Harrowe’s gaze narrowed. “And substituted.”
Darcy met his eyes. “Yes.”
Matlock folded his hands behind his back. “Lady Catherine would have compelled you to a church in Kent.”
“And I,” Harrowe said dryly, “would have compelled him to a ditch in Hertfordshire.”
Darcy allowed himself the faintest curve of a smile. “And both would have been wrong.”
“The thread was real,” Matlock said, returning to the map. “It ran between the counties. That much none of us misread. But not as a boundary. As a path.”
Darcy saw again the hawthorn rising in the hedgerows, the narrow lanes hemming them in, the sense—not of pursuit—but of direction. The dog’s certainty. The way each fork had resolved without signpost or guide.
Matlock regarded him for a long moment. “And the moment you…” he cleared his throat and glanced uncomfortably at Harrowe. “Well, when you… expired… tell me more.”
“The thorns withdrew,” Darcy replied. “That is all I know.”
“Because you placed yourself in her stead,” Harrowe grunted. “Not as ritual. Not as lineage. As substitution.”
Darcy met his gaze without flinching. “I choseher.”
“And you knew,” Matlock returned. “Youbelievedyou would die, even before you chose.”
“Yes.”
“And yet you did not.”
Darcy’s hand moved unconsciously to his throat, to the place where the thorns had closed with patient inevitability. The skin there was unbroken now. The memory was not.
“Something in me did,” he said quietly.
He understood it now with a clarity that had eluded him even as the branches tightened. The certainty that stewardship required command. The belief that duty was a solitary burden. The conviction that love must be measured against consequence.
Those things had not survived.
Harrowe looked up from the map. There was no triumph in his expression. Only the exhaustion of a man who has watched the scaffolding of his life’s work collapse and discovered, to his irritation, that something better stands in its place. “You’re the luckiest bastard, Darcy.”
Matlock’s mouth twitched faintly. “And you, Mr Harrowe, will require a new occupation.”
“I do believe so.”
A discreet knock interrupted them. Darcy turned. “Enter.”
It was Barlow, his London man of business, flushed from haste and still holding a folded sheaf of damp broadsheets beneath his arm.
“Forgive the intrusion, sir. Oh, excuse me, Your Lordship.” He bowed to Matlock. “I know it is most irregular, sir, but I had to come at once. There are… reports.”
Matlock arched a brow. “From the War Office?”
“From everywhere, my lord,” the man replied, clearly uncertain whether he brought good news or madness. He extended one of the sheets to Darcy. “The afternoon edition. It will surely impact your estate and investments. I thought to bring you the earliest word.”
Darcy unfolded it. The headline was not triumphant—London printers did not dare such language yet—but it was changed. Matlock stepped nearer. “Read it.”
Darcy did.
“‘In Suffolk, a warehouse condemned three days past for rot and blackening was reopened this morning at the insistence of the owner. The grain within, previously deemed unfit, is reported dry and whole. Similar accounts have arrived from Kent and Middlesex.’”
Harrowe let out a low sound that was neither laughter nor disbelief. “Kent as well, eh?”
