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“I assume her husband finds that inconvenient?”

“You met the man. Will he oppose Darcy?”

That was interesting. Right under the old bat’s nose! Maybe Darcy was growing up, but he was still only one man, and he would keep that sort of thing quiet as a mouse… not wanting to endanger precious Georgiana’s reputation.

He took a breath and stared at me hard. “Do you know the parsonage?”

So, the trout wanted the bait. Time to set the hook.

“I know it well. I spent many summers there, and the last parson had an accommodating daughter. I know it intimately.”

The man looked me over carefully for a long time, then finally blew out a deep breath. “Can you get into the parsonage and back out without being seen? That is what I have been waiting for. The place will be surrounded, and I cannot afford to be caught.”

“It could be done. When?”

“Saturday week.”

And with that, the chucklehead walked right into my trap. Oh, we would go to Kent together all right… in his carriage, if he still had one. We would go into the parsonage together. We would collect some money or some blood from Darcy; I would take either. He had very good horseflesh, so with my intimate knowledge of the stables at Rosings and the surrounding countryside from many a tryst, I could get away with one or two horses clean.

Only one of us would leave the parsonage for the greener pastures of Scotland.

Plaster

Colonel Fitzwilliam

I must admit I was having a most difficult time making a momentous decision. It is a choice which will no doubt be passed to grandchildren as accumulated wisdom, and must be made most carefully. My conundrum is that I could not decide which thing I liked more.

The first candidate was the look of my cousin’s fist, ragged, bloody, and bruised. While a truly worthy cousin would never take pleasure in another’s pain, I must confess I have never pretended to be a good cousin.

The second candidate was the wall in Pemberley, where said fist was now entombed. Granted, it had already been damaged by water before we arrived, so it is not as if he was punching through stone. A little rotten plaster and lath was hardly even worth mentioning. In a battle, it would not have served as cover against an army of mice, let alone the French.

The third was the look of absolute joy, excitement, consternation, probably love (but who am I to say?), and burning, explosive frustration, with the word spit out like an expletive. “EASTER!”

That probably would have been the favourite, if I had not pumped the bellows on the forge just a bit with my comment. “Trust your sisters, cousin!”

The look then contained no love… but a great deal of frustration. At long last, he apparently decided that, even with the poor condition of the plaster, he had no need to abuse his hand again by hitting me… though I could see it was a well-thought-out decision that could have gone either way.

I finally took pity on the poor man. “Darce, Easter is just five weeks away. We have travel time, so she is really only asking you to wait three weeks, and you could not possibly leave for ten days or more anyway, so at most she has delayed you a fortnight. It will not kill you. She probably wants to be strong enough to oppose whatever mad scheme you plan to throw at her when we arrive.”

The man finally calmed. “She banned me from Rosings!”

“I gathered that.”

He chuckled. “The roads are very bad anyway. We should leave early enough to ensure our safe arrival. It would not do to have an accident or be late for Easter services.”

“You are the most conscientious of masters. I applaud your good sense.”

His face split into a grin, having apparently come up with some probably bad idea that I was certain we were about to implement. He had thrown money and workmen at Pemberley like a madman since our arrival, and even hired three temporary overseers to help the steward. There was not really anything keeping us here except Elizabeth’s instruction after about another week or so.

He finally looked at the letter again. “She did not ban us from the parsonage!”

HO-HO! This was the Master of Pemberley once again, working his magic.

I can tell you this. With an injured leg and an overexcited cousin, it is not a great idea to cram ten years of instruction in estate management into ten days, but Darcy did his best to teach; and I did my best to learn. I imagined my Charlotte probably knew more about it than Darcy did anyway, but thought I should do my best. Ten days seems like a year if your life is just waiting to start, and if you spend half of it on a horse with your leg aching abominably, and half sitting your arse on a chair, both of which involved an endless stream of instructions from my cousin, it can in fact seem like ten years.

Our departure date arrived at long last. We had personally chosen the design for all the new cottages. Darcy showed me how to get the best information about any part of the estate from the people who worked it day in and day out, year after year. The tenants were not a well-educated lot, but they did have good ideas from time to time. For example, we hired a dozen men to dig a drainage ditch for one of the overflowing streams, which would have saved the cottage had it been done a year sooner. Many of the wives had suggestions about the layout of the kitchens; Darcy listened patiently to all and implemented those that made sense. In some cases, he overrode them because they were asking for what they thought they could get, while he was more generous than they expected. Some of the cottages were moved to higher or lower ground as appropriate. Many wells and barns were not in the best condition, so we sent men to repair them. Darcy explained that a break like this was a good time to remedy all the accumulated problems that never seemed important enough to fix or even notice during a normal year.

He also gave an excellent and extended lesson in how to be a master: How to talk to your tenants with the right level of respect; when to bounce a child on the knee or send him back to his mother; when a young boy could be treated as slightly more than he was, and when the opposite was required. I was astounded that, here in his own world, Darcy was an entirely different man from the one he was wandering through the first circles with a target on his back. If Elizabeth had met him at Pemberley, he would not be in danger of having lost her love; and I suspect there was no chance she would have let him get away either.