Page 133 of Homeless

He bowed. “That is more than I had ventured to ask. Thank you, Lady Honoria.”

LII

No Cause for Alarm

The banking house occupied a sober set of rooms off Lombard Street, all dark panelling and green baize and the hush of a place where other men's fortunes were weighed by the ounce. Darcy had gone into it that morning with more hope than he had let himself examine too closely, and come out of it with none.

He had brought them everything, and laid it before the two grave partners who received him — the history of the Spanish loan, the trail of documentation he and his solicitors had built over months, and then his trump card, the receipt — proof of the original certificate, now lodged in official channels and pressed by the Foreign Office as a claim of the Crown's own interest. A hundred thousand pounds, acknowledged, documented, real.

They had examined it with genuine interest, turning the stamped acknowledgment in their hands, murmuring to one another, and for a quarter of an hour, he had believed it would answer.

“It is most remarkable, Mr Darcy.” The senior partner had set it down at last, and folded his hands, and given him the look Darcy had come to know from clerks across half of Spain — the courteous look that preceded a refusal. “Remarkable proof, and I do not doubt its authenticity for a moment. You have done a great thing to obtain it, and against, I gather, no small odds. But you must permit me to speak plainly, as I think you would wish.”

“I would wish it.”

“Then I shall. Proof that a debt is owed is not a proof that it will be paid. These are very different things, and it is the second, not the first, that a house such as ours must reckon by.” He tapped the document. “This establishes beyond question that the late Spanish junta acknowledged the sum. It establishes nothing whatever about whether the present government of Spain — the restored crown, which has, as I am sure you are better aware than I, made a public business of disowning the debts its predecessors contracted in the war — intends to honour it. Or when. Or in what part. You have a claim, sir. You have an excellent, well-documented, entirely genuine claim that is far beyond what others might be able to show. I daresay you have more reason to hope than others. But we cannot advance against a hope, even a strong hope, even a just one. We should not be a bank very long if we did.”

Darcy had argued it. He had argued it as well as he had ever argued anything — the strength of the documentation, the weight of the Foreign Office behind it, the near-certainty that a settlement must come — and the partners had listened with perfect courtesy and been entirely unmoved, because they had heard men argue for their hopes before and it was their business not to lend against them. And at the end of it, when he had spent everything he had, the senior partner had offered him the only thing the house was prepared to offer, and it was the offer that had sent him out into Lombard Street white to the lips.

They would not extend the loan. They would not refinance against the claim. What they would do — and they plainly considered it handsome, a kindness even — was to see that when Pemberley was sold to satisfy the debt, as it must be after Michaelmas, Mr Darcy received fair value for the equity remaining after the mortgage was discharged. They would not let the estate go for a song at a forced sale; they would see it fetched its true worth, and the balance paid honestly to him. It was, the partner said, a good offer. Many a man in Mr Darcy's position was not treated half so well. He should account himself fortunate.

Fair value for the equity remaining. Darcy had stood in the street afterward and bitten back curses at the orderly and dignified dismemberment of everything his family had held for three hundred years. They would sell Pemberley properly. They would not cheat him on the corpse. And he was expected to be grateful.

That was what he got for refusing to trade on Marchwood's name.

It was the one card that might have changed the game, and that Marchwood almost certainly believed he would play it. If he had only said it — “The Earl of Marchwood takes an interest in my affairs,” these same cautious men might have found the claim persuasive after all. Even Matlock’s name would not have done what Marchwood’s might have. But he would not buy Pemberley with a lie, would not let these men lend him money on the strength of a marriage he had already refused. He would lose the house first. He rather thought he was going to.

He came up his own steps still shaking with it, and came into a hall that was, unaccountably, full of boxes.

For a moment he could not make sense of it — maids and a manservant going up and down the stairs with corded trunks and bandboxes and a wrapped harp — and there, on the stairs, in the middle of the chaos of her own homecoming, was Georgiana — flushed and bright and glad, directing the disposal her things. She saw him and abandoned the hatbox at once, and came down to him with her face lit up.

“Fitzwilliam! You did not say I might come today. Aunt only decided it this morning, and I could not wait to send word, I simply came. Is it not the best thing? I am home! We are both home.” And then, seeing his face, some of the light in hers faltered. “Oh. You are tired. Was your morning very dreadful? You look…”

“It was a long morning of business, but never mind that now. Let me look at you. You have taken your old room, I hope? It has the best light.”

She had, and she told him so, and a great deal else besides, following him into the library still talking — how she had asked Mrs Hodges to make his favourite for supper, and Aunt's messages, and how she meant to arrange her music. And once the door closed, she cornered him behind his desk and leaned over it.

“And Fitzwilliam, now that I am here, and settled, and it is all so much easier to ask you about it, when may I meet Elizabeth? You said soon. It has been four days, and I have been so good, I have not breathed a word to a soul, not even to Aunt when she asked why I smiled so. surely it might be soon now. Might I not go to her? Or she come here? I should not mind Cheapside in the least, whatever Aunt says of it —”

He wanted, with a sudden ferocity, to say yes. To send her that very hour — to put his glad, generous, secret-keeping sister into a carriage and send her east to Gracechurch Street and let the two people he loved best in the world finally know each other. He very nearly did it.

But not today. Not with Lombard Street still white on his face, not with Georgiana carrying word of that expression back to Elizabeth. He had rather have something cheerful to send, if it was to be Georgie passing it on. Bad news had to come from himself, by his own hand in his daily note.

“Soon,” he said, and touched her cheek. “I promise you, soon — sooner than you think. But not quite yet, dearest. There are one or two things I must see to first. Trust me a little longer.”

She pulled a face, and she let him go with only a sigh and a “You always say soon,” thrown after him.

He went up to his room to write to Elizabeth — a few lines, all their careful arrangement allowed, but he had not yet missed a night and did not mean to start. He sat with the pen a long moment, and thought about what to tell her, and how much, and how little, of a morning that had shown him the edge of the cliff at last with his own name written on the far side of it.

Darcy's note came at the usual hour. Elizabeth took it up to her room to read, as she did every evening, and had come, in these few short days, to live for.

This one was different to the others. It was longer, and his hand was not quite his hand — a little hurried, a little pressed, the letters not so even and angular as he liked to make them. She sat on the edge of the bed and read it, and felt the ground she had been standing on give a slow, sickening tilt beneath her.

He had been to the bank, he wrote. He had meant to spare her the particulars of his business, but they had reckoned everything together for so long that it felt a kind of falsehood to keep silent. He begged her not to be alarmed, but the meeting had not gone as he had hoped. The men there had been civil, and had looked at everything he brought them, all that they had bled for on the road, and had told him, with great courtesy, that it was not enough. That the thing she had wrung out of a clerk’s pile of forgotten papers with her own two hands was interesting to them, and encouraging, but worth precisely nothing as security. He did not, he wrote, yet see his way clear. He would find another way. There were always more options, and she was not to lie awake over it. But he would not pretend that the day had gone well, because it had not.

If she had been there, in his arms to comfort him rather than across town in secret, she might have held him. Might have felt the strong assurance in his embrace, returned the smile and self-deprecating laugh and loved him until they had both gone senseless for the night. But she would have also felt the faint tremor in his muscles, the one he had never been able to hide from her. The one that told her he was frightened, and that he could not find a path through or over or around, though he would very much like her to believe he could.

He could have used Marchwood’s name. She knew he had gone to see the earl, and that there remained some interest there. But he had not, it seemed, employed that leverage where he might have. And he had come away with his hands empty.