Page 151 of Homeless

“Give me the pen.”

LXI

Mrs Darcy

The banking house off Lombard Street was exactly as forbidding as she had feared. Elizabeth walked into it on Mr Yates's arm in a new grey gown made after the likeness of the silk-merino one she had ruined in Spain, with her husband's authority folded in her reticule and the Spanish offer in a leather case the solicitor carried.

They received her civilly. Two grave gentlemen rose and bowed. They had a chair set for her and expressed themselves honoured, all the while looking at her with the patient blankness of men who had been obliged to give an audience to somebody's wife and meant to give her exactly as much of their time as courtesy demanded and not one minute more. The senior partner — Mr Fenwick, a heavy, deliberate man with a soft voice and hard eyes — folded his hands and inclined his head and said that they were entirely at Mrs Darcy's service. They understood, he said, that she came on some matter touching her husband's affairs, and that they hoped Mr Darcy was recovering from his indisposition, poor gentleman. Every word of it was the condescension offered to the pitiful.

“I will come to the matter directly,” Elizabeth said, “since I am sure your time is valuable.”

“Not at all, madam. We are glad to give you what help we can. Though I ought to say, Mrs Darcy, so that you do not distress yourself unnecessarily, that your husband's situation with regard to the loan is one we have already had the melancholy duty of discussing with him in person, at some length, and I fear there is very little in it that a… well, that further conversation is likely to alter. These are hard matters, and no fit burden for a lady. Perhaps it would be better if Mr Yates were to lay before us whatever it is you have brought, and you need not trouble yourself with the particulars.”

Elizabeth smiled sweetly. “You are very considerate,” she said, “but I am afraid the particulars are precisely what I have come about, and I know them rather well. Mr Yates is here to see that every legal nicety is correct, and to draw whatever wants drawing. But the case, I will put to you myself, if you will allow it — and I think, when you have heard it, you will be glad I did, for it is very much to your advantage as well as ours.”

Something flickered in Fenwick's hard eyes — surprise, faint displeasure, and even a hint of affront. Beside him, the younger partner, a Mr Coote, glanced at his senior with the beginning of a smile that was not quite kind.

“By all means, Mrs Darcy,” Fenwick said. “We are listening.”

“When my husband came to you more than a fortnight ago,” she said, “he brought you a certified acknowledgment of a debt owed him by the Spanish crown. You examined it, and you told him, correctly, that a proof a debt is owed is not a proof it will be paid, and that you could not therefore lend against it. That was a sound judgment on the facts as they then stood. I do not quarrel with it. I have come to tell you that the facts have changed.”

She nodded to Yates, who opened the case and laid the documents before them.

“Spain has answered Mr Darcy’s claim. There, before you, is the answer: a formal offer from the Spanish crown, under its own hand, acknowledging the debt and undertaking to discharge it. That is no longer a hope, gentlemen. That is a foreign government's written promise to pay, produced by its own foreign office, obtained through the diplomatic weight of ours. It is a different creature entirely from the document you refused, and you know it is.”

Fenwick had drawn the offer toward him. He was reading it now, his soft-voiced condescension gone quiet. Coote had leaned in to read over his shoulder, and for a moment, there was no sound in the room but the turning of a page.

“The terms,” Fenwick said at last, slowly, “are not simple. The principal in installments over a term of years. A portion of the interest in coin. And the remainder — the greater part — in some manner of grant respecting the Spanish wool trade.” He looked up. “Mrs Darcy, I will be frank with you, as I would be with your husband. An installment of coin spread over years does not discharge a mortgage that falls due this Michaelmas. And a grant of foreign wool, sheep, trading privileges — however generous it may look on paper, is not a thing this house can readily value or lend against. We deal in money, madam, not in fleece. I fear that when it is looked at closely, this offer, for all its fine appearance, does not much mend your husband's case. I am sorry to say it. But you would not thank me for false comfort.”

