Page 146 of A Debt Inherited

Below it, in narrower lines:

Second son. Trinity College. Expelled January 1782. Commission purchased thereafter. 10th Foot. Barbados. Returned wounded. Knighted. Estate inherited by failure of elder line. Five daughters. No son.

The next sheet was headed Darcy.

Not Fitzwilliam Darcy first, but Edmund. Pemberley. Younger son. Cambridge. Dead. Then George Darcy, master of Pemberley. Then Fitzwilliam Darcy, son and heir, with notes on income, estate, sister, Ramsgate, Wickham.

Fitzwilliam lifted that page aside.

Beneath it lay his own name.

Fitzwilliam, Richard. Younger son of Matlock. Army. Portugal. Badajoz.

There followed only facts. Regiment, dates, wounds, dispatches, honours.

Fitzwilliam set the page down.

He pulled the drawer. Locked.

Fitzwilliam slid a paper knife along the seam. The drawer resisted, then sprang with a sharp crack. Inside were bundles bound with narrow red ribbon, some new, some faded.

Ashby. Stamford. Cambridge. Glenbride. Bennet. Darcy. Fitzwilliam. Wickham.

Fitzwilliam touched the bundle marked Stamford.

The top paper was a copy, old and handled often. Depositions. A coach overturned near Greatford. A dead lord. A murdered girl. Three Cambridge men named in the margins.

Thomas Bennet. Edmund Darcy. David Fitzwilliam.

Not Richard. David.

His uncle.

Fitzwilliam read until the sense took shape, then stopped. There was no time to read sorrow.

He untied the Ashby bundle next.

An abstract of the Glenbride succession lay inside, dated September 1787. Lord Julian Ashby, deceased. Hugh Ashby. Hugh’s infant son.

Beside it, in Kerr’s controlled hand, a later note had been added.

Hugh Ashby, seventh Earl of Ashby. His son and heir, Lord Glenbride, now four-and-twenty.

Below that, two names stood apart from the lawful line.

Lady Marjorie Kerr.

Alexander Kerr.

Fitzwilliam laid the sheet flat beside Bennet’s and looked once around the pristine room.

“Not a ransom,” he said. “A trial.”

He gathered the papers and went down.

Villiers waited at the foot of the stair, Mrs Price pale beside him.

Fitzwilliam handed him the bound bundles. “This accounts for Kerr.”