Page 3 of Darcy's Legacy Tortoise
“A very reasonable request,” I agreed. “My mother had similar sentiment, as well as my grandmother. Hounds were not allowed indoors; they were used strictly for hunting, and Mrs. Reynolds was quite strict about the shedding. However, my father was permitted a tortoise, and he passed it on to me as a boy.”
“A tortoise, Mr. Darcy?” Mr. Gardiner’s brows raised with surprise.
“He is quite a character. Bertram, eight inches long, around six pounds, and likely to outlive us all. I brought him to London because my sister ignores him. He asks little—just a garden and children for company. I have neither, and he deserves better than my neglect.”
“Mr. Darcy.” Mr. Gardiner leaned forward, his expression caught between surprise and genuine interest. “Are you offering your father’s tortoise?”
“I am. He eats strawberry tops and dandelion leaves. He dislikes loud noises and sudden movements, but he is otherwise remarkably sociable. He would be well suited, I think, to a house with four children.”
“This is, I confess, the most remarkable business call I have ever received.”
“I assure you, I did not intend for the conversation to take this direction.”
“And yet here we are.” He smiled broadly. “You must come to the house and meet my wife. She will want to hear everything about Bertram’s care. The children will need to be prepared. When would you prefer to come?”
“Will tomorrow at four be sufficient warning?”
“Assuredly.” Mr. Gardiner beamed as if he had pulled off a coup. “I will warn the household, for what good it will do.”
I thanked him and confirmed the merino order. I shook his hand and walked through his warehouse, past stacked bolts of cloth and industrious clerks who paid me no mind, and I climbed into my carriage and sat in perfect stillness while the coachman turned toward Mayfair.
Bertram was in his box beside the library fire, his ancient head drawn into his shell, the lettuce untouched, and the warming stone cold. The room was dim and very quiet, the way rooms become in houses that are well-maintained but have no one happy in them.
I knelt beside the box. “Wake up, old fellow. I have news.”
One dark eye opened, slow and patient and profoundly unimpressed by anything the world might choose to offer.
“There is a house in Gracechurch Street with four children who will feed you strawberry tops and call you Sir Bertram with all the solemnity of a royal audience. There is a garden for you to forage and the sun for you to bask. You have been with a Darcy long enough, but as we have no children, you will go to a family who will know how to keep you properly.”
Bertram’s head extended from his shell by a quarter-inch. In a tortoise of sixty years, this constitutes considerable enthusiasm.
“I was wrong about something,” I confessed to my old counselor. “I told Bingley that Miss Bennet did not care for him, and I was mistaken. She is in London, staying on Gracechurch Street with the intent of reacquainting herself with the Bingleys. Caroline knew and said nothing. I stood behind a curtain and watched her be turned away from a door.” I replaced the warming stone. “I do not yet know what to do about it. But I cannot pretend I did not see her face.”
The tortoise regarded me with the steady, ancient patience of a creature who has outlived everyone who first loved him and has learned to wait for the rest of the world to catch up.
“I am doing this for you,” I concluded. “You need a garden.”
Bertram closed his eyes and withdrew into his shell.
My father always said that when a Darcy cannot explain his own actions, he is on the verge of something either very wise or very foolish, and will not know which until it is much too late.
CHAPTER TWO
THE GENTLEMAN WITH THE TORTOISE
Elizabeth
My sister did not weepabout the door. She wept about the curtain.
Jane had borne the snub itself with the composure that was her particular gift, that gentle, unwavering steadiness I had spent twenty years admiring and only recently recognized as armor. The Bingley sisters were not at home. Very well. Jane had smiled at the butler, thanked him with her customary warmth, and walked to the waiting carriage as if she had merely been passing and thought to leave her card. It was only when she climbed inside, she told me, that she had looked up at the house.
“The curtain moved, Lizzy. Someone was standing very close to the glass. A tall figure, quite still.” She had turned her teacup in its saucer without drinking. “It looked very like Mr. Darcy.”
That was Tuesday. By Wednesday afternoon, I had managed something that resembled calm, though really it was fury in a better dress. My sister had sat on this very sofa, in this very drawing-room, and quietly come undone, and I had been holding myself together ever since.
“Lizzy.” Jane looked at me from her end of the settee, where she had been pretending to read a novel for the better part of an hour. “Do you think Mr. Bingley knew I called?”
“No,” I said, with more certainty than the evidence warranted, because Jane needed conviction and I could give her that, at least. “Caroline manages him. She arranges, contrives, and smooths away anything that does not suit her plans. She cut you, plain and simple, and whether Bingley was aware or not is incidental.”
