Page 123 of Homeless

“It was nothing of the kind at first. He sought an introduction. Called it a wish to know me better — I was a Derbyshire man of some standing, he said, and we had interests in common, and he thought it a great pity we were not better acquainted. I was not such a fool that I did not know what it meant. A man does not trouble to cultivate a gentleman two ranks below him. I knew his position at the Foreign Office. I had been trying to learn everything I could about matters with my father’s loan, long before the principal came due and the state of the war made the prospect of recovery possible. My letters had certainly crossed his desk, so I knew he would have a comprehensive understanding of how my affairs stood. And I knew he wanted something of me, but the first order of business seemed to be to throw his daughter in my way. At first, I confess, my thoughts were far from complimentary to the lady.”

“Dare I ask?”

“I assumed she was in need of an expedient marriage. That, however, was not the case. By my third meeting with Lady Honoria, I had begun to wonder what the catch was to be, for there seemed nothing objectionable in herself. So, after dinner one evening, Marchwood sat me down with port and cigars when the ladies had retired. He wanted me to understand that a connexion there would be… accommodated. That his influence with certain houses in the City might be made available to a son-in-law, where it would never be extended to a mere ‘Mr Darcy’.”

He set down the empty glass. “He offered me the rope to climb out of the well, Elizabeth. And the price of the rope was the valley. The water was the thing being bought, and his daughter and his banking friends were the coin he meant to pay for it, and I…”

He turned to look at her at last. “I did not refuse him. I did not accept him, either. I told myself I was considering it, weighing it soberly, and the truth is I had not the courage to say no to the only door that had opened. I let it stand unanswered. Went to Spain instead and found you, and there was an end of my sober considering.”

She had been braced for the wrong thing entirely, and she had come down that companion ladder prepared to be a little wounded. To have to hear the details of his affair with Lady Honoria Vane — that he had intentionally cultivated some warm understanding with the family and nurtured feelings in and for this heiress not only because of Marchwood’s wealth. Other earls had daughters and wealth, and a man might find a woman who genuinely suited his fancy, if he had the luxury of choice. That was what she had been prepared to hear — that he had looked round and decided he could provoke feelings in himself sufficient to court a lady for her dowry and her father’s position.

But the truth was worse and it was also, unbearably, not his fault. He had not sold himself. He had been shopped for. A rich, hungry man had looked at Fitzwilliam Darcy going under and seen not a person but a valley with a wheel-turning river in it, and had sent his daughter in as the bailiff. And Darcy — proud, upright, drowning Darcy — had been too far down to slam the door, and had left it open behind him when he sailed.

And he had come home with her instead. Who had shut that door for good simply by existing.

“What sort of man is this Marchwood? Not the office, not the his business concerns. What of his character?”

Darcy’s face flickered in thought before he replied. He was trying to be fair, which was, somehow, the most frightening thing he could have done. If he had called Marchwood a villain, she could have felt some triumph over the man. He did not.

“He is not a cruel man, that I know of,” he said carefully. “Nor a dishonest one. I never heard that he cheated anyone or broke his word. He is only… I suppose Bramwell said it best. A man who looks to his own interests. In every particular. He does nothing that does not serve him and he leaves nothing on the table that might be got, and he does it all quite calmly, without heat, as another man says good morning. I do not think he would trouble to hate me. I do not think I signify enough to him to be hated.” A grim ghost of something crossed his face. “I think he would simply reckon what I had cost him, and set it against what might yet be recovered, and act accordingly. That is all.”

Elizabeth's clever, tired, frightened mind took that mild and reasonable sentence and built the rest of it herself in the space of three breaths.

Marchwood would not be the sort of man who could overlook what her existence had done to his interest. He had wanted the valley. He had arranged, patiently, over months, to acquire it the cheap way, through a daughter and a dowry and a grateful son-in-law who would never miss what he signed away. And she had married the man and killed the whole design. The cheap door was shut. If Marchwood wanted the Derwent now, he would have to wait for Pemberley to fall, and buy it from the bank at whatever ruinous figure the water was truly worth, out of his own pocket, with nothing thrown in — no daughter married off, no grateful heir, only a cold, expensive purchase. She had cost him that difference. Elizabeth Bennet of nowhere, a merchant's niece with coins sewn in her hem, had reached up and taken tens of thousands of pounds out of an earl's calculation, and he did not even know yet that she existed.

