Darcy straightened. “You speak as though the matter were already decided.”
“I speak,” Matlock replied, “as one who has been listening where you have not been permitted to go. I have been at the War Office. I have spoken with men who do not indulge rumour, and who have no patience for metaphor. What you call disturbance, they call collapse. Supplies have not merely been delayed; they have failed. Roads have given way where no flood preceded them. Grain has spoiled in sealed stores. Ships have run aground in fair conditions. This is not a season’s inconvenience.”
Darcy felt a chill that had nothing to do with the fire behind him. “And… the war? Richard?”
“Richard’s last dispatch was already strained. The confidence of it rang false—too carefully shaped, too intent on reassurance. Since then, there has been nothing. And silence, at this juncture, is never neutral.”
Darcy drew a breath that did not seem to reach his lungs. “Then youbelieve—”
“I believe,” Matlock said, cutting him off, “that engagements we expected to hold have failed. Our infantry is losing ground. Not through incompetence or cowardice, but through attrition that no general can command. Roads washed out beneath supply wagons. Rivers swollen past their crossings. Men arriving to battle without boots because the stores never reached them. Blankets lost. Powder spoiled. Need I go on?”
He leaned forward slightly, and the controlled restraint of his manner only sharpened the force of what he said next. “There are regiments sleeping in the open, Darcy, because tents could not be raised on ground that froze solid beneath the stakes. There are wounded men who could not be moved because the tracks behind them were washed out by flash flooding in the night. And Napoleon—damn him—does not need to win cleanly when the land itself is doing his work.”
Darcy felt something cold and inexorable settle in his chest.
“This is not rumour,” Matlock continued. “This is not a matter of interpretation. The War Office is already scrambling to disguise losses we were certain would not occur. Parliament fears panic because they fear the truth. The public has not yet named what it feels, but it will. And when it does, it will not speak gently.”
He held Darcy’s gaze. “Whatever has been left unanswered has begun to demand payment at scale. And it is not content to take it from one house, or one county, or one woman.”
Darcy’s thoughts flew, already reaching for paper and ink, for names and distances. “If I write to Mr Bennet—if I learn whether Miss Elizabeth’s condition alters with removal—”
“You will learn nothing that matters. Or rather, you will learn it too late.”
Darcy’s face fell from hope to frustration. “You cannot know that.”
“I know this,” Matlock replied. “Whatever balance existed depended upon proximity, not distance. You yourself told me that her condition did not improve in isolation, only in relation. You are not observing an illness that may be cured by rest. You are observing a force that has been displaced.”
Darcy felt Harrowe’s presence behind him like a held breath, but he did not look away from his uncle. “Then you would have me act blindly.”
“I would have you act decisively,” Matlock said. “You have spent months seeking to be certain before you moved. That caution may have been wisdom once. It is now indulgence.”
“And if the cost is hers?”
“Then you must determine whether refusing the cost spares her, or merely postpones a greater one. I will not dress it more kindly than that. At this point,” Matlock continued, more quietly, “you are no longer choosing between competing theories. You are choosing whether to answer what has already begun. The country will not wait. The land will not wait. And if you do not act, others will suffer for it—most of all the woman you are trying so desperately to protect.”
Darcy closed his eyes for a brief instant, not in surrender, but in reckoning. When he opened them again, the path before him felt brutally clear.
“No more delay,” Matlock said. “Tell me what you will do.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
The morning had beguntoo quietly to feel honest.
Elizabeth sat near the window with her sewing laid aside—she no longer trusted herself with a needle. At present, she was watching the light slide across the floorboards as though nothing in the world had shifted its course. The sea lay beyond the houses in a broad, pewter sweep, its sound softened by distance and walls.
She had slept. She had eaten. Her head did not ache. Her limbs did not tremble. If she listened only to her body, she might have believed herself restored.
Yesterday, after all, had endedwell enough.
Mary had been married, as far as they knew. The hour had passed. The vows had been spoken. The world had not cracked open in church or swallowed the road beneath the carriage wheels. And Mary would be on her way to Kent by now.
There had been no cries, no fainting fits, no unseemly spectacle to force acknowledgement. Whatever had seized Elizabeth in that brief, terrible interval—whatever pressure had built until she could scarcely breathe—had loosened again. By evening, she had been declared merely fatigued. Overwrought. Excitable.
A wedding, her father had said mildly, was enough to try anyone’s nerves. And so, the matter had been allowed to rest.
Her father sat with a broadsheet folded idly upon his knee, his spectacles lowered as he watched Jane move about the room. Jane had insisted on setting the breakfast things to rights herself, though the landlady had offered twice. There was a quiet satisfaction in her movements, a gentleness born of relief. Elizabeth knew the look well. It was the look Jane wore when she believed danger past—when a thing hadnothappened loudly enough to require a reordering of daily affairs.
“You see,” her father said at last, glancing toward Elizabeth with a small, weary smile, “sea air and distance. I ought to have prescribed it years ago.”
