Chapter Eighteen
Elizabeth
"Mrs Darcy?"
Elizabeth startled at the voice, turning to find a maid approaching with a sealed letter on a small tray.
"From Ireland, ma'am. Included in the morning post."
She accepted it with a murmur of thanks. The direction was in an unfamiliar hand — not her aunt’s, not either of her cousins’. Some acquaintance from Westport, perhaps.
Curiosity carried her to the small sitting room at the corridor's end, empty at this hour, afternoon sun slanting across the east garden where autumn had begun painting the landscape in shades of gold and amber. She took a seat and broke the seal, unfolding pages covered in elegant script.
Dear Elizabeth, how wonderful it was to see you again after so many years...
She frowned. See you again? She turned to the signature.
Your devoted friend, Annabelle Sempill.
Annabelle. The name surfaced something half-formed — finishing school, years ago. A girl in her own year, beautiful and utterly certain of the brilliant match awaiting her. They had not been close, but they had been friendly. Annabelle Sempill, who had attended alongside a younger sister.
She went still.
A younger sister whose name had been Fiona.
The image came before the thought completed itself: the woman at the garden party, the one who had monopolised Fitzwilliam's attention with such practised ease. That nagging sense of familiarity she had dismissed in the chaos of the afternoon.
Not a stranger. A schoolmate.
Elizabeth picked up the letter again, her hands not quite steady, and read on.
I imagine you are rather surprised to receive this letter.
Perhaps even more surprised when I tell you that we did indeed meet in Ireland, although I can hardly blame you for not recognising me.
You were rather occupied with playing the hero that afternoon, were you not?
I confess I panicked the moment I saw you — I was certain you would know me immediately.
That you did not was either a mercy or an indictment of how thoroughly circumstances have altered me. I have not yet decided which.
I suspect you have worked it out by now. Yes, I was the woman attempting to secure Mr Darcy's attention at the Ahearns' garden party. I had quite forgotten that you had an aunt in Ireland. A foolish oversight, as it turned out.
How dare she write so casually about deliberate entrapment, as though it were merely an amusing misadventure to share with a friend? Elizabeth's hands tightened on the pages.
But she read on.
Knowing you as I do — or did — I expect you find my actions unconscionable.
Certainly by any conventional moral standard, what we attempted was wrong.
I am not writing to argue otherwise. But I beg you to continue reading before you pass final judgement on your old friend, because what I have to tell you may alter the picture somewhat, even if it cannot excuse it entirely.
Do you remember how my family was situated when we attended school together? The estate, the income, the comfortable future that seemed so entirely assured? It is gone, Elizabeth. All of it.
What followed was a history she had not expected, delivered without sentimentality, which made it worse.
Mr Sempill's gambling had consumed first his ready income, then his investments, then the land itself, mortgaged piece by piece to creditors who showed no mercy and extended none.
His drinking had deepened as the losses mounted, the one feeding the other in a cycle that left nothing intact.
One night he had not woken. His heart had given out, too worn down to continue.
Mrs Sempill had lasted only months longer. Grief, Annabelle wrote, whatever the physicians chose to call it. A heart broken by watching everything destroyed, by the knowledge of what her daughters faced.
Fiona and I live now entirely on our grandmother's