Harrowe froze, irritation flashing across his face. “Darcy—”
“Bingley,” Darcy said, turning deliberately away from him. “My apologies for Mr Harrowe. If you would excuse us for a moment?”
Bingley hesitated. His gaze moved from Darcy to Harrowe and back again, curiosity warring openly with restraint. “If you are certain.”
“I am. Thank you.”
Bingley inclined his head and went to the door, pausing only long enough to give Darcy a searching look before stepping into the corridor beyond.
Darcy closed the door behind him and turned back to Harrowe. “Now,” he said, “you may speak.”
Harrowe reached into the satchel with a decisiveness that bordered on reverence, drawing out a slim volume wrapped in oilskin so worn it looked more like habit than precaution. The cover beneath was dark, the leather cracked and rubbed smooth at the corners, the title stamped so faintly it had to be caught at an angle to be read at all.
“I was reading the Ballads last night,” Harrowe said. “When it come on. The jolt. I felt it through the floorboards.” He glanced up. “Would’ve come straight to you—but there was somethin’ I needed to see first.”
Darcy’s gaze had fixed on the book. A pressure gathered behind his eyes that had nothing to do with fatigue. “Put that away.”
Harrowe’s brows lifted. “You’ll want to see this.”
“I wish to know,” Darcy said, sharply now, “how you came by it. I was told books of that age could not even be removed from the Archives.”
Harrowe paused, then smiled—not sheepishly, but with a small, private satisfaction. He reached back into the satchel, this time fumbling a bit for a pocket sewn into the side,and withdrew a folded sheet of parchment, yellowed with age but unmistakable in its authority. He laid it out carefully beside the book.
Darcy leaned forward despite himself. The seal was real. The wording archaic, formal. The dates…egad.
“You cannot be serious,” Darcy breathed.
“I am,” Harrowe replied. “Entirely.”
Darcy stared at the writ, then at him. “This grants your family complete access to restricted collections—indefinitely?”
“Correct.”
“Acrossgenerations?”
“Aye.”
Darcy straightened slowly. “On what grounds?”
Harrowe’s expression sobered. “On the grounds that what was writ there was not to be lost. Nor to drift loose among those as couldn’t tell record from rhyme. On the grounds that it was true.”
Darcy exhaled once. “And the Crown agreed to such an arrangement?”
“The Crown,” Harrowe said evenly, “requiredit.”
Darcy’s gaze fell to the page again. There were three dated signatures, and the top date was1605.The same year the Ballads were first printed.
Darcy’s jaw dropped. “Then it was granted under James I.”
“Oh, aye. James had a taste for antiquities,” he said. “Lineage. Boundaries. What gave a kingdom its shape. He gave my forebear leave to examine parish rolls and monastic copies—quiet-like. Mind what I told you, he claimed to be descended from Sir Gareth? ‘Twere a touch of the left hand about it,” he chuckled. “No parson stood over that cradle, but James, he were proud of it all the same. Said such matters of inheritance were not to be neglected.”
Darcy absorbed that. “And the later dates?” His finger moved to the last one, 1769.
Harrowe’s mouth thinned. “That was His present Majesty. Reaffirmed it, he did, and a good thing, too. My old man were turned away from the Archive one day, and His Majesty would have none of it.”
Darcy hesitated. “You will forgive me if I find that difficult to reconcile with… the reports of his condition.”
Harrowe went very still. Then, very quietly, he murmured, “No. I won’t.”
