“You did not come here merely to speak of grain,” he said.
Darcy met his gaze without evasion. “No.”
Matlock swallowed. “I see.”
“I want to see it,” Darcy said. “Urgently. I know you have it.”
Matlock did not ask what he meant. He paled, drew a shaken breath, and heaved it out slowly. “I suppose there is no more putting it off.”
Then, with a grim set to his shoulders, he crossed to a cabinet set into the panelling. The key came from his pocket, not his watch-chain, which told Darcy more than any explanation might have done.
When he returned, the book lay cradled in both his hands, wrapped in a length of linen that had long since lost any pretence of cleanliness. The cloth was worn thin at the folds and darkened where fingers had handled it again and again, as though the act of uncovering it had become habitual long before it became reluctant.
Beneath it, the volume itself was plainly bound in cloth, faded to a colour that might once have been blue or green, the spine rubbed soft by age and use. It looked less like a relic than a thing that had survived by being consulted and put away, consulted again, and never fully set aside.
Darcy’s eyes went to the cover at once, trying to make out the faded title.
“TheLiber de Terris et Finibus.‘The Book of Lands and Boundaries.’ Said to have been first written in the eleventh or twelfth century. Who knows how old this copy is, but it was never intended for hurried reading,” Matlock said, offering it. “It is not a narrative. It offers no patience to those who seek one.”
Darcy accepted the volume and turned it in his hands, feeling the give of the cloth beneath his fingers, the unevenness of the boards, the way the spine resisted being flattened, as though it had learned to close itself against too much attention.
“You will find what you are looking for before the middle,” Matlock said, his thumb resting against the linen where the page beneath lay marked by a faint crease. “There is a place where the hand changes. The Reverend Harrowe is said to have spent so much time with that page open that the book would never close properly again.”
Darcy glanced up. “Harrowe himself?”
Matlock lifted a shoulder. “Well! It strains credulity a bit. Thismighthave been the very copy he referenced. Although… well. Less said on that for now, the better, I suppose.”
Darcy lowered his gaze again. “I should like to keep it,” he said quietly. It was not a request for which he would accept refusal. “For a short time.”
Matlock did not answer at once. He moved away instead, crossing to the window and standing there with his back to the room, his hands clasped behind him as though the posture might steady something internal.
“I wondered how long it would take you to say that.”
Darcy looked up. “You object?”
“No.” Matlock’s voice roughened a little on the word. “I would object only if you skimmed it, or if you believed it would explain itself readily. The book is not dangerous because of what it contains.” He paused. “It is dangerous because of what it refuses to do for the reader.”
Darcy closed the cover, careful, deliberate. “Then I will take the time it demands.”
Matlock turned back at last. There was something like resignation in his look, tempered by a grim affection. “If you make sense of it,” he said slowly, “if you truly understand what is being described and not merely what is written, then you are a better man than I ever managed to be.”
Darcy frowned. “You have read it.”
Matlock gave a short, humourless breath. “More than once. Enough to know where I lost my footing.” His gaze rested on the book in Darcy’s hands. “Read it where there is quiet, and no one to interrupt you with sensible objections. But understand this, Fitzwilliam—what you find there will not ask whether you wish to know it.”
Darcy inclined his head. “I have not found that knowledge ever does.”
Darcy bent again overthe table, the lamp drawn closer, its flame trimmed down to a steady core of light. He had not intended to be up so late. He had not intended to pull half the shelves bare. And yet the study now bore the marks of a mind unravelling, writhing with truths it did not like, and unwilling to be contradicted: books stacked open on the floor, others laid face-down across chairs, slips of paper marking places he meant to return to and could not afford to lose.
He found the crease in theLiberwithout difficulty. The book opened to it as though taught. The page itself bore the history of that habit—worn thin at the fold, darkened where fingers had lingered, the margin softened beyond what time alone might have accomplished. The hand here was not uniform. The script shifted from careful to compressed, from authority to urgency, as though the act of recording had become more difficult the longer it continued.
The text had changed its purpose. Earlier pages marked and referenced. This one concerned itself instead with relation.
From þe þorn hegge set afore þe ford,
þe saide erthe is holden in perpetuite,
neyther demesne nor waste,