He folded the offer and pressed it back across the desk to her, but Elizabeth stopped it with her fingers. “You deal in money and not in fleece,” Elizabeth said. “Yes. That is exactly your difficulty, Mr Fenwick, and I am going to solve it for you, because I do not think you understand what you are looking at.”

Coote's smile faltered.

“You see a grant of wool,” she said, “and you think of sheep, and you think it beneath the notice of a serious house. The man who secures a standing right in that trade now, at this moment, while it lies broken open, secures a position in the single most valuable commodity in English manufacture at the one instant in three centuries it has come within reach. That is what Spain is offering my husband. My husband's estate sits at the head of the Derwent valley, gentlemen, in the very cradle of the woolen and cotton manufacture — Cromford, Belper, the whole of it, downstream of his own land. All those mills depend on him, and would stumble over themselves to negotiate with him for his water and for his wool. He is positioned, better than almost any man in England, to make it worth a fortune. And I will tell you plainly that there are men in this City — great men, textile men, men whose names you would know — who would give a very great deal to hold what Spain is here offering my husband for nothing but a debt already owed him.”

“You speak,” Fenwick said slowly, “as though you had some knowledge of the trade.”

“My uncle is Edward Gardiner, of Gracechurch Street. He has spent thirty years in wine and in wool, and I had the honour of helping him to negotiate in that very country, as I speak the language and understand the business. He is… at this very moment he remains there. But you may send to his trading house on Basinghall Street for confirmation of every word I have said. Ask for Mr Copeland, but you do not need to have my credentials confirmed to understand the thing that matters to you, which is this.” She leaned forward, and put her gloved hand on the papers between them. “You told my husband you could not lend against a hope. This is not a hope. This is a government's written promise to pay, part in coin and part in an asset that any competent valuer in this City will tell you is worth a great deal more than the sum owed. It is real. It is documented. It is security — exactly the security you said you required and did not have. I am not asking you to render my husband charity. I am asking you to do the ordinary, prudent, profitable business of a banking house: to refinance a mortgage against sound collateral, and take your interest, and make your profit, on a loan that is now demonstrably good. If you will not —” she pulled the offer back and passed it to Yates — “then I shall thank you for your time, and take these same documents to a house that can see what is in front of it. They shall have the business, and the profit, instead of you. There are other banks in Lombard Street, gentlemen. I passed three of them on my way in.”

There was a long silence.

Fenwick looked at the offer, and at Yates, who inclined his head to confirm that the legal ground was sound, and then — for a longer moment — at Elizabeth herself. The condescension had gone out of his face entirely.

“Mrs Darcy, you make a considerable case.”

“I make an accurate one. The considerable part is Spain's.”

Something that was almost a smile touched the corner of the hard mouth. “Mr Coote,” he said, without looking away from her, “be so good as to send round to Mr Copeland in Basinghall Street, with our compliments, and ask whether he would wait upon us tomorrow to speak to the valuation of a Spanish wool concession.” He folded his hands again, but differently now. “And have the current terms of the Darcy mortgage brought up from the strong room. It would seem, madam, that we have a good deal to discuss after all — and rather less time than one would wish to discuss it in. Shall we?”

Elizabeth Darcy sat back in her chair, in the green-baized room where her husband had been offered the decent burial of his family's seat a fortnight before, and permitted herself, at last, the smallest breath of triumph.

“By all means.”

Two weeks did a great deal for a man, even a man who had tried to die by a dozen ways in one country and been shaken half to pieces in another.

Darcy was downstairs now, in his own drawing room, in a chair by the fire. There was a rug over his knees that he privately considered an insult, and permitted only because Elizabeth had put it there and would put it back the moment he threw it off. He was thin, and easily tired, and his hand still had a tremor in it by evening. He could not yet climb the stairs without stopping halfway and pretending to admire a picture. Samuels came twice a week to dose and examine him, and promised the fits would not return if he was careful. Darcy believed him about half.

But he was down. He was dressed, and shaved but for the beard Elizabeth would not let him lose, and sitting among his own people managing his own affairs again. After the weeks he had passed, that felt very nearly like glory.