Page 118 of Honor Requires

Darcy’s gaze lifted slowly.

“For smuggling and for gain.”

“Yes, sir.” Stone nodded toward the documents. “Hargrave profits from trade—iron openly, other things less openly. Langford gives those ventures legal cover, whether by customs papers, warehouse orders, or warrants that keep inconvenient men from interfering.”

Darcy let the order for Thomas Gray fall to the table. For one terrible instant he saw not the room before him, but darkness—the rough cloth over his head, the ropes biting his wrists, the grating mockery in his captor’s voice.

The great Fitzwilliam Darcy is no more.

No. He drew in a breath and forced the memory down. He would not be carried backward by it now. Instead, he looked at the papers laid before him and saw not suffering, but structure. Connection. Proof.

Hargrave moved goods. Langford forged the law to protect him. Gardiner had gone to the Home Office. Richard was already in motion. All his plans were coming together. If all went well, Hargrave and Langford would be taken at once—one in the act, the other by the papers that had made the act possible.

Darcy gathered the documents and returned them to Stone with deliberate care. “You have done very well.”

Stone inclined his head. “Thank you, sir.”

“You will keep watching,” Darcy said. “Especially Hargrave. I want to know the moment he moves, the moment he writes, the moment he breathes in the direction of a ship or warehouse.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Langford. If he destroys papers, if he calls unusual hours, if he attempts to flee—I am to know.”

Stone rose. “You shall.”

Darcy studied him intently. “No one must suspect how much we know.”

“They do not,” Stone said. “And if I can prevent it, they will not.”

Darcy gave a single nod. “Good. You may go.”

Stone bowed and withdrew, leaving the room once more to silence.

Darcy remained where he was for some moments after the door closed. The fire shifted in the grate. Somewhere in the street beyond, wheels passed over stone. The house held itself in stillness around him, warm, ordered, secure.

He ought to have felt triumph. Instead, what he felt was something harder, more difficult to name. Hargrave and Langford, at least, had revealed themselves fully now. Their fates were no longer uncertain. The net was closing, and he had only to wait for the proper moment to draw it tight.

But Wickham—Darcy moved at last, crossing slowly to the window. The late afternoon had deepened toward evening. Across the street, the facades of familiar houses stood in their accustomed manner, unchanged in appearance if not in truth.

Wickham remained the one part of the design he could not resolve. It should have been simple. In some moods, Darcy wished it were. Wickham had seduced his sister, stolen access to Pemberley, abandoned both duty and decency, and spent the years since in waste and vice. He deserved no gentleness.

But he was not Hargrave or Langford, both who showed no remorse.

There was corruption in Wickham, yes. Weakness and vanity. Self-pity enough to ruin any better quality he might once have possessed. But there was also something else Darcy had seen in those moments when drink loosened his guard and memory pressed too close.

Regret. Remorse, even, though it was crippled by cowardice and indulgence.

Darcy rested one hand against the window frame and looked out without seeing the street before him. He did not know what to do about Wickham. That ignorance troubled him more than he cared to admit.

For Hargrave and Langford, justice had shape. It could be assembled from documents, from witnesses, from the machinery of law turned at last against those who had abused it.

But Wickham lived in a more ambiguous country—he had done unforgivable things and seemed half ruined by the doing of them. He possessed what he had once wanted and took no pleasure in it—he neglected Georgiana, but did not, from what little Darcy could gather, actively torment her. He drank, gambled, drifted, and spoke now and then as if he had long ago discovered that the victory he secured had poisoned him.

Darcy closed his eyes briefly. It was like Wickham had designed his own destruction and punishment, actively living it daily. He had thought vengeance a simpler thing. It was not. And if he was to have Elizabeth’s good opinion—if he was to deserve it—he could not afford to forget that distinction now.

Hargrave did not sit. He stood near the window of Langford’s private office, one hand resting lightly against the back of a chair he had not troubled himself to use, his gaze directed not toward the street below, but toward the faint distortion of his own reflection in the glass. It was a habit he had acquired over time—speaking while appearing not to look at the man he addressed. It unsettled some. Langford, he suspected, was not so easily moved.

“I await word of the shipment,” Hargrave said, his tone even. “Until it is safely accounted for, I shall make no further arrangements with Gardiner. There is no sense in advancing one matter while another remains uncertain.”