The King’s voice echoed off the stone walls, warm as syrup, cold as steel beneath. He was in high spirits. The rebellion was crushed. The Parliamentarians defeated. The traitor king dead. And now, in this new age of restoration, Charles II was determined to secure his throne by binding his nobles to him with lands, flattery—and more oaths of fealty.
Peter’s eyes flicked toward the dais where the names were being called.
“Richard Darcy of Pemberley,” the herald intoned.
Peter’s father stepped forward, and the younger man watched with a knot in his gut. Richard’s shoulders were still square, his hair still dark, but his movements had grown heavier in recent years. Not from age, but from the weight of choosing safety over conviction repeatedly during the years of the civil war. The moment Richard reached the table, the king leaned forward with a gleam of amusement.
“Ah, the loyal gentleman from Derbyshire. A fine estate. I have heard much of Pemberley. And I believe your new affirmation brings it into even better standing.”
The parchment was laid out on the table: an oath of fealty not only to the crown, but to the newly reformed Church of England. A public, deliberate, irrevocable renunciation of Catholic faith.
Peter held his breath.
His father took the pen without hesitation.
He signed his name with a steady hand, ending with a flourish and a grin.
Peter flinched, as though struck.
The boy who knelt beside his grandmother to recite Latin prayers… who watched his maiden aunt tend to the secret altar behind the hearth… who listened to tales of ancestors hiding priests behind panels and chimney walls—that boy died a little.
He had known this was coming. He had ridden with his father to Whitehall that very morning. But now, standing among nobles draped in silks and smug smiles, he felt filthier than if he had crawled through gutters.
Father is betraying everything our ancestors held dear—for what? Money? Thirty pieces of silver.
“And now,” the king said, beaming, “a reward for fidelity.”
Another name was called.
“Henry Fitzwilliam.”
Peter turned as the Fitzwilliam heir, their nearest neighbor, strode forward with all the pomp of a peacock in spring. The man’s doublet gleamed; his lace was a foot thick. His family had been whispering at court for years, offering coin, secrets, and men.
“For service to the crown and loyalty in these troubled times,” the herald announced, “Henry Fitzwilliam is raised to the peerage, as Earl of Matlock.”
Applause rang out.
Peter’s stomach turned.
He stared down at his gloves, seeing the embroidery his grandmother had stitched along the cuff—tiny golden crosses barely visible. A quiet act of rebellion. A legacy no crown could erase.
“One day,” the King said to Richard Darcy as the room quieted, “perhaps you too shall be ennobled, should your loyalty remain constant.”
Peter’s breath came short. His heart pounded—not with pride, but with fury. He looked at the back of his father’s bowed head and felt cold all the way through.
Never,he thought. Not from a king who mocks God’s law. Not from a throne built on broken altars. I will keep my land—but I will not soil my soul.
He did not applaud. He did not smile. When he returned home to Pemberley that week, he waited…
Waited for two long years until his father died, and Pemberley was Peter’s to do with as he wished.
His father’s body was not yet even when the ground when Peter ordered the priest’s hole behind the library hearth to be rebuilt and reinforced.
Not for priests. Not yet.
But for memory.
And for resolve.
