The second trunk was larger, lighter for its size, for its contents were of a different substance, and he had instructed Perkins to strap it where the road would not jostle it. It contained a promise that had been kept, and he would say nothing more about it until the time came.
The solicitor’s business had taken longer than he could forgive, though he understood the necessity. Harwood was thorough, which was why Darcy employed him, and thoroughness in matters of business did not bend to the urgency of the man who had authorised it. But the work was done. The documents were signed, witnessed, and filed. Harwood had the authority to act in his absence—full authority, without limitation, on the single matter Darcy had instructed him to watch.
If the worst came, Harwood would move before anyone else could.
If. He held to the word as the carriage passed through Barnet and the city thinned behind him into the grey sprawl of the northern parishes.Ifwas the margin he was working within—the distance between Elizabeth’s strength and the trustees’ patience, between the flame’s endurance and the legal machinery grinding toward a conclusion he could not see from the road.
Gardiner’s intelligence was a fortnight old. Anything could have happened in a fortnight. The flame could still be bold and strong. The trustees could have delayed. Or the flame could have died, the trustees acted, and Elizabeth could be standing in a towerthat was no longer hers, reading a letter that dissolved everything she had sustained since September. He would not know until he arrived.
Arriving was still five days away, if the roads held—five days of posting inns and hired horses and the Great North Road in March, which was not a road but a negotiation with mud and weather and the endurance of animals that did not share his desperation. On horseback, riding his own mount, the journey south with Richard had taken six days to reach Pemberley alone—and Pemberley was barely the midpoint. But a carriage posting fresh teams every dozen miles could cover in a day what a single horse required two to manage, and he intended to use every advantage that money and a well-sprung axle could purchase.
He had written to her twice before leaving London. He could only hope the letters had reached her. He could only hope she knew he was coming.
ThefevercameatStamford.
He woke in the coaching inn on Friday morning with the sheets damp beneath him and a weight behind his eyes that he attributed to the road until he tried to stand.
The floor refused to remain where floors belonged. He sat on the edge of the bed with his hands braced on the mattress and waited for the room to resolve itself into a single version of its contents. It did not.
Perkins found him there an hour later, still dressed in the previous night’s shirt, his boots unlaced, his face the colour of tallow. The valet’s horrified expression told him what his own body had already said.
“I will send for a doctor, sir.”
“You will ready the carriage.”
“Sir—”
“Ready the carriage, Perkins.”
Perkins sent to have the carriage readied. Darcy descended the stairs by holding the wall and crossed the inn yard by not looking at the ground, which had developed an inclination toward movement that bore no relation to its actual state. He climbed into the carriage. He sat down. The doorclosed.
The carriage began to move, and within a quarter of an hour, the motion and the fever and the airless interior had combined into something he could not sustain. He knocked on the roof, and the carriage stopped. Perkins opened the door to find him on his hands and knees on the verge of the Great North Road, bringing up everything he had eaten since London—which was very little, which made the effort worse rather than better.
They returned to the inn. The doctor came—a local man, competent, unhurried, with the pragmatic sympathy of a physician who treated coaching travellers regularly and had learned that urgency in the patient rarely reflected urgency in the complaint.
“A fever, sir. Not uncommon on the road in this season. Rest, broth, no travel for three days at the minimum.”
“I do not have three days.”
“The fever does not consult your calendar, Mr Darcy.”
Helayintheroom above the taproom and listened to the northbound mail depart at six in the evening. The horn sounded in the yard below his window. The horses stamped. The guard called the time. The coach pulled away—wheels and harness diminishing down the road until the sound was gone, and everything it carried—post, passengers, newspapers, the ordinary commerce of a country that functioned without reference to his need—went north without him.
He counted the hours. Not by the clock on the mantel, which he could not read without the room doubling, but by the sounds that marked the inn’s rhythm—the changing of the yard horses, the meals called below, the mail coaches arriving and departing with a regularity that mocked every mile he was not covering. Friday evening. Friday night, which was long and hot and broken by intervals of something that was not sleep and not waking—a territory between the two where the fever did its work and his mind, freed from the discipline of consciousness, turned to the things consciousness had been holding at bay.
Elizabeth in the gallery. Elizabeth with the logbook open and the pen in her hand and the flame behind her thinned to something he could see through.
Her handwriting, which he knew as well as his own—the steady downward strokes, the way she crossed her t’s with a single sharp line that brooked no hesitation—recording a failure she did not deserve and could not prevent because the failure was not mechanical.
Elizabeth on the cot, in the dark, in the tower that was emptier than stone ought to be. Elizabeth at the window, looking south.
Hewas south. One hundred fifty miles south, and the distance seemed like it was growing by the hour. Every hour on this bed was an hour she was alone with a flame that could be dying because he was not there. The knowledge was a sickness worse than the fever, but the fever was the thing preventing the cure—preventing him from scooping her into his arms.
The symmetry was so morbidly precise it might have been designed by whatever governed the covenant he had not believed in until the night the lantern answered his hands and hers together on the same brass housing and burned brighter than it had burned in years.
Saturday. The doctor returned. The fever had not broken. Broth was brought and refused and brought again and kept down on the third attempt. Perkins sat in the chair by the window with the contained stillness of a man who had served Darcy long enough to know when argument was futile and when silence was the better form of loyalty. Outside, the March rain fell on the inn yard and the road and the fields beyond. The same rain would be falling on the Great North Road all the way to York, which meant mud, which meant the roads would be worse when he finally travelled them, which meant more hours lost.
He asked Perkins for paper. His hand would not hold the pen steady. He dictated instead—a letter to Harwood, confirming the authority already granted, instructing the solicitor to act immediately if word of the trust’s dissolution reached him before Darcy’s own return to London. Perkins wrote it in his careful clerk’s hand and posted it that afternoon. It was the only useful thing Darcy accomplished in three days.
