He dressed himself before they could send the valet. The shirt was too fine—the linen so smooth against his skin that it registered as absence, as the lack of the rough cotton he had worn for years. The waistcoat buttoned with an ease that mocked the stiffness of his tower coat. The trousers fit because Mrs Reynolds had kept his measurements, or guessed them, or consulted the tailor in Lambton who still had them on file from five years ago.
The knock came as he was pulling on the boots.
“Mr Darcy, sir. I am Perkins. Mrs Reynolds has assigned me to—”
“Come in.”
The valet was young. Perhaps twenty-five, neat, composed, with the careful bearing of a man who has been trained in a good house and was conscious of the importance of first impressions. His eyes widened at the sight of Darcy already dressed. “Forgive me, sir. I did not know you had already roused.”
Darcy stopped lacing the boots and straightened. “A habit I shall not shed easily, I am afraid. Come in, Perkins.”
Perkins nodded a little nervously. “Of course, sir.” He carried a case of shaving implements and a towel over his arm, and he entered the room to lay them out with a deference so complete that it could only have been rehearsed.
“If you would permit me, sir.”
Darcy nodded and rose to cross over to the basin, and Perkins draped a covering over his clothing—a covering that might not have been necessary, had Darcy only waited in his dressing robe for the proper attention.
The shaving was tidy, painless. Darcy sat in the chair by the window, and the valet worked with a competence that admitted no fault—the razor’s angle, the soap’s warmth, the towel’s pressure, every movement perfected into invisibility. Five years of shaving himself with a steel blade and cold water and a square of mirror propped against the gallerywall, and this man accomplished in ten minutes what Darcy had managed with varying success every morning since leaving for the navy.
Then the hair. Cut, combed, arranged in a manner that Darcy had not seen on his own head since... sincebefore. Since the man he had been before the tower, the man who attended dinners and sat for portraits and ridden through Lambton with the easy authority of someone who belonged to the land and the land to him.
“The glass, sir.” Perkins angled the mirror. “Does this meet with your approval?”
The man in the glass was a stranger. Clean-jawed. Dark-haired. The face lean from the tower years but restored by the shave and the grooming to a severity that was not haggard but chiselled—the bones more prominent than they had been at twenty-three, the jaw sharper, the eyes darker against the clean white of the collar.
He looked like his father. He looked like the portrait on the landing that he had not yet stopped to face. He looked like the master of Pemberley, which was the thing he was and the thing he had fled and the thing that was now staring back at him from a glass held by a servant he had not hired, in a room that smelled of soap and bergamot instead of salt and coal.
“Will there be anything else, sir?”
“No. Thank you, Perkins. That will be all.”
The valet withdrew. The door closed, and the room subsided into its wealthy silence.
Darcy stood at the glass. The stranger stared back. He lifted his hand and pressed it against his jaw where the razor had passed, and the skin was smooth and foreign and wrong. It was not that he had been shaved—that was commonplace enough—but that the shaving had been done for him. The helplessness of it all, his very insufficiency, was the thing that broke what the firebuilding had cracked and the bed had strained and the missing clothes had pried open.
He sagged in the chair and hid his face in his hands. The weeping was silent—not the wracking kind, not the kind that announced itself, but the slow leaking of a man whose composure had been constructed with such care and maintained for so long that its failure was quiet, almost structural, like water finding its way through stone.
He wept for the tower. For the simplicity of a life in which his hands were necessary and appearances worthless. For the gallery where the flame required his tending, and the stair that required his climbing, and the lens that required his cloth, and the stove that required his coal. He wept for the cot that fit one body, the blanket that was rough on his skin, and the table that held two cups.
And hewept for her.
Not for long. The weeping lasted perhaps two minutes. He could not think of her smiles, the way she fit under his arm, and still weep—not when he had promised himself that he had not had his fill of her, and never would. She would be his again soon, and he could not bear to confess to her that he had spent all his time apart from her crippled by tears.
He gasped and fisted his hands at his eyes to force them to stop. Then he drew breath. He wiped his face with the fine linen handkerchief that Perkins had placed in his waistcoat pocket. He stood and checked his reflection—eyes clear enough, composure rebuilt, the stranger in the glass showing nothing of what had just occurred behind his face.
He had replaced the stone on the nightstand earlier, before he dressed. Now, he picked it up again and put it in the waistcoat pocket, where the handkerchief had been, and the weight of it against his ribs was the only thing in this house that was his.
There was nothing for it but to descend the staircase and once again pass his mother’s portrait. He did not stop, but he did not look away—he let the portrait exist in the edge of his vision, her face and her hands and the set of her shoulders that Georgiana had inherited. For his first morning in this house, it was enough to acknowledge that—a place in his heart still carried that hole, and he had a mostly grown sister who would have very much liked to fill it.
He sat in his father’s chair in the study, opened the first ledger, and began to read.
In the window, the green fields stretched south under a sky that carried no salt, no wind, no sea. Somewhere to the north—two hundred miles, six days’ hard ride, a distance that geography measured in miles and the body measured in ache—a woman was tending a flame alone. The flame would burn, an act of faith in his return—a thing that the green fields and the carved shelves and the polished boots were conspiring, with every comfortable hour, to delay.
He turned the page. He read. He began the work of being the man he had been born to be, in the house his brother should have inherited, at the desk where his father had committed his life’s work.
The stone pressed against his ribs, holding its warmth against his chest. That warmth was hers, and hers was the only direction that mattered—north.
Chapter Thirty-Five
