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The library would serve. She would leave the seal on a table and trust Vernon to restore it to its rightful place. After venturing into Darcy’s den, she had no wish to tempt fate—or the bear—a second time.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

MARRIED FOR NOTHING?

Darcy sorted through a stack of leather-bound volumes on the long mahogany table, dividing them into precarious piles: those he might bear to part with, and those whose loss would leave a visible hollow in the shelves and an invisible one in his chest.

A book dealer in Manchester might well unearth a collector with a taste for a 1611 King James or a Ben Jonson folio, but Darcy found little comfort in the prospect. Every quarter, the same ritual: tenant rents trickling in, barely enough to appease Bexley’s insatiable notes, let alone the annuities that gnawed at the estate’s marrow. The autumn blight had finished what the debts began, and now the most precious volumes must be offered up—if only to spare his mother’s jewels, which he had always imagined setting aside for a wife.

A wife that had always been a future thought—a vague, well-bred, accomplished woman who knew her way amongst society. He had not meant to obtain one so hastily, but Elizabeth Bennet had come trampling through the mud and into his carefully ordered life. She had been entirely unsuitable, and he had resisted the notion with a fury, building a case against her in his heart.

And then, the mysterious Henry Bennet will appear, and with it, the excuse to relent to wanting her. So he had fallen in love with her and brought her to Pemberley, and whatever good opinion she had of him vanished when she saw the poverty of his estate.

Penniless.

That, it seemed, was to be his epitaph: a Darcy of Pemberley, presiding over the slow extinction of fortune, library, and every cherished relic since his grandfather’s day. Each quarter, the estate was bled anew—debts and annuities draining away what remained, all courtesy of Horatio Bexley, that flamboyant conjurer of schemes who had breezed through Darcy’s boyhood, leaving only stories and obligations in his wake.

So Darcy moved to the next volume: a first edition of Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. The margins held his mother’s delicate handwriting: annotations, exclamations, wry remarks, and questions as she read.

He sank into a chair by the fire, the book open in his hands, and let his mother’s voice echo through the margins. The King James and Ben Jonson would suffice for this quarter’s ransom; he would not part with anything that had once delighted her.

The floorboard creaked, and he looked up.

His wife stood at the globe, as startled to see him as he was of her. Her mouth dropped open, her cheeks colored, and a small object struck the floor with a distinctive metal clink.

“Mr. Darcy! I had not expected to find you here.”

“In my own library?” He raised an eyebrow, his gaze traveling to the small object—his brass seal with the Darcy crest. It had rolled a half turn and came to rest against the edge of the Turkish carpet. He could ask where she had gotten it, and perhaps Mrs. Reynolds or Vernon had fetched it for her. She did not require permission to write letters. That was one of her conditions.

“Why, yes, I had come for a book… to read.” She did not bend down to retrieve the seal. “I did not wish to disturb you.”

He set the book down, crossed to her side, and picked up the seal. “I believe you dropped something?”

“Yes, I was returning it to you. I thought…” The color in her cheeks deepened, as if she had been caught in mischief.

“Then you have found me.” He pocketed the seal and prepared to leave. “Please, the library is at your disposal.”

“Yes, but I must explain.” Elizabeth’s voice was not quite steady. “I required sealing wax for my correspondence. The seal was nearby, in your—that is, the desk in the adjoining room was the nearest source, and I did not wish to trouble Mrs. Reynolds for so small a thing. It was a brief errand, and I took nothing else.”

“You are under no obligation to explain, Mrs. Darcy. I believe freedom of correspondence was prominent on your term sheet.”

“But I did not mean to invade your personal domain.”

She was his wife, and he had kept the door unlocked because he was not the one who insisted on separate lives. But he would not laugh it off and excuse her so easily. She had drawn lines, and she had also been disdainful.

“Keep it.” He held out the seal. “I wear mine on my watch chain, and as Mrs. Darcy, you are entitled to it.”

“That is generous of you.” Her brow contracted slightly. “The thorns are very fine work.”

“My grandfather commissioned it from an engraver in Sheffield. The thorns are a family conceit. We are meant to be beautiful but inadvisable to grasp, or so the legend runs.”

“Then I shall take that under advisement.” She tucked the seal into the pocket of her dress and remained standing directly in his path to the door.

“Was there anything else you require? A tour of the shelves, perhaps?”

“No, I can find what I wish, although…” Her gaze dropped onto the piles of leather volumes on the mahogany table. “Your collection is quite extensive.”

“My ancestors have been adding to it for hundreds of years. Some of the volumes are duplicated, as one generation does not remember if the previous one had acquired a particular printing.”