He did not pursue it. Not here, not with his wife three feet away and his nieces in the room. He folded whatever he had seen into the same pocket where he kept his spectacles and returned to the ground that could be discussed openly.
“Then you had better understand what you are returning to.” He pulled the chair from the wall and gestured for Darcy to sit down opposite him.
“The trustees wish to dissolve the stewardship. They have wished it since before Elizabeth arrived, and they have been assembling grounds to petition for alteration of the trust. There is a mechanism which does allow them to do this, if Elizabeth is found wanting in any capacity. Trinity House has expressed interest in the site, and the land itself is not without independent value. The endowment, which has been inaccessible without a steward, represents a considerable sum that the trustees are eager to redirect as the law allows. What they lacked was sufficient evidence of incapacity or impropriety. The lantern failure gives them one. Your absence gives them another. And any questions about her character…”
His heart gave one solid thud in his chest. “What does she need?”
Gardiner studied him... his jaw working as if he were deciding if he really wished to say the words. “She needs you at that tower, Mr Darcy. She needs the keeper at his post. She needs it before the trustees find cause to act, which will surely be before September.”
“I will leave London within the week.”
“See that you do.” Gardiner held the gaze a count longer, then leaned back. The interview was not over, but the most pressing question had been answered to some provisional satisfaction. He glanced at his wife, who had been listening with the curious stillness of a woman who heard everything and would have a great deal to say when the caller had gone.
Then Gardiner said, as though it were an afterthought—though nothing in the way he said it suggested anything unpremeditated: “Were you appointed keeper under the terms of the same trust that governs the stewardship?”
“I was.”
“Formally appointed? Your name in the deed?”
“In the logbook and the trust’s registry. The appointment was made through the trustees five years ago.”
“The exact date, if you can recall it, sir.”
Darcy cast his eyes up to the ceiling as he searched his memory. “The twenty-eighth of October 1807.”
Gardiner reached into his waistcoat pocket—not for the spectacles this time but for a small notebook, the kind a man of commerce carried for figures that could not wait for a desk. He wrote something in it. Brief. A date, a name, a reference—Darcy could not see which.
“My solicitor, Mr Abbot, is examining the original trust deed in its entirety. Not the summary the trustees provided, but the full document, including the codicils.” He returned the notebook to his pocket. “He will want to know of your appointment. It may bear upon certain provisions he has not yet finished reviewing.”
Darcy waited for more. None came. Gardiner rose, and the gesture ended the business portion of the conversation and returned them to the niceties of a social call, to the ordinary demands of courtesy between people who had not yet decided what they were to one another.
“You will stay for tea, Mr Darcy?” Mrs Gardiner asked.
He stayed, and it was easier than any hour he had spent in London since his return—easier than Lady Matlock’s drawing room, easier than the solicitor’s chambers, easier than the empty dining table at Berkeley Square where he sat each evening with his correspondence and his conscience for company.
These were Elizabeth’s people, and he belonged to her, more than to anyone else. The tea was poured, the conversation turned from Darcy’s business to the ordinary exchange of a household receiving a guest, and he found himself answering questions from the two young women who had been watching him from across the parlour for the better part of an hour and had clearly been storing up their curiosity for this occasion.
Kitty was the bolder of the two, despite her cough. She asked him about Northumberland—the weather, the coast, the village—with the appetite of someone who had been confined too long and wanted the world brought to her since she could not go to it. She had Elizabeth’s directness without Elizabeth’s clever subtlety, and when she asked whether the tower was truly as cold as her sister claimed, something in the phrasing—her sister claimed—told him that Elizabeth had written more about the keeper and his tower to her sisters than the Gardiners perhaps suspected.
“Lizzy says the wind comes through the gallery like a living thing,” Kitty said, watching his face. “She says you can hear it change direction before you feelit.”
He had taught her that. The memory of it—Elizabeth standing in the gallery with her hair loose and her hand raised, turning her palm to find the shift—came to him so completely that he had to set down his cup.
“Your sister is a quick study.”
“Lizzy says the keeper taught her everything she knows about the lantern.” This from Mary, who had left the piano and taken the chair nearest the fire with the air of someone who intended to participate in the conversation on her own terms. She had Elizabeth’s dark eyes but used them differently—where Elizabeth observed and withheld, Mary observed and delivered. “She says he is very exacting.”
“I believe she used the word tyrannical,” Kitty added.
“She would,” Darcy said, and something in his voice—or perhaps in the way he said it, with a familiarity that belonged to a man who knew exactly how Elizabeth Bennet deployed the word tyrannical—made both sisters look at him, and then at each other, with the swift silent communication of siblings who have just confirmed a theory they had been developing by letter for months.
Mrs Gardiner poured more tea and said nothing, but her hand on the pot was steady, and her eyes, when they met her husband’s across the room, carried a conversation of their own.
When he rose to go, Mrs Gardiner walked him to the door herself, which was not customary and which she did, he suspected, because she had something to say that did not belong to the parlour.
“Mr Darcy.” She stood in the entrance hall, one hand on the newel post, her voice lowered. “Elizabeth has not written to us of you by name. She has mentioned the tower’s keeper, and she has mentioned his departure, but never a name or any sort of description of your person. The manner in which she has not mentioned both tells me more than she perhaps put down on the page.”
“She is a woman of discretion, Mrs Gardiner.”
