1

“Colonel Fitzwilliam,” the clerk announced, and then, with the small wince of a junior who has saluted the wrong shoulder, “Forgive me. Mr. Fitzwilliam.”

“Both true, once.” Richard handed off his hat, crossed the solicitor’s good carpet without waiting to be asked, and poured himself two fingers from the decanter on the sideboard. The clerk half rose, as if to rescue it, then recalled from whom he was rescuing it, and sat. “Fifteen years in His Majesty’s cavalry, young man. We drink what is in the room. Is Mr. Longwell coming, or am I to be softened up first, like a garrison under siege?”

“He is coming directly, sir. He begs you will sit.”

Richard did not sit. He had been sitting for six months. At breakfast tables, in drawing rooms, in the fourth pew at St. George’s. He had begun to understand that sitting was the whole of a gentleman’s profession, and that he had sold a colonelcy to purchase it. He stood at the window instead, with the brandy, and watched the law’s gray morning traffic go by below.

He was still standing when the door opened on Mr. Octavius Longwell, Senior. Solicitor to the Fitzwilliams and the de Bourghs these thirty years. A small man going thin on top, his spectacles riding the very tip of his nose.

Behind him came two clerks bearing scrolls and a bound book of family pedigrees thick as a paving-stone. They set their burdens on the corner table and went out without a word. That was the first item Richard did not like. Lawyers, in his experience, were like artillery. The quantity brought forward told you the size of the engagement someone was expecting.

“Mr. Fitzwilliam. You are very prompt.”

“Your note spoke of a matter touching the late Lady Catherine’s estate. My wife is her daughter.” Richard set down the glass. “The notice of her ladyship’s death has sat on my breakfast table two mornings, doing its work. Four lines, Mr. Longwell. A stranger’s hand. Sent express from Rosings, and not a word in it that a groom might not have written of a horse.”

“I am sorry for it. Her ladyship’s household is much reduced.”

“So I gather. My wife wept at the window in a way I have never seen from her, and could not have stopped if I had tried. So. I am prompt.” He turned from the glass. “What is the matter that could not go in the note?”

“The matter,” said Longwell, settling behind his great desk and drawing the pedigree book toward him with both hands, “is best gone at in my own order. It is the only way I can be sure of leaving nothing out. The de Bourgh line may be traced in England to the reign of Queen Elizabeth—”

“We may skip the Tudors, I think.”

The solicitor pursed his lips, plainly grieved to be hurried, and turned the leaves until he found the page he wanted.

What he found there sat Richard down after all, down into the visitor’s chair, as though he had taken a fist beneath the ribs. There was Anne, inscribed beneath her father, Sir Lewis de Bourgh: the issue of Lady Catherine, lawful and expected. And there, level with Anne, ruled in beside her like a man pulling up a chair uninvited, was another name entirely. George Wickham, the issue of Sir Lewis also, got upon a woman Richard had never heard of. One Elizabeth Burrell.

“And what,” Richard said, with great care, “is that blackguard’s name doing in my wife’s family tree?”

“I laid the whole of this before your father, and your cousin Mr. Darcy, after the wedding. Is Mr. Darcy to join us today?”

“He is at Pemberley with his wife and means to stay there.” Richard heard the edge in it and could not be troubled to file it down. Why the man should reach for Darcy, who had no more to do with Rosings than the King of Naples, he could not say. Except that everyone reached for Darcy, sooner or later, when the ground grew uncertain. He fixed the unfamiliar name in his memory, Burrell, and went on the attack rather than admit he was lost. “You have me instead. I am the one married into the line, so you will make do. Say it plainly.”

“Then I should like to send for my son first.” The old man reached for his small silver bell. “Neither your father nor your cousin objected to Ovi’s presence before. And it is greatly to your family’s good, Mr. Fitzwilliam, that the whole of this should not one day go into the ground with me.”

He rang. The door opened on the instant, as though the younger man had been standing to it. Which, Richard reflected, he almost certainly had. Ovi Longwell came in, bowed with a frankness that was nearly a relief in that close and papered room, and took in at a glance the pedigree book, the visitor, and the level of the decanter. Then he did what made Richard begin to like him. He carried the decanter and a second glass to the desk before he sat down.

