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Chapter One

F itzwilliam Darcy stared at the inkwell. Not the letter atop the blotter. Not the man behind the desk. Not the tidy window beyond which summer bloomed like a wound.

The inkwell.

Round. Ornate. A dragon coiled round its silver neck, fire caught in its tiny mouth, its tail wrapped tightly about the base. He could not imagine why it was so aggressive. What was it meant to guard? Ink?

Ink did not need guarding. Estates did.

“I must ask, Mr. Darcy—have you reached a decision?”

Darcy blinked. Once. Then again, more deliberately. The solicitor’s voice was not unkind, but it carried the insufferable crispness of someone used to explaining difficult things slowly.

Mr. Dyer was not his father’s man—Darcy had dismissed him months ago—but the trustees required an independent party for this meeting, and the earl had chosen Dyer for his discretion and silence. Thus far, Darcy could vouch only for the silence.

“I was under the impression,” Darcy said, his voice scratchy with disuse, “that my father’s intentions were already decided. What, precisely, remains for me to determine?”

A flicker passed over Dyer’s face. Sympathy, perhaps. Or something close enough that Darcy wanted to snarl at it.

“Only the means by which you intend to comply, sir. The trust, as you know, becomes fully yours on the thirtieth anniversary of your birth. Unless certain… provisions are unmet.”

Provisions . The word tasted of cold iron.

Darcy had read the document a dozen times, perhaps more. The phrasing was maddeningly precise. By his thirtieth birthday, he must either marry, or relinquish sole control of the Darcy endowments.

Not Pemberley itself. That was safe—so long as he could afford to keep it. But everything else—the entailed investments, the shipping shares, the London property rents, Georgiana’s dowry and jointure and the full weight of her future—those would pass into shared hands.

And who were those hands?

“Remind me,” Darcy said coldly, “whom the clause names as alternate trustees.”

Dyer hesitated. Just long enough. “The Earl of Matlock is first listed. Should he decline, then Viscount Winthrop, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, or—”

Darcy stood.

“—a qualified solicitor, to be named by the board,” Dyer finished, rising hastily as well.

The room was too warm. Or his collar too tight. Or his father too absent. He could not decide which offended him more.

“My sister,” Darcy said, pacing to the hearth despite the season, “is eleven years old. A child. Gentle-hearted, painfully shy, and not yet come out of the schoolroom. You understand that?”

“I do,” Dyer said cautiously.

“She still names her dolls and weeps at the end of fairy tales. She is not to be made a pawn in a trust negotiation.”

“No one intends to treat her as such, sir.”

Darcy turned, his glare flaring. “Do they not? Because as I see it, unless I wed by some artificial deadline, Georgiana’s entire fortune becomes a chess piece for my aunt to push across a table.”

Dyer had the gall to look regretful. “I agree it is an unfortunate clause. But your father meant to protect her. You are only four and twenty this past February, and your father wrote the final draft of this trust in… yes, March of ’02, during your second year at Cambridge.

Your affairs were—and if you will forgive me, sir—still are largely unsettled, and Miss Darcy’s future dependent upon a good match. He believed it prudent.”

Darcy stared at the document. It was neat. Too neat. His father’s hand had not trembled. Of course it had not. He had not been ill when he wrote it. Only prudent .

Egad, how he hated that word.

He had never disobeyed his father. Never once, though he had, at times, longed to do so. And now the man was beyond reach, beyond argument—and still managing to issue commands from beyond the grave.

“You have no objection to marriage itself, I assume,” Dyer added. “Simply to the timeline.”

That earned a humorless laugh. “I object to being auctioned off by the calendar like a bull in need of breeding.”

Dyer cleared his throat. “Well. That is one way to put it.”

Darcy rubbed the bridge of his nose. He had not slept properly in weeks.

Pemberley’s land records were still in disarray, the steward had retired, and Georgiana smiled less frequently now that she had a new governess—one who thought sentiment was the balm of the lower class.

His life, once a clean progression of Latin verse and Greek philosophy, had unraveled into ink-blotted ledgers and legalese.

He had no room for a wife yet.

Eventually, of course. He had always known what would be required of him. He would marry. He would produce an heir. He would preserve the estate his father had handed down.

What he had not expected was to be badgered into it like some fumbling schoolboy behind on his sums.

“I will comply,” he said at last. “But I will do so on my own terms. My own timeline. The trust allows me five and a half years, and I shall take them. When I marry, it will not be at the pleasure of my uncle, nor my aunt, nor a band of trustees sniffing after influence.”

