Page 18 of A Debt Inherited

“May I have the honour, ma’am?”

The offer was exact. Courtesy and possession held the same sleeve. No gentleman could have done less.

Lady Isobel looked at his arm.

Marjorie did not breathe.

Then the dowager Countess of Ashby placed her hand upon Hugh’s sleeve.

She did it without hesitation.

That was her courage.

Hugh led her towards the door with every mark of respect due to her rank. Dr Kerr rose. Mr Armitage and Mr Ballantyne stood aside. The passage beyond waited, lamplit and cold.

Marjorie followed alone.

As she passed the desk, she saw the papers Hugh had left upon it. Dowager Lady Ashby. Lady Marjorie Kerr. Alexander Kerr. Three neat headings. Three lives made legible by ink.

Behind her, McNab closed the library door.

Chapter 7

Bridgetown Garrison, Barbados, February 1785

The flies came first, as they always did, then the heat rose to drive them mad. Bennet sat behind the Adjutant’s desk with his shirt undone at the throat, the quill steady. The ledger before him was half-filled, the ink already fading. He drew the line, dated it, and signed for two deaths before breakfast and one after.

Outside, the barrack yard baked white. Fever had taken another lieutenant the night before, and the surgeon said the Captain of Grenadiers would not last the week. That left only the commander above him, and he seldom left his quarters. The duty of command, such as it was, had fallen quietly into Bennet’s hands.

He had grown used to it—the heat, the paper, the slow arithmetic of loss. His life was a rhythm now: ink, tally, burial, repeat.

A shadow passed the doorway. “Mail from the packet, sir.”

The sergeant laid a canvas sack upon the desk, its drawstring dark with salt. Letters first: half for men already dead, one for the colonel, and a small bundle for the commissary. Then the papers—Gazette, Morning Chronicle, Naval Register. All months out of date, all still damp.

He opened them with more care than interest. Beneath the papers lay the small brown parcel he waited for each quarter: three books bound in blue calf, sent by an old acquaintance from London who had survived the island and owed him gratitude.

He unwrapped them. Cicero, Plutarch, and a thin volume of Cowper’s verse.

The garrison had come to call him the Don. He did not correct them; the name was an irony too justly earned.

He picked up another paper. A name caught his eye.

Major David Fitzwilliam, attached to the Madras Establishment, died of wounds received in service upon the Coast.

The notice was short, polite, the sort of death that could be printed without pain. He imagined his friend’s pressed uniform, his family proud, his name carried home without blemish.

Bennet folded the paper and leant back. Outside, the light struck the shutters and made bars across the floor. He remembered Cambridge—laughter echoing under stone, a carriage, and the sound of horses leaving in the night.

There was nothing he could write to Matlock House but condolence. To Pemberley, he could write something else.

He drew a sheet of foolscap towards him and dipped the quill. When he finished, he folded the page and sealed it with the garrison wax. Upon the outer leaf he wrote, in a careful hand:

Mr Edmund Darcy

of Pemberley,

in the County of Derbyshire