“You’ll want it where you can reach it,” said Ovi. “Everyone does, by the middle.”

“Sir Lewis de Bourgh,” the old man began, “married your wife’s mother a long generation ago. It was not a love match. I do not believe either party ever troubled to pretend it was.”

“Few of them are,” said Richard.

“Fewer than the poets allow. And for years the marriage got no child that lived. Lady Catherine buried more than one before Miss Anne was safely come. Sir Lewis went up to London a great deal in those years, and stayed a great while, on business the estate did not strictly require.”

Ovi, from his corner: “He means Sir Lewis kept a house in town, and did not keep it empty.”

“Ovi.”

“He asked for it plain, Father. I am being plain.”

The old man let it pass. He turned a leaf. “In town Sir Lewis came to know a young married lady. Very young. Married the twelvemonth before to a great house, and married the way such girls are married. Which is to say she was asked her opinion on the morning of the wedding, and not before.”

Richard said nothing to that. He was thinking, against his will, of a girl at a window in his own house, and how near she had come to being sold in exactly that coin.

“She was unhappy,” the old man went on. “He was unhappy. London is a wide place, Mr. Fitzwilliam, with a great many unlit rooms in it. I will not dress it for you as a romance. But I have read the letters that came down to this office, and I will say this much for the pair of them. They were kinder to one another than either was used to being treated elsewhere. There is worse to find in a strongbox.”

“And the child.”

“A son. Born the summer of ’eighty-four, quietly, at a distance from anyone who might count on his fingers.” A pause. “The lady did not keep him. She could not. A married woman does not hand her husband another man’s son and call it weather. The boy was carried north to Pemberley and given over to the steward and his wife, to raise as their own, under old Mr. Darcy’s eye. Sir Lewis’s own house was the one house in England the child could never be got near.”

“George Wickham,” Richard said. The name tasted of every card-room and creditor and ruined girl of the last ten years. He looked again at the small ruled name on the page, and found, to his considerable annoyance, that he could not manage to hate an infant carried off in a basket. “So the mother lost him twice. Once to the steward. And once to whatever he grew into.”

“Just so.”

“And she is dead, I take it.” Richard reached for the brandy. “They generally are, in this kind of history. It spares everyone the awkwardness of them.”

The two lawyers looked at one another. It was Ovi who answered, and for once with none of the dryness in it.

“No, sir. She is very much living.”

Something in the room shifted its footing. Richard set the glass down untasted.

“Then name her.”

“Elizabeth Burrell, that was.” The old man said it low, and did not raise his voice again for a good while after. “She is not Elizabeth Burrell now. Has not been these thirty years. She married on, Mr. Fitzwilliam. Married high. Buried one husband and took another higher, and is this morning as great a lady as any that will sit down to dinner in London tonight. If I spoke you the name she carries, you would put down that glass and get to your feet, soldier or no.”

“Try me.”

“I will not. Not in this room, with the paint two years dry and a clerk on the far side of the door.” The old man’s spectacles caught the light. “It is enough that you know three plain facts. The woman who bore George Wickham is alive. She is among the first ladies of the kingdom. And she would sooner give up her right hand than hear that summer of ’eighty-four named aloud. Great houses have long memories, sir, and longer arms. You have soldiered. You know there are guns a wise man does not walk before merely to prove he is not afraid.”

Richard was quiet a moment. He had walked before a good many. He had the wet-weather ache in his shoulder to show for the one or two that had answered.

“Does she know the boy is dead?”

“I should think,” said the old man, “there is very little that lady does not know.”

Richard turned it in his hands, once, and set it down, the way he had learned to set down a weight too heavy to carry and fight at the same time. “Charming as all this is,” he said, recovering his ground the way he always had, by moving forward across it, “it still does not tell me why a steward’s bastard is inked into the Rosings pedigree as though he owned a corner of the place.”

