Darcy smiled. “I saw your uncle in London. Mr Gardiner received me in Gracechurch Street.”
He watched her face change—the confusion sharpening into something more alert, more wary, the face of a woman who had kept these parts of her life carefully separate and was now discovering that they had met without her knowledge. “What?”
“Your aunt recognised my name before I had finished giving it, and I believe she spent the first ten minutes of my visit convinced I had come to deliver bad news from Derbyshire.”
She did not laugh. It was a poor attempt at a jest, anyway.
“You went to Gracechurch Street.” She said it slowly, as though repeating it might help it become credible. “You called on my family?”
“I did.”
She raised her brows and pinned him with a look of disbelief. “Uninvited?”
“Entirely uninvited. I had calling cards printed for the occasion, but I was too impatient to use them.”
Something moved across her face—not quite a smile, not yet, but the shadow of one, held in reserve. “And my sisters?”
“Were present. Miss Mary plays the piano with great conviction, and Miss Catherine asked me more questions in a quarter of an hour than the trustees have managed in five years. Though they are not half so vexing as you are.”
The shadow of the smile deepened, though she pressed it down. “What did my uncle tell you?”
“Everything heknew. The trustees. Norwood. The inquiries into your conduct and the correspondence.” He held her gaze. “He told me that your position was far less secure than either of us had understood, and that the men who held authority over this trust had been building their case for months. He told me what I ought to have seen for myself before I ever left this headland—that my absence had given them a weapon, and that your letters to me and mine to you had given them another.”
She flinched. A small thing, quickly governed—the barest tightening of her mouth. He had named the wound she had been carrying since Norwood’s visit, the knowledge that her faithfulness in writing to him had been turned into evidence against her. He reached for her hand again. She let him take it.
“The moment I left your uncle’s house, I went to the trustees.”
Her eyes widened. “You did what?”
“I presented myself at Rotherdam’s office in Lincoln’s Inn. As Mr Darcy of Pemberley, with my solicitor’s card and a very clear understanding of the value of the Blackscar property.”
He traced his thumb across her knuckles. “I did not tell them I was the keeper. I told them that I had an interest in coastal properties, that I was prepared to make an offer well above any other on the table, and that my terms would be uncomplicated enough to make their work very simple indeed. I told them I would cooperate fully with Trinity House in the management of the navigational light. I told them my solicitor, Mr Harwood, had the authority to act in my absence, and that if the property became available for purchase, Harwood would move before any other buyer could.”
Her eyes rounded. “You did this... before you left London?”
“I did this before I even went back to my own house that afternoon. I could not let it rest even a single hour.”
She stared at him. The gold light from the stairwell caught the wetness still on her cheeks and turned it to something luminous, and the expression on her face was one he had not seen before—not gratitude, which would have diminished her, not disbelief, which would have diminished him, but a kind of reckoning, as though she were adding together the man she had known in the oiled coat and the man who had walked into a solicitor’s office in Lincoln’s Inn and laid a fortune on a table to buy her a headland, and finding that the sum was the same person.
“How?”
“My solicitor, Mr Harwood, was instructed to place an offer on the property the moment the dissolution was granted. An offer well above any other, with terms the trustees found very attractive.” His grip on her hand tightened. “If my estimate is accurate, Harwood is already on the road to deliver the papers.”
She went very still. Her hands flexed, pulling him a little closer as though she needed the solidity of him to hold herself upright. She looked at him the way she had looked at him the first night in the gallery, when he told her the lantern had been failing for weeks and she had not yet decided whether to believe him or to throw him down the stairs.
“Fitzwilliam Darcy. Are you telling me that youboughtthis headland?”
“The tower. The cottage. The land. The reef. All of it.” He held her gaze. “It will be yours as of the moment the papers are delivered, but I hope I may call it a wedding gift. Assuming you are amenable.”
She could only blink, her features bled of colour. She was not speaking, not smiling or laughing, not... not reacting at all.
This would not do.
He tightened his hands on hers, hoping to jar some response from her. “You need not fear the trustees now, Elizabeth. This land is yours—you will be free to come and go as you please. Sell it to the highest bidder, mine it for rock and coal, or just... remain here if you like. Mistress of Blackscar, the woman whose touch lights the lantern.”
Still, she hardly breathed. Her body had begun to tremble, her hand now limp in his as the bewilderment fell to something like dismay on her countenance.
Alarm flared in his breast. This... this was all wrong. Should she not be overjoyed? Falling into his embrace with the promise of love and a future and the sort of life he had never imagined possible until she twirled into the small chamber that had been his world and threw open the drapes?
