Page 155 of Homeless

“Uncle…” Elizabeth began, colouring.

“No, no, I am not done.” He held up a hand, and his eyes were bright now, wicked with delight. “For I will tell you what I remember, Mr Darcy, since we are all being so free with the truth this evening. I remember a gaol in Tudela. I remember fretting and worrying over what was to become of my niece after I had been taken, and then there she was, escorted in like the queen of the place on your arm. And I remember, sir, that you explained to me, very gravely, very correctly, that you had undertaken the duty for her protection. As a matter of survival and expedience and nothing more. You gave me your word — I have it yet, word for word, a man remembers what is said to him in a place like that — you gave me your word that it was a practical arrangement only, that she was safe, that she would come to no harm by it, and that she would not, on any account —” he paused, and looked, with enormous deliberation, from Darcy's crimson face to Elizabeth's, and back — “be compromised.”

Darcy coughed.

“I congratulate you, sir,” said Edward Gardiner, “on your admirable restraint.”

The Making of Me

They came into Derbyshire a fortnight before Christmas, in a cold so clean and hard it made the whole world ring. Elizabeth was holding Darcy’s hand in the carriage, looking out at the white hills and thought that she had never in her life seen anything so beautiful, because this one was hers.

The carriage slowed where the road forked, and Darcy leaned across her to look out. “There is a choice to be made,” he said, “and I will not make it for you, because you have all suffered enough of my managing for one journey. The short road goes straight up to the house, and there is a fire, and hot things to drink, and you may all be indoors and thawed within the quarter hour. But the long road goes round by the valley. It is a mile further, and it is colder, and the carriage is not so warm as the house will be. But it goes along the river, and past the low meadows, and there is a place where the whole of it opens out all at once, and… and I should like you all to see it, even before you see the house. But you have been three days on the road, and you are none of you obliged to indulge me. Are you too cold? Or too impatient to be at the fire?”

“Fitzwilliam.” Elizabeth squeezed his hand. “We did not come all this way to be hurried indoors and miss the whole reason for coming. Take the long road.”

Her aunt, muffled to the eyes across the carriage, said that she had grown up five miles from this very valley and would think it a poor sort of homecoming that did not go the long way round; and her uncle said that a man who had spent a summer in a Spanish gaol was not going to be put off a river by a little cold, and that Darcy might drive them round twice if he liked. So the choice was made, and Darcy rapped the roof and gave the direction.

It opened, as he had promised, all at once.

The road came round the shoulder of a hill and the bare trees fell away. There below them lay the whole valley, white and still and shining under the low winter sun — the great sweep of the park running down to the water, the meadows under snow, the woods black-branched and rimed with frost, and through the heart of it the river, frozen at its edges into lace and running dark and quick down the middle, curving away between its white banks toward the distant grey shape of the house. She had not been prepared for the scale of it. She had known Pemberley was great; she had not known it was this, this reach of country, this whole cradled valley lying open under the snow with the river threaded down its length like a signature.

“Oh,” she said, and could say nothing else, and felt Darcy's hand tighten on hers.

“That is the Derwent,” he said, as the carriage rolled slowly along above the water. “Or a good stretch of it. It rises above us, in the high country, and comes down through here, and goes on —” he lifted his free hand, pointing down the valley, southward, to where the land folded away toward a line of far blue hills — “on down there, past our land, to the mills. Cromford is beyond those hills, and Belper below it, and a dozen more, all of them turning on water that runs first through this valley. Our valley.” He raised Elizabeth’s gloved hand to kiss the back of it. “It is a strange thing, to look at a river and know that half the fortunes in the north depend on where it may be drawn. I had spent my whole life not thinking of it as anything but the river I fished in as a boy. It took very nearly losing the whole of it to teach me what I was standing on.”

“And beyond those hills,” Gardiner said, leaning to look where Darcy pointed, “is where his lordship's works stand, I take it.”

“Marchwood's mills, yes. On the far side, on the Amber and the lower water — good sites, but nothing to the sites up here, which is rather the whole of the difficulty, from his lordship's point of view.”

“And now?” Gardiner's eyes had sharpened. “Now that you are, as I understand it, sitting on a Spanish wool concession the like of which he has been trying to build for himself these five years — now that you have the raw material and the water it wants processing on — what does his lordship say to that?”