“Because, for a little while, he did.” The old man drew a second document from beneath the first. “There are two wills, Mr. Fitzwilliam. Sir Lewis made the first in ’eighty-nine, when Miss Anne was a babe and the one living child of his body he was sure of. That will named Anne, and Anne alone. But he was a careful man with a sickly daughter. And careful men build a fence at the bottom of a field they never mean to fall down. So he made a second will, later, and in it he set the son behind her. In reserve. Against the day Anne might die without issue, and the name go wanting an heir of his blood, lawful or not.”

Richard held up a flat palm and worked at it aloud, the way he had worked at bad maps by worse candlelight.

“Stop. The bastard was the elder. If he stood to inherit at all, it is the first will should own him, and the second cast him off. Not the reverse.”

“You would think so. Turn it about.”

“…because the second will was written with Anne already got, and more children looked for.” Richard came to it slowly. “The son as the far contingency. The fence at the bottom of the field. Anne in front, the boy behind, in case.” He drank. “And my aunt with no taste for furnishing an heir and a spare, so there it stood for thirty years. Anne in the will, Wickham behind her, and not a soul at any dinner-table the wiser.” Something in him eased to have got even that much of it straight. He took the brandy Ovi had poured and drank it with the plain gratitude of a man who has eaten nothing since he broke his fast. “Very well. My aunt is dead. Anne is her heir named. Then Anne has Rosings, and you may both stop making that small mournful noise, for you have made it twice now and I am watching my relief curdle where it stands. What is it?”

The elder Longwell took off his spectacles and polished them, unhurried, a man buying himself a moment.

“Both wills, Mr. Fitzwilliam. Her ladyship’s and Sir Lewis’s alike. They make Anne heir of Rosings if she bear a living child. She has not. Not yet. Until she does, she cannot inherit.” He set the spectacles back on his nose. “And failing her, the estate was never to fall to Mr. Wickham’s line in her place. The Wickhams take only if Anne’s own line inherits first, and then fails. Which leaves a third party. Frederick de Bourgh, brother to Sir Lewis. I have written to him already and look for him directly. He and his son are settled at Gillingham.”

Richard set his hand to his brow and dragged it slowly down a face that had outfaced cannon and come away unmoved, and was now thoroughly moved by two small lawyers and a bound book.

“There is one letter more,” said Longwell, and drew it out, black-edged, twin to the one that had undone Matlock House two mornings since. “From Rosings. Mrs. Wickham has written to me. She seeks the unlocking of her funds, and a paper from this office attesting that her son stands rightful heir to the estate.”

“Rosings belongs to my wife.” Richard’s hand was halfway across the desk before he had decided to move it. The old man drew the letter quietly out of reach.

“Rosings, at this hour, belongs to nobody,” said Ovi, gently, “which is exactly the difficulty. Your wife cannot take it. Mrs. Wickham’s son was never to take it in her place, whatever Mrs. Wickham has been given to believe. And Mrs. Wickham is at Rosings this minute. Cousin to your wife. Widow to that name in the pedigree. Sitting in the house with a paper claim in one hand and an infant in the other. Somebody must go down into Kent and tell her the truth of it. Gently. Before Frederick de Bourgh arrives at his own front door and tells her with a bailiff at his elbow.”

The room went quiet. Both Longwells looked at Richard.

Richard looked back at them a long moment. Then he rose, took the decanter from the desk himself, and refilled his glass, because a man wants his hands occupied when he has just seen the whole of his orders.

“Let me be sure I have the commission,” he said. “I sold out in the spring, gentlemen. Fifteen years of it. Spain, and a horse shot under me, and a sabre-cut I still feel in the wet. Sold the whole of it to become that finest flower of England, a private gentleman. And I have spent the six months since learning what the profession of gentleman consists of.” He counted on his fingers, glass and all. “My aunt is four days dead and still commands the family from inside a will, which I call staff work of a high order. Georgiana, who is my ward as much as my cousin, is dug in at Rosings and wants papers of you like a quartermaster. My mother has begun on the guest list for a christening that wants a child yet. And now the law of England, having tangled an estate into a knot no man in this room can cut, proposes to solve it by sending me. Down the Dover road. To tell a widowed girl of eighteen, in her dead aunt’s house, that her son is disinherited.” He drank. “In the army, when a man was wanted for work of that kind, we did him the courtesy of calling it a forlorn hope. And there was generally a medal after.”

