“Miss Elizabeth Bennet.”
Mrs Gardiner sat down. Not in collapse, but in the careful lowering of a woman who had just moved from one kind of fear to another and wished to be steady for whichever arrived.
“Perhaps we had better speak in my study,” Gardiner said.
“I am happy to speak here, if you prefer. I apologise if I have alarmed you, for that was not my intent. I have nothing to say that requires privacy from Mrs Gardiner.” He stopped, then—because they were Elizabeth’s family, because he could not bring himself to approach them through the oblique formalities that London expected and that he had always despised and that five years at Blackscar had stripped from him entirely.
“I havebeen at Blackscar for the past five years. I am the keeper of the lantern. Miss Bennet and I have been acquainted since her arrival in September.”
Gardiner blinked several times but otherwise did not move. His hand remained on the chair. His expression, which had been curious, went still as if he had just received information that rearranged a great many things he believed he already understood.
“Youare the keeper?”
“Yes.”
“The keeper who has been absent from his post since January.”
The bluntness of it caught Darcy short. Not away.“Absent from his post.”Language that had been chosen with care, language that belonged to a report rather than a conversation.
“Yes. I left in January to settle certain personal affairs that could not be managed by letter.”
“And the lantern?” Gardiner’s voice carried no accusation. It was something worse—the careful neutrality of a man who had been investigating, who had assembled facts, who was now testing them against the source. “I understand there was a period of failure. That the light went dark. How does your absence affect that?”
“The period to which you refer was before Miss Bennet’s arrival. The apparatus…” He stopped. The full explanation required more than he could offer in a parlour, and Gardiner’s expression told him that the mechanical details were not what was being asked. “The lantern failed before she came. Her arrival was the catalyst for its return to good order. The light has held.”
“It has held,” Gardiner repeated. He removed the spectacles from his forehead, folded them, placed them in his waistcoat pocket. The gesture had the quality of a man putting away one instrument and reaching for another. “Mr Darcy, I will speak plainly. I wrote to my niece a fortnight ago with information that may not yet have reached her, depending on the roads. I assume it has by now. The trustees of the Blackscar estate have been making inquiries.”
“I am aware that they are monitoring the function of the lantern. Miss Bennet conducted their assessor on a tour of the property. Entirely routine.”
Gardiner cleared his throat. “These are not routine inquiries. I hired my own investigator to learn what they were trying to discover about her, and some of it is rather personal and unsettling. They have documented the period of the lantern’s failure. Theyhave noted the keeper’s absence. And they have become aware that Elizabeth has been conducting... frequent correspondence with a man addressed as the keeper of the tower.”
Mrs Gardiner drew a slow breath but said nothing.
Darcy’s neck heated under his fine silk cravat.
“The… er… frequency of that correspondence,” Gardiner continued, “has raised questions about the propriety of her situation. A young woman, unmarried, living alone on a headland, writing regularly to a man who is not a relation and who is, by their understanding, a common labourer in the employ of the trust…” He lingered on the word common and watched Darcy receive it. “Youare not a common labourer.”
“No.”
“I take it they do not know that?”
His jaw ticked, and he shook his head. “No.”
“Does my niece know who you are?”
The question was not idle. It carried the weight of a man who had sent a young woman north to accept a charge and was now discovering that the circumstances surrounding that charge had been rather more complicated than anyone had disclosed.
“Miss Bennet is aware of my circumstances. She is also aware of the arrangements I have been making to return.”
Gardiner considered this with a somewhat stricken expression. His gaze moved briefly to his wife, whose stillness in her chair had acquired the quality of someone listening with her whole body, and then returned to Darcy.
“And you intend—forgive me, Mr Darcy, but I must understand this clearly. You are telling me that you, the master of Pemberley, heir to one of the finest estates in Derbyshire, intend to return to Northumberland… to keep a lighthouse?”
Put thus, in a tradesman’s parlour in Cheapside, with the March light falling grey across the carpet and the tea growing cold in its cup, the statement did sound like something that required explanation. Darcy gave the only one that was true.
“I gave her my word. She is the steward, and I am the keeper, and the stewardship is not secure until the probationary term is fulfilled in September. I mean to be certain her position is on firm ground before that date.”
Gardiner’s mouth did not change. His eyes did. Something moved behind them—not suspicion, which had already been present, but a deeper recognition, the kind a man of commerce arrived at when the figures in a ledger suddenly resolved into a patternhe ought to have seen three columns earlier. The way a man looked at an answer that confirmed a question he had not yet asked aloud.
