“This is the book?”
Darcy inclined his head as he passed theLiberinto Harrowe’s thick hands. “I brought it to the Museum Library today because I hoped to compare it with whatever I might find.”
Harrowe’s mouth curved—not in amusement, but in something like awe. “I’ve spent half my life tryin’ to prove that book existed,” he said quietly. “An’ you walk in with it under your arm.”
“It has not proved especially obliging,” Darcy said. “Nor has my family.”
“No,” Harrowe agreed. “I wonder if that aunt of yours can be quite sane.”
Darcy scoffed and shook his head. “She would have you believe she is the only one who is. And according to my uncle, she has another copy, though potentially bearing certain different wordings in crucial passages.”
Harrowe nearly dropped theLiber. “She never does! Where did she find that?”
Darcy shook his head. “She would never tell me if I bothered to ask, which I shall not. Look here, what can you tell me about… well, about anything?”
Harrowe scratched his chin. “I’d have to read it. Study it.”
“You maykeepthe bloody thing as far as I am concerned, if you are willing to help disseminate its meaning.”
Harrowe weighed it in his hands instead, as though its worth were not settled by its age alone. “Easy. Before I go puttin’ words in it, you tell me what it’s told you first.”
Darcy tipped what remained of the cold, bitter tea to his lips while he considered. “That it was not preserved so much for consequence… family pride, that sort of thing,” he said at last. “But for continuity. That the record avoids instruction by design—that it names presence without explaining its cost, though it does imply that thereisa cost.”
He paused, his gaze fixed somewhere beyond the table. “And that the failure was not absence,” he added. “It was attachment. Something was held when it ought to have been released—and what endured afterward was not meant to.”
Harrowe shook his head slowly. “An act not finished. A thing clutched too long.”
He turned theLiberonce in his hands, as though aligning it with something he could not quite see. “But that’s only half the fault.”
Darcy looked up. “How do you…?”
Harrowe did not look down at the book as he spoke. His gaze had drifted instead to nothing in particular, as though the thought had found him from elsewhere and only now required words.
“There’s another sort o’ absence turns up in records like this,” he said, slow and careful. “Don’t always get named. Sometimes not at all. It ain’t just what was kept that ought to’ve been let go—there’s what wasn’t kept neither.” He paused, as if testing the thought against something older than the ink before him.
“Somethin’ that should’ve been kept watch on. A vow, I’d wager. I’ve seen that silence before. Different records. Different ink. Same piece left out.” He closed theLiberwith care and set it flat upon the table, then pushed back his chair and rose. Crossing the room with a heavy, deliberate tread, he reached for a shelf set higher than the rest. His fingers closed around a slim, time-softened volume bound in faded calf.
“The Ballads,” he said, bringing it down between them. “My ancestor’s work. They laughed him near out o’ London for printin’ ’em. Said it were country doggerel. Claimed he’d taken rhyme for revelation.”
Darcy watched him lay the book open. “I know the verses. I read them as a boy.”
Harrowe looked up sharply. “Did you, now?”
“Often,” Darcy replied. “Then, I liked the lyrical quality of them. But of late…” He rubbed his eyes. “I regret to say that they haunt my nightmares.”
Harrowe grunted. “Then you’ve read this one.” He turned the page with care and tapped a finger against the margin. “Read it again.”
Darcy leaned forward despite himself. The lines were familiar—too familiar. He could have spoken them from memory if pressed.
He stood where water meets with land,
And sware no troth unbound;
Yet held his handwhere first it lay,
And so the bound unwound.
“I have always taken it for lament,” Darcy said. “A moralizing flourish.”
