Page 74

Chapter Thirty-Six

T he study reeked of wax and paper. Melted seals lined the desk in regimented order, each one bearing his crest in sharp relief.

The chill had not lifted despite the fire’s coaxing heat, and his coat felt tighter today—stiff in the shoulders, restrictive in the sleeves.

He had not worn it since one morning when Netherfield was entertaining the Bennet ladies for tea. That felt a century ago.

“Mr. Dyer’s clerk is expected at half past eleven,” he said, without turning from the desk. “We shall sign and witness here. Ashford has stated he will arrive before noon.”

A disapproving sniff from behind him confirmed that Lady Catherine had taken the nearest chair—likely without asking.

“You may yet come to your senses, nephew. Nothing obliges you to sign this morning. Every stroke of that pen tightens the noose. Delay it a day—delay it an hour—and you may still be spared the worst.”

“Catherine, please,” sighed the dowager.

“How can you countenance this?” Lady Catherine huffed, stabbing her cane into the carpet. “You sign these papers, Darcy, and you bind yourself to a family too craven to meet your eyes.”

He did not rise to the bait. Instead, he just kept staring out the window until he heard the voices from the hall.

A moment later, the door creaked open, and Mr. Dyer’s clerk stepped in, blinking against the low light. “Sir. I have the packets ready for delivery.”

The man handed them over with the precision of a man counting cannonballs. “Three sets. All ready for your inspection, sir.”

Darcy laid them out before him and he tapped the edge of the top page into place, once, twice, until it settled flush with the others. Three sets. Marriage settlement. Dowry notation. Schedule of trust inheritance, assets to be transferred upon union.

He picked up the pen.

The dowager cleared her throat delicately, knitting needles clicking. “Must we all hold our breath for this? You look like a boy at the gallows.”

Darcy signed the first page.

His hand moved with precision, but his pulse had quickened. The sound of the pen scratching across paper was intolerably loud, like a ticking clock in an empty room. The wax seal followed. Red. Perfectly centered. He reached for the next folio.

Elizabeth would have hated this. She would have scoffed at the ceremony of it all—the stamps, the witnesses, the pretence that affection required legal scaffolding to hold it upright. Affection. He had never dared to call it that aloud, not even in the privacy of his own mind.

But now the word broke through, sharp as a pinprick.

He signed again. Page two.

She would have laughed at the solemnity in this room. Called them all cowards, perhaps, for hiding their feelings behind embossed paper and duty. And yet, he was here. Signing. Stamping. Stacking each sheet like bricks in a wall that could never be torn down.

Another page. Another signature. His hand shook, but carried on with its task.

His heart was doing something else entirely.

Lady Catherine surged to her feet, the tip of her cane biting into the carpet with every determined step. “You may be one signature away from disaster,” she snapped, voice rising. “That girl’s father has never stood firm in his life, and now you intend to bind yourself—publicly—to a reed!”

Darcy looked up just in time to see her advancing.

But she did not reach him.

The dowager, still seated, extended her own cane like a fencer unsheathing a blade. “Sit down, Catherine,” she said crisply. “Or I shall be forced to recount that unfortunate business with the vicar, the punchbowl, and your third-best hat. You remember the one.”

Lady Catherine stopped mid-step, turned a dangerous shade of red, and sat with the weight of a toppled statue.

“Good,” said the dowager, returning to her knitting. “We are all much more agreeable when seated.”

The clerk, caught between noblewomen and temperaments he could not rank, shrank closer to the table, eyes fixed on the documents as though they might shield him.

Darcy signed the final page.

“She will not be the last to regret it,” he muttered.

The wax seal hissed as it met the paper.

From the corner, the dowager resumed her knitting with a rustle of wool and disdain. “If paper could save a marriage, we would all live in perfect harmony. But no parchment ever held more weight than a breath withheld at the wrong moment.”

Darcy cast his pen aside on the desk, not even bothering to put it up properly.

His head lifted slowly. “Yet some breath must be withheld. Or all is lost.”

The fire crackled. The dowager’s eyes narrowed.

A knock sounded at the door.

Darcy looked up at once, spine tight. “That must be him.”

The clerk glanced at the mantel clock and nodded, relief loosening his shoulders. “Yes, sir. Nearly to the minute.”