“His lordship,” said Darcy, “has become remarkably civil.”

Gardiner laughed. “I'll wager he has. I'll wager he was on your doorstep within the month, hat in hand, proposing a partnership.”

“Within the fortnight. And not hat in hand — he is not a man who does anything hat in hand — but with a very handsome and very detailed proposal for the joint working of the merino, which I have not yet accepted and do not mean to accept until I have had it looked over by a man who knows the wool trade to the last penny.” Darcy inclined his head to Gardiner, with grave courtesy and a glint under it. “I had hoped, sir, that such a man might be found within the family. If he could be persuaded to winter in Derbyshire, and look at a great many tedious papers, and tell me exactly how badly the Earl of Marchwood is attempting to fleece his new associate…”

“Fleece,” chuckled Gardiner. “In a wool partnership. I see marriage has not damaged your wit, sir, whatever it has done to your judgment.”

“My wit has rather been sharpened in self defence, sir for I have daily need of it. As to my judgment, one of the finest things I have ever learnt is to take advice and management from those cleverer than myself. If you would be inclined to offer your expertise, then I should count the whole business very well begun. There is the matter of the leats above the second weir, which he wants rebuilt at shared cost but on my land, which I need not tell you is a thing to be examined closely. There is also the question of whether the concession is best worked as raw export or scoured here and spun in his sheds, which touches on carriage and duty and a dozen things I only half understand; and the terms of the —”

“The terms of the drawing-off rights,” Gardiner said, “which is where he will try to bury you, mark me, because a man who has wanted your water for five years will not settle for a share of your wool if he can get a claim on your river written into the same contract, and you must have that clause out, sir, root and branch, whatever it costs you elsewhere, or you will wake in ten years to find you have sold him by inches the very thing you refused to sell him whole —”

“Which is exactly why I would not sign a word of it without you,” Darcy said, with real satisfaction, and the two of them were off — leats and weirs and drawing-off rights and scouring sheds and carriage costs and the iniquities of the Earl of Marchwood, back and forth across the carriage over Elizabeth's head.

“Stop,” she said at last, laughing, pressing her gloved hands to her cheeks. “Stop, both of you, I beg you — I cannot bear it — we have come all this way to see the loveliest valley in England at Christmas time, with the river frozen and the whole world white, and you are ruining it entirely with carriage costs and scouring sheds. Fitzwilliam, I forbid the word weir to be spoken again until we are indoors. Uncle, not one more leat. Look at it! Only look at it, the pair of you, and be quiet, and let it be beautiful for one single minute before you go back to fleecing each other.”

“Hah! She is right, Darcy” said Gardiner. “She generally is. It is her most trying quality.”

“It is,” Darcy agreed. He drew her hand under his arm, and turned with her to look out at the valley as the carriage rolled slowly on above the shining river. For a while, none of them said anything at all, and the only sound was the muffled hush of hooves and the jingle of harness bells. Somewhere below, beyond sight and hearing, the water ran under its winter coat on down the valley, carrying the whole prospering future of the house of Darcy down through the white and silent hills.

He had thought, once, that he would never see this house again.

Through the fires and the hot negus and Georgiana flushed and radiant playing carols at the instrument, through the settling of the Gardiners into the best guest rooms and the children asleep at last, and the house gone quiet around them at midnight, Darcy’s greatest triumph was the simple staggering fact that he was here, in his own house, and showing it to Elizabeth for the first time. He had walked the corridors that evening touching things. He had not meant to; he had caught himself at it, his hand on a banister, on a doorframe, on the cold marble of the hall. Pemberley. His. Hers. Theirs.

And now it was very late, and the house slept while he stood in the doorway of the mistress's chambers with a branch of candles in his hand, waiting for his wife.

He had had the rooms opened. That much she knew — she could hardly not know, since he had been unable to keep from telling her, at dinner, that they were aired and warmed and ready. She had laughed at his transparency and told him, as she had been telling him for weeks, that she wanted nothing whatever to do with a separate suite of rooms, that she had shared a blanket with him through fever and rats and more than one night sleeping rough under the stars, and did not intend to be exiled to her own wing now that they were respectable. She said that he might do what he liked with the mistress's chambers, but he need not expect to find her sleeping in them. He had not argued. He had only had the rooms opened, and warmed, and made one particular arrangement.