped from lifeless fingers. And he had forgotten how to breathe.

Webb’s letter was dated the fourth of July. Six days to reach him — the usual run for summer weather. He had not wondered at the timing until now.

He read it again, this time scrambling for dates.

GC,

This does not pertain to the investigation. I send it because Hodges judged it a matter of personal concern to you, and because, having looked into it since, I find the facts worse than the manner in which they reached me. I have verified what follows, and I give it to you plainly. You would not thank me for the gentler version.

The thread came from Colonel Fitzwilliam, who arrived at Grosvenor Square on the third of July in a poor state, having spent some considerable time with a bottle. Hodges says the colonel had come directly from Gracechurch Street, Cheapside, where he had met by chance on the front steps a Miss Elizabeth Bennet of Longbourn, Hertfordshire, whom he knew. What he said there, I have since confirmed from other quarters.

Mr Bennet of Longbourn died in May, without warning. The entail fell at once, and the heir put the widow and five daughters out of the house inside a fortnight. They went to Mr Edward Gardiner of Gracechurch Street, a warehouseman, brother to Mrs Bennet.

Gardiner was himself ruined this spring. He had placed the greater part of his capital in a trading concern that paid well for two years. In April, a single large investor closed out and withdrew his whole stake inside a week; confidence broke, the other backers followed within the fortnight, and the firm failed. I have traced the dates. The withdrawal was the cause, and there is no reading of the sequence that makes it otherwise. The house at Gracechurch Street is sold.

Unable to keep six women, Gardiner sought husbands for the two eldest through a connection moving in higher circles than his own, and the articles were signed in a single sitting. Miss Jane Bennet is to marry Sir Horace Blackwood, baronet. Miss Elizabeth Bennet is to marry Mr Thomas Sibley, of new money. The weddings are set for the eighteenth of July.

That is the whole of it, so far as I have it. I do not know why Hodges felt it important to pass on, but it is a sorry situation, and I am sorry to be the one to set it down.

W.

Darcy read those two lines again.

Miss Jane Bennet is to marry Sir Horace Blackwood.

Miss Elizabeth Bennet is to marry Mr Thomas Sibley.

The candle guttered, and he did not lift his hand to shield it.

He had liquidated in April. Webb had moved everything in five days — accounts cleared, positions closed, assets converted or transferred. A liquidation of that size, that speed, from a man with shipping interests, moved through the markets the way a stone moved through still water… it would have made ripples, even waves.

He had not known what Gardiner had invested in. He had not known Gardiner existed. He had been on a ship to Aberdeen by the time the ripples reached Gracechurch Street.

He had ruined them.

Not intentionally. Not knowingly. The chain ran clean from his own hand to the sign outside Edward Gardiner’s house, and there was no arrangement of the facts that changed that.

And before the Gardiners, there was Bingley.

Bingley had been on the cusp of proposing to Jane Bennet last autumn. Darcy had been certain of it — had seen the whole thing assemble itself over a fortnight at Netherfield with the clarity of one who had been present for Bingley’s every attachment for years and knew the difference between the usual sort and this. This had looked like the real thing, from Bingley’s side. From Jane Bennet’s side, Darcy had not been certain. He had read her as a young woman who could be happy with Bingley, or happy without him — and on that reading, he had decided Bingley deserved certainty before he committed himself, and had acted accordingly.

He might have been right about Jane Bennet’s feelings. He was not certain, even now, that he had been wrong. None of that signified any longer.

Because Jane Bennet was going to marry Sir Horace Blackwood, and no uncertainty about the depth of her feelings for Bingley changed what that meant. A moderate attachment to a kind man would have been a decent life. What Blackwood offered was not a life. And Darcy had been the one to make Bingley walk, with the best intentions available to him, and there was no reaching Bingley now to ask him to walk back. Bingley was in London, fixed on Miss Harrington, moving towards a happiness that was constitutionally available to him in ways that had nothing to do with which woman he was pursuing. The door to Hertfordshire had closed months ago, and Darcy had been the one to close it.