Dyer nodded slowly. “Very well. Then I shall inform the board you are reviewing the matter and intend to act accordingly.”

He did not ask when. He knew better.

Darcy reached for his gloves. His hands had not stopped shaking since last October.

As he left the office and stepped into the white heat of early summer, he felt the full weight of it settle on his shoulders again—not grief, not duty, but the bitter knowledge that his father’s last lesson had come too late:

No one escapes legacy. Not even the unwilling.

T he wheel hit a rut and Elizabeth Bennet bounced in her seat, her shoulder thumping lightly against Jane’s. Across from them, Mary gave a soft, martyred sigh and tightened her grip on her copy of Fordyce’s Sermons, as though they might offer ballast.

Elizabeth turned back to the window. The hills were rising now—low and green and untamed—spotted with sheep and dry stone walls that unraveled across the landscape like abandoned threads. It was not wild, precisely, but it was not Longbourn, either. And thank heaven for that.

“Are we very near, Aunt?” she asked, not for the first time.

Mrs. Gardiner gave her an indulgent smile from beside her husband. “Another half-hour, I expect. Lambton lies just beyond the ridge.”

Elizabeth grinned and settled back. “If it were any farther, Mary might complete the entire sermon on prudence before we arrive.”

Mary lifted her chin without looking up. “There is no wrong time for moral instruction.”

“Except possibly when the hills are too pretty to scold,” Elizabeth murmured, but Jane’s quiet elbow persuaded her to leave the matter there.

This was not the first time Elizabeth had visited Derbyshire, but it had been years—probably at least ten, so her memory was but faint.

Mr. Gardiner, when not absorbed in matters of trade and shipping, had a fondness for travel.

He and Mrs. Gardiner had planned this excursion in the spring and invited her with such natural pleasure that Elizabeth could not help but accept.

Jane had been added to the party as a matter of course—no one refused Jane anything—and Mary had insisted upon joining with the air of a volunteer for sainthood.

Kitty and Lydia had not been invited. Elizabeth suspected that Mr. Gardiner had decided he liked his sanity too much to see it scandalized by misplaced flirtation.

“I still cannot believe how green everything is,” Jane said quietly, drawing back the curtain. “It is softer than Hertfordshire, somehow.”

“It is older,” Mrs. Gardiner said. “The rocks know more secrets.”

“Now you sound like a Gothic novel,” Elizabeth teased.

“Do not tempt her,” Mr. Gardiner said from the opposite seat. “Last time we stayed in Lambton, she told me the bedposts whispered warnings in the dark.”

“They did,” said Mrs. Gardiner serenely. “You simply do not listen.”

Elizabeth smiled and let the chatter pass over her. She was not impatient, not really, but there was something in her chest that buzzed like a trapped bee. It had been building ever since the road began to climb, and she could not quite say what it was—excitement, perhaps. Or dread.

Her hand drifted to her satchel, fingers brushing the worn leather edge of her journal. She did not open it—she would not—not while Mary was within peering distance. But still, the weight of it was oddly steadying, as if the act of writing could settle the things she had not yet named.

She had not been particularly mournful at leaving Longbourn.

Her mother had spent the last fortnight alternating between sighing over some syrupy poetry that Jane had received from a now-absent suitor, and lamenting Elizabeth’s apparent allergy to all things demure and practical.

Charlotte Lucas had taken to hinting—rather archly—about the virtues of a stable income over romantic nonsense, and Lydia’s laughter had grown especially high-pitched now that she had discovered which hats made the shop boys blush.

When the Gardiners’ invitation arrived, Elizabeth had packed her valise before the ink dried.

It was not that she disliked home. It was simply that she had begun to imagine something beyond it.

The carriage crested the hill and began to descend toward the town.

Lambton was nestled in the valley, neat and inviting, its cottages painted white and grey with tidy stone chimneys and flowering window boxes.

Beyond it, the land rolled upward again toward Matlock and Bakewell, and somewhere further still—though Elizabeth cared little about the famous gardens her aunt loved to gush over—the infamous Pemberley of her aunt’s fondest boasts lay tucked behind the hills.

“You will like Mrs. Hartley,” said Mrs. Gardiner. “She and I were at school together, and she is twice as sensible now as she was then. Her husband is the vicar of St. Thomas’s, and they keep a lovely garden. If I remember rightly, she plays the harp.”