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It was a single sheet, and the hand was cramped and heavy, the strokes cut deep into the paper by a pen driven hard. She had half expected it to run to six pages. She read it twice.

Miss Bennet —

I spoke to you last night as no man should speak to a woman, and I had no right to expect any answer but the one you gave. I do not ask you to reply to this. I wished you to have it in writing that I know what I did. And, I am sorry for it.

— F. Darcy.

That was all. Elizabeth frowned and turned the sheet over, to see if there was more, and there was not. There was no plea in it, nor any defence, nor any of the lofty, wounded rhetoric she had braced herself against. There was not one word about Jane, or Wickham, or the Colonel, or what he had been given to understand about her feelings and had not been given to understand about his own. It was not eloquent. She thought it was nearly rude, in its want of ornament.

She thought of the hand clenched against the mantelpiece. She thought, unaccountably, of the Colonel’s phrase, he is the most precious thing he has, and of the way a person’s whole character may be told by what he will not say.

Elizabeth decided that she was not softened. She was very clear with herself upon that point. She had been wronged, and the wrong stood, and no four-line note could unwrite it. She rose and went to the hearth, where a small fire still burned from the night before, and held the letter over it.

She held it there, she thought afterward, for rather a long time. Then she folded it into three, along the creases he had made, and put it away in the bottom of her writing-case, beneath Jane’s letters and her father’s, where it could not be seen. It was a matter of ordinary fairness, she told herself. One does not burn a document that may someday be wanted in evidence. It was nothing more than that. She said so twice, quite firmly, to the empty room.

CHAPTER 5

The Colonel found the first objective by the simple method of asking the servants. He came to Darcy at breakfast on the third morning, in the small east parlour, with a piece of cold ham in one hand and the expression of a man who has been up since five in a good cause. Lady Catherine was not yet down. The room was empty but for the two of them, and a footman who had learned, over two days, to remove himself.

“Tarrant,” said Richard. “Abel Tarrant. He has the long field behind the church, forty acres, a wife, six children, and a rent day on Michaelmas Eve that he does not expect to survive. The harvest failed in the low ground, and the agent has served notice.”

Darcy asked flatly, “How do you know?”

“The under-cook is his niece.” The Colonel sat, and took a pull of Darcy’s coffee. “I am told he has been to see the parson, and the parson told him to put his faith in Providence and the patronage of Lady Catherine. That is two sources of relief, neither of which has ever put a loaf on a table.”

Darcy said nothing. He was studying his right hand, which Cowper the valet had wrapped that morning in clean linen, and which he found he could close if he did not mind the sound it made. It had been two days. He had not seen her. He had walked to the end of the Rosings avenue yesterday and stood at the gate for eleven minutes by his watch, and had then turned round and gone home like a whipped hound; and the Colonel, who knew perfectly well where he had been, had not said a word.

“I do not propose to give the man money,” Darcy started.

“Good. You are not to give him a farthing. Nor are you to ride down in that coat with your name on the buttons and have the whole village bow at you. You are to find out what is wrong, and mend it, and leave quietly.” The Colonel put down the cup. “I mean this, Fitz. If a single person in Hunsford can say that Mr. Darcy of Pemberley came and was gracious, we are finished. Rule the first.” He paid and added, “I know you recall the rules, though I want to be sure you intend them.”

Darcy looked up. There was a quality in his cousin’s face that he had not seen there for some time; rather, it was not irony, but a hard and watchful gravity, like the gravity of a man who has put his money on a horse and means to see it run. Darcy nodded once, and said, “I will go this morning.”

***

The agent’s office was a low brick building at the back of the Rosings home farm, with a window onto the yard and a door that stuck. It smelled of dust and sealing-wax and cheap tallow, and of a very large man who had eaten a great deal of mutton for his breakfast. Mr. Pruett rose from behind a table, and his face did what faces do in that line of work when a gentleman of Darcy’s consequence walks in uninvited at a quarter past nine.

“Mr. Darcy! Sir! I had not the honour.” He paused, and then tried, “ Lady Catherine did not say.”

Darcy held up one hand to stop the man, and then said, “Lady Catherine does not know I am here. I have a question about the Tarrant holding.”

The agent’s smile did not so much fade as set. “A sad business, sir. A very sad business. But it is the custom of the estate, you understand, a matter of the quarter, and her ladyship has always been firm on arrears. I could not, myself, make an exception.”

“I did not ask you to.” It was a quiet remark and was meant to be one. But Darcy had spent a good many years learning to put a hard edge on a quiet voice, and he was aware, as the man’s colour shifted, that the old instrument had not lost its use. It was the first thing that had felt natural to him in three days. He did not like how much he liked it.

“You will let me see the accounts,” Darcy said.

“Sir, I.” He did not want to say, “They are her ladyship’s private.”

Darcy cut the man off from continuing. “Abel Tarrant is in arrears, I understand, for sixty-one pounds. I should like to know how a man with forty acres and a wet year runs to sixty-one pounds.”

The agent looked at him for a long moment. Then, with an air of profound injury, he unlocked the press behind him and brought out a ledger. Darcy read it standing. He read the way he had learned to read at nineteen, when his father had put the Pemberley books into his hands and told him that a man who could not follow a column of figures was a man whom every steward in England would rob. It took him some time. The agent hovered and sweated. Out in the yard a boy was whistling, badly, and a hen complained.

The rent was sixty. That was easy. It was the line beneath it that stopped him. To repair of barn roof, thatching and sundries, £14 7s. To new door, hinges, &c., 4 guineas. To drain, ditch and fence, west boundary, £9 2s.

He read it twice. The sum of the three came to nearly thirty pounds. He ran his finger along the margin until he found the vouchers pinned at the back of the volume, two small slips signed in a round clerk’s hand, J. Mattock, joiner and thatcher.

A man who had never in his life repaired a barn roof could still tell when a barn roof had not been repaired. He had passed the Tarrant barn on his way, because the Colonel had sketched him the road: a long grey shed with a sagging ridge and an old door off one hinge, through which a wet draught, he would have sworn, had blown since the spring.