“Mr Easton,” he said to his valet, “we will leave after I have seen her ladyship. Will you pack and tell the coachman to ready the carriage?”
“We are not staying, sir?” Easton asked, surprised.
Darcy shook his head. He would never sleep in this house again. “And send someone to tell Mrs Collins that Miss Bennet is safe with her family in Gracechurch Street and to please send her belongings to town.”
As he entered the house and went directly to the drawing room Lady Catherine preferred, Darcy took close notice of every uselessly fine ornament, every chimney piece, every painting, and wondered how her ladyship’s finances had gone so wrong.
“My dear Darcy!” Lady Catherine cried upon seeing him.
To his great surprise, she put her arms around him as soon as the door was closed. She was not an affectionate woman, and her embraces had stopped even before he had grown up. Now she gripped him close. The hug reminded him of his own mother,and it almost made him change his mind about what he had to do.
She stepped back and held him at arm’s length, looking him up and down. “You are in good health? Perfectly well?”
He briefly considered if he would always wonder if the person walking up to him might try to harm him. “Perfectly well. Miss Bennet and I managed to escape.”
Her ladyship settled herself on her chair, once again with all the authority and arrogance one might expect from her. “Criminals! It is scandalous that criminals can abduct decent people from a respectable home. What has the world come to when people are not safe walking at Rosings Park?”
Darcy sighed to himself. He had known it was likely, but it still disappointed him that his aunt would deny the truth behind their abduction. “It was not a random attack,” he said in a low voice. “Miss Bennet was targeted because they assumed she was Anne, and I would not stand by and let them take her.”
“You cannot believe that.” Lady Catherine frowned. “You have the sense to not trust a word those criminals say. The important thing is that you and Miss Bennet are safe. Where is she? I suppose she wished to see Mrs Collins before she called on me.”
Darcy blinked once, slowly. He could not allow this wilful self-deception to continue. “Was it all lies, aunt? The cherry brandy, the smuggling scheme to exchange your mediocre brandy for fine French alcohol, bribing to get the certificates to ship your brandy within England?” He gave her a fierce look. “Cheating criminals to save a few guineas? Was that all lies?”
A muscle twitched next to his aunt’s mouth, but she was silent. That alone raised his suspicions.
“Be honest with me,” he said. “Please, be honest. After all I have suffered since Friday morning, I deserve the truth.”
She flinched. “The truth is, those men are criminals, and they have nothing at all to do with me.”
“Then I must tell you what happened. I was threatened with being shot and stabbed more times than I can count. The threat of my tongue being cut out particularly stands out in my mind. But that is nothing to what Miss Bennet endured.” He watched his aunt turn red in mortification. “Shall I lay out what they did to her, what I had to watch happen to her because I was powerless to stop it?” His voice shook, though he tried to hide it. “You should hear what they did to her and what they threatened to do, and all becauseyoucheated unscrupulous smugglers!”
Lady Catherine met his gaze but said nothing, and Darcy felt his temper snap. “She was threatened because they thought she was Anne! They wanted to torment her because Anne’s suffering would woundyou! Now, for the last time, be honest. You entered into a smuggling deal with Markle, did you not?”
“I did,” she said with all the confidence he expected from her.
“And then you cheated them. They lost their money and one of them went to prison, and they sought vengeance.”
“Cheated!” She drew back. “I did what was best. There was no reason to continue bribing for new shipping certificates for every load when the previous ones were always accepted. It was only one time they seized the shipment, and those smugglers should have been able to evade the excise men.”
Darcy scoffed. “You always think you know better than everyone else. Why? Why did you bargain with smugglers?”
She shifted in her seat and looked away. “There has been some mismanagement of Rosings’s funds, and I found a solution to restore us to profitability.”
“And who mismanaged them?” She was silent, but he already knew the answer. “Why did you never ask for help, or rely on a capable steward?”
Lady Catherine gave him the same look she did whenever he gave his opinion too freely. “I have managed Rosings since Sir Lewis died. Besides, once you marry Anne, it will not matter if I am behindhand. We shall more often be at Pemberley, and only need to keep up Rosings for your second son after he is grown.”
He ignored this as another suspicion returned to his mind. “Does Anne still have her fortune? She had twenty thousand pounds settled on her. Is that spent too?”
Her expression was all the answer he needed. He felt his anger rising for Anne’s sake, and for all that he and Elizabeth had suffered. “How did you reply to the ransom letter? Were you going to pay?”
“Good heavens, Darcy!” she cried. “How can you suggest such a thing? You are my nephew. Your mother’s memory would haunt me for all time if I let anything happen to her child.”
“And Miss Bennet?” he asked in a low tone. “You must have realised what had happened once you got the ransom letter, that she was taken by mistake and pretending to be Anne. Did you write back that you would pay for us both, or did you tell them you would only pay for me since they took the wrong woman?”
He did not want the latter to be true, and Darcy searched his aunt’s face for some sign that she was not so lost to all decency.
After far too long, she finally said, “It was an outrageous sum for the cousin of my parson.”