And the same man sat at the Foreign Office with her uncle's fate under his hand. Could hurry it, if it served him. And the reverse of hurry was not far to seek, for a man who looked always to his own advantage and had just had a fortune's worth of advantage snatched out of his ledger by the very woman who would come, hat in hand, to beg him for her uncle. He need not lift a finger against Gardiner. He need only decline to lift one for him — let the case sink back into the ordinary six-months-or-a-year or longer, decline to press it, be, as Bramwell had said, perfectly civil and do nothing, so that no one could ever say he had refused. Her uncle could sit in the Basque mountains for years, and there would be no villain to point to, no cruelty to expose, only a busy earl who somehow never got round to it, and everyone would call it bad luck.

And Darcy's claim — she was fully into it now, cold to the fingertips — Darcy's own claim against Spain, the hundred thousand pounds, the thing that might yet save Pemberley, ran through that same office, that same man's part of it, the man who had once advised Darcy how to secure it. Of course, he had advised him. He had wanted Pemberley kept whole and solvent, back then, so that it might come to him entire through the marriage. But now? Now a solvent Pemberley in Darcy's own hands was the last thing on earth Marchwood would want, because a Pemberley that did not fall was a valley he could never buy. The man who had helped Darcy secure the claim had, the moment she married him, acquired every reason to wish the claim would fail.

One man. One mild, reasonable, self-interested man held her uncle's freedom in one hand and her husband's whole future in the other, and her marriage had turned him, quietly and without any villainy at all, against them on both counts.

“Elizabeth.” Darcy had crossed to her. He was crouched in front of the berth, his hands over hers where they had knotted in her lap. “You have gone somewhere I cannot follow. Tell me. We reckon these things together — you said it yourself. Say it aloud and let me carry half.”

She looked at him, and she found she could not, quite, say the whole of it.

“When we land,” she said instead, carefully, feeling her way, “I do not want it known that you have married. Not at once. Not until we understand better how things lie.”

“Elizabeth, no.” He was shaking his head. “No, we are not doing this again. You are my wife, and I am your husband, and —”

“I know how that must sound to you. I am not…” She had to pause because her voice had failed to cooperate for the next word. “I am not leaving you, Fitzwilliam, I swear to you I am not. I only think there are things we do not yet know, and a great deal that could go wrong from being known too soon. I would rather we were quiet a little while, and careful, and certain of the ground, before we go announcing to London that there is a new Mrs Darcy for anyone to reckon against.”

“I know you are frightened, Elizabeth, but I will not have you hiding your face the moment we return to London. How would we even manage it? The moment you enter the house, you will be seen. Servants talk, even mine. I would rather it be supposed I brought home a wife than a mistress.”

“Let nothing be supposed at all.” She dashed a tear from her cheek with the heel of her hand, and he captured it again the moment she let him. “My aunt will be wanting comfort, anyway. I will go to her in Cheapside.”

His face hardened. “You mean to run. You may as well admit it.”

“No! I love you, Fitzwilliam. I would never… no, I am not running!”

The brittleness behind his eyes softened in an instant, and his chest rose. “You…” He brought her hands to his mouth in a rush and kissed them both. “You love me? You have never said that before.”

“I am quite sure I have.”

“Never.” He kissed each hand again. “I assure you, I have been listening most attentively. You have said everything else, and have said much of it in a language I can only partially grasp, but you have never told me that.”

She tugged her hands free of his to capture his face and pulled his brow against hers. “I loved you when you chose not to leave me to my own disaster, and put thirteen coins in my hand instead. I loved you when you screamed like a girl after a rat frightened you, and I woke with your arm around me in the night. I loved you when you brought me, half-dead and half-dying yourself, to a priest’s door and swore to him that you would trade your life for mine. I would go on, and I can go on, because I do not think there was a moment, Fitzwilliam Darcy, that I did not thank God for his mercy in sending you, of all people, to Navarre when I needed you. I have every intention of spending the rest of my days arguing with you over the silliest things, and then loving you through the nights to make up for it. I do love you, you preposterous, wonderful man, and because I love you, I ask you for this. Let me go to my aunt when we arrive in London, and let us plan together how best to survive this.”

His eyes closed, and he was still for a few moments. At length, he tipped closer, letting his lips rest gently on hers. “I hate it. I hate everything about it.”