“There will be no medal,” said Ovi, with regret. “There is, however, the brandy.”

“There is the brandy.” Richard sat back down. “I’ll go. You knew I’d go. It is why I was sent for. She is my ward, poor foolish girl, and my cousin besides, and it had far better be family than a bailiff. But you ought to know the worst of it, since you are so fond of full instructions.” He turned the glass, and the ghost of the morning’s other engagement came up in his face. “My wife is coming with me.”

The effect on the two lawyers was everything he had hoped. The elder went still. The younger sat forward.

“Mrs. Fitzwilliam. Forgive me, sir. Mrs. Fitzwilliam is—” Ovi hunted for the lawful phrase.

“In expectation of an interesting event, the first days of February. Yes. She is also announcing to her household, as of Tuesday breakfast, that we leave for Rosings on Thursday.” Richard held up a hand against the protest already forming on four lips. “Spare yourselves. I have made every argument you are about to make, and made them better, for I have long practice at ordering people to stay where it is safe. I marshaled the cold. The ruts, the inns, the Dover road. Every officer’s wife I ever knew brought to grief upon a march. I was, I will say it, since no one else will, rather magnificent.”

“And?” said Ovi.

“And I lost.” Richard said it the way a man reports a battle honestly or not at all. “She heard me to the end, head tilted, still as a general letting an enemy spend his reserves. And then she said, very mildly, mark, that of course she would be ruled entirely by Dr. Sims. That I had only to send round for the man’s opinion, and she would abide by it without a murmur. Generous. Unimpeachable. The very portrait of a dutiful wife bowing to medical wisdom.” He looked from father to son. “I accepted the terms. I walked out of my own breakfast-room congratulating myself on a reasonable compromise. And I was three streets gone before the trap sprang, gentlemen, because my wife had already sent for Sims. Had him in the house that morning, before ever the argument began. She knew to the syllable what he would say of a short, well-sprung journey taken by stages. And she handed me his verdict dressed as a concession. It was an ambush. An ambush in a bonnet, presented to me with both hands, and I marched into it with colors flying.”

There was a silence in the office of Longwell and Longwell such as that respectable firm rarely enjoyed. The elder’s mouth was pressed into a line fighting for its life. The younger had given up the fight entirely.

“You are laughing,” Richard observed, “at a decorated officer.”

“I am laughing,” said Ovi, unashamed, “at the campaign. Sir. It wants framing.”

“It wants studying. Bonaparte could profit by it.” Richard drained the glass and set it down with the finality of a man signing terms. “I ought to have known. She got me to the altar in the first place by conspiring with Mrs. Darcy against her own mother. I have married a tactician, Mr. Longwell, and the whole of my consolation is that she is now on my side, which is more than the French can say of theirs. Sims swears the journey safe, taken slow. She wishes to bury her mother and stand in her own family’s house while it is done. God knows she has earned the right, and a man who would forbid his wife that deserves whatever his dinner becomes for the rest of the winter. So we go down together. Thursday. By stages.” He stood, and reached for his hat, and then paused, and leveled one finger at Ovi with the deliberation of a man committing his last reserve. “On one condition.”

The two Longwells exchanged a glance and, finding nothing untoward in a man who asked but a single condition where they had braced for a quarrel, the elder bade him name it.

“You come with me. Today. Now. To Matlock House. And you explain the whole of it to my wife. The wills, the pedigree, that name ruled in beside hers, every word of it, gently, in your own lawyer’s order, Tudors and all if you must. Because I am damned if I will carry this home and lay it at her feet alone.”

Ovi was already gathering the scrolls.

“You are requisitioning reinforcements,” he said.

“I am doing what every gentleman of six months’ standing learns to do,” said Richard Fitzwilliam, late Colonel of His Majesty’s cavalry, settling his hat and holding the door for the man like an old comrade. “I am losing in good order. Bring the book.”