Matlock laced his fingers over his waistcoat and tapped his thumbs together, a habit Darcy remembered from childhood, employed only when his uncle was displeased with himself. “Thereareothers,” he said. “Later transcripts. Excerpts. A few copies made in the last two centuries, once antiquarian interest took hold. As to this—” He hesitated. “Ibelievethis particular copy has been in the family for as long as we have known to keep it. That is all I can say with confidence.”
“You are not certain?”
Matlock cleared his throat. “I ought to be.”
“Why would you be in doubt?”
“Well, er… when my sister Catherine married Sir Lewis, she believed the book might follow her as a matter of right. Not merely as property, but as inheritance. I had to go to Kent myself, in person, to restore it to the family library where it belonged.”
Darcy’s hand stilled on the page. “Shetookit? On what grounds?”
“She believed,” Matlock said, choosing each word with care, “that the line which mattered, the one through which the families would converge once more, would pass throughher,as the eldest. That Anne’s marriage to your father had altered the course improperly, and that she might yet correct it.”
Darcy leaned forward slightly. “By marrying Sir Lewis. Oh, yes, she has some idea about Kent, does she not? Even I have heard that bedtime story—could hardly fail to. So, this is where that comes into the matter.”
“Indeed,” Matlock grunted. “By her reading, at least, the Lady would arise in Kent.”
“Ah. I suppose she thinks thatAnneis this person? It begins to make sense now, why she thinks Anne and I are destined.”
His uncle offered an unhappy scowl as he shifted in his chair until it creaked. “Your father may have thought to protect you, Darcy, but in not revealing any of this to you, he has done you a wretched disservice. Yes, I fear you have judged it rightly. My sister has… expectations of you.”
“Oh, yes, she has made them plain enough, but I never understood what that expectation rests upon. What gives her the impression… nay, the certainty, however misguided, that she has wedged her way into the matter and has the right to make such demands?”
“You would know that already if…” His uncle sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Never mind. She married Sir Lewis for his land—his location, more exactly.”
Darcy’s eyes narrowed. “If my aunt believed Sir Lewis’s lands answered to it, then the proof must be here. But I have seen no such proof, and indeed, perhaps evidence to the contrary.”
“Evidence to the contrary?” Matlock observed mildly. “That is not the phrase of a man speaking in hypothesis.”
Darcy did not answer at once. His gaze had drifted from the page to the window, where the afternoon light lay pale and uncommitted upon the glass.
“I mean only,” he said at last, carefully, “that Kent has produced no… disturbance commensurate with the expectation my aunt insists upon.”
Matlock’s brow lifted. “And elsewhere?”
Darcy’s jaw set. He reached for the edge of the table, not for support, but as if to anchor the thought before it ran too far ahead of him.
The names tingled on his tongue—Elizabeth.Hertfordshire. The hedgerow still laden with roses, the split in the ground that followed no waterway, the many unexplainable things… but he did not speak it.
Not without knowing what it would cost to say it aloud.
“Surely there are places my aunt has never thought to examine,” he replied instead. “And evidences she would not recognise as proof even if they were laid before her.”
Matlock studied him now, openly. There was no triumph in his expression, no alarm—only a slow, dawning interest.
“So,” he said, after a moment, “you are not disputing the premise.”
“No,” Darcy said. “Only the conclusion.”
“Hmm.” Matlock reached for the book again and opened it, turning several leaves with care. “Here is your answer,” he said at last, pointing out a passage midway down the page. “And again, farther on.”
Darcy bent to read. The place-names were there, rendered in a hand older than the marginal text, their forms faded, their spelling irregular. He traced the line slowly, following where a later correction had been worked into the margin, the ink darker, the script more certain.
“This,” Darcy said slowly, “may be read asCantium. The old Roman name for…”
He did not sayKentat once. The word sat uneasily beneath his eye, its letters cramped and uneven, thetnearly lost where the ink had faded.
Matlock leaned closer. “OrCantiacum,” he said. “The hand is inconsistent. One could argue the scribe meant the Roman province entire, rather than the people.”
