“Did the late master know?”
“That is the question every man in this valley has asked. Some say they ran it together—that the master got his ease and the steward got his cash, and they liked each other well enough not to count too close. Others say the steward fleeced the master worse than anyone. I lean to the second. Edmund Darcy was lazy. Lazy is not the same as clever. Wickham was clever enough for both of them, and what he gave Edmund in friendship was no more than the cover he wanted.”
Darcy nodded. “They were always friends in our youth.”
“Aye. Thick as you please. Drank together. Hunted together. Took the same girl home on at least one harvest evening and laughed about it after. I never saw Wickham give him anything that did not first keep Wickham comfortable. When Edmund died, Wickham was in Yorkshire on a holiday Edmund’s estate had paid for, and within the week he was somewhere else again with a fresh recommendation in his pocket and not one tenant of Northmere a penny better off.”
Darcy did not answer. The peg in his hand had gone still.
His father’s voice was suddenly in him, summoned by no one.That boy could charm a stick of furniture into thinking it was alive.
Your cousin Edmund makes friends in an hour where you make none in a year.
Wickham has more of his father’s gift than we shall ever see. You had betterstudy how.
Two charming boys, summer upon summer, with himself the third—who had sat with the ledger long enough to know what it said and had been less liked for it.
He pressed the peg home. The slate clicked into place.
Hargrove rose in him. A man in his own service who had dressed falsehood as order for years. Wickham had done it charmingly. Edmund had done it lazily. Hargrove had done it competently. The poison was the same.
They worked a while in silence. The boys below fed fresh slates and gathered the broken ones. From this side of the roof Darcy saw beyond the orchard to the mere, a pale oval in winter light, and beyond that the lower meadows where the carrier Hadley had cleared yesterday now marked the ground in a dark line. Nearer at hand, the south windows of the drawing room caught the morning sun.
One curtain was already drawn back.
He looked away quickly.
Ashby, who missed little despite seeming to glance only at timber and sky, said mildly, “You’d do better to mind the ridge than the window, sir. Roof’s less forgiving.”
Darcy drove the hammer harder than necessary on the next peg. “I was minding both.”
“Aye. That is often the trouble.”
Under any other roof Darcy might have rebuked the liberty. Here, with wind off the height and the remark’s accuracy too exact to deny, he merely said, “Does your work always include commentary on your employer’s line of sight?”
“Only where the line of sight becomes part of the structural concern.”
That was impertinent. It was also, in Ashby’s way, not entirely impertinent. The man had daughters, sisters, perhaps enough memories to recognise a gentleman looking more often than he would admit at one particular room.
Darcy bent over the slate and said no more.
By eleven they had the west seam secured and the worst of the ridge patched with sounder work than the house had seen in some time. Ashby descended first, Darcy after him with less grace than he wished and more success than Ashby perhaps expected. In the yard the boys loaded broken slate into the cart for reuse in the lower path.
Mrs Reeves emerged from the kitchen door with a jug of small ale and four cups and distributed them to a grateful audience. Men doing roof work, in her view, belonged temporarily to the same species and might be served alike whether one paid the bills or not.
Ashby drank half his at one pull and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“If weather holds, the drawing-room stain’ll dry clean. If weather doesn’t, nothing in England will.”
“And the blue chamber?” Darcy asked.
“Needs the south gutter cleared and one length of flashing reset. I’ll take Will up after dinner.” He tipped his head toward the house. “Miss Bennet was at the parlour window yesterday. My Mary saw her from the lane when she brought eggs. Said the new lady sits as if she’s measuring every crack in the place and considering whether the house deserves to survive.”
Mrs Reeves, collecting the emptied cups, said, “Miss Bennet has better manners than to pronounce sentence before she has seen the breakfast parlour.”
Ashby grunted. “If she has seen the late accounts she’ll know sentence is due somewhere.”
Darcy looked from one to the other. “Does the whole valley now discuss what I bring into my own house?”