Darcy stepped back from the desk, jerking his waistcoat, and motioned for Jackson.

The butler opened the door—and did not step aside.

Instead, he turned and held out a single envelope, crested in wax and mottled by the rain.

“Delivered by a footman,” Jackson said quietly. He extended a folded letter, the Ashford crest waxed in dull green at the seal.

Darcy took it, staring for a moment at the seal. A footman. Not even a secretary. Not a message delivered hand to hand, but dropped like an afterthought at the door.

He cracked the wax and read.

The words were brief. Insufficient. Ashford regretted the inconvenience. Circumstances had changed. The match would not proceed.

No signature. Only a stamped card.

Lady Catherine surged to her feet in a magnificent sweep of rustling skirts, her cane striking the floor like a gavel.

“It is exactly as I predicted. The Ashfords have shown their true breeding—or lack thereof. No spine, no honor, no sense of obligation. And you—sitting here like a clerk, arranging papers and signatures, thinking duty can be scribbled into permanence! You thought a contract would secure loyalty? You thought paper could stand where character failed?”

She turned on him fully, her eyes blazing.

“But we shall repair this. You will announce the engagement to Anne by week’s end.

You shall accompany her to Matlock, be seen, be quoted.

The gossip will pivot before the banns are barely cold.

We shall salvage what you have so grievously mismanaged.

A man betrayed by his bride commands sympathy.

A man betrothed to his cousin commands deference. ”

“Catherine!” the dowager warned.

“Nonsense! Darcy, you will propose to Anne. Today. Before your wits escape you again. You have delayed long enough. The time has come to fulfill the expectations set down since your cradle!” She was already striding toward the door, calling for Jackson to fetch her daughter, demanding the green silk and the pearls.

Darcy did not move. The study seemed to shrink, the air dense with perfume and power.

“I shall write to the Archbishop myself,” she announced. “I have connections you cannot fathom. We shall have a special license within the week. It will be done.”

She lifted her chin with finality, her expression alight with triumph—as though the matter had already been signed and sealed.

Darcy stared at the page, the lines of it curling faintly at the edges from the warmth of the hearth. The letters—precise, polite, and unmistakably final—might as well have been etched in stone. Each word hit like a tally against his chest.

He could say yes. He could nod once, let her take over, let her do what she had always wanted. A proposal, a wedding, a dutiful cousin bride—and no more scandal, no more noise.

No more Elizabeth. It would be over.

Good Lord…

“Leave me,” he mumbled.

Lady Catherine made a sharp noise of objection, part snort, part protest. Her cane snapped once against the floor. “Do not be absurd. This is precisely the moment when—”

But the dowager rose before she could finish, unfolding herself from the chair like an empress descending from a throne. “We shall leave you to your paperwork,” she said with a glance toward the desk. “No doubt the ink still believes it holds power.”

Lady Catherine scoffed, but her argument dissolved beneath her mother’s glare. She turned sharply, skirts flaring, muttering something vicious about betrayal and imbeciles. Her cane tapped a path toward the door, one step behind her dignity.

The clerk, who had made himself near-invisible beside the window, bowed hastily and clutched his folio as though it might deflect fury. His eyes flicked to Darcy and then away again, unsure whether to offer condolence or congratulations.

Only the dowager remained, like a sentry at the threshold.

Her cane rested lightly against the floor, more scepter than support.

Her expression had shifted—no longer imperious, but assessing.

Her mouth drew to a fine, deliberate line, and her eyes narrowed, not with sympathy, but with something more dangerous: understanding.

She took one step back into the room.

“What will you do now?” she asked. Not unkindly, but without softness either. She asked as though it were a chess problem, and the pawn left had been left exposed.

He said nothing. The letter in his hand was answer enough.

After a moment, she inclined her head. “Then you had best decide before someone else does.”

And with that, she turned and departed, her cane clicking once against the polished floor. The latch clicked closed behind her.

Darcy remained where he was.

The fire crackled. The folded letter drooped in his hand, the wax seal already broken but still cruelly intact in his memory. The paper rustled slightly in the heat, like breath from something dying.

No reply.

No recourse.

Only a void where a signature ought to be, and a place in his heart that would never be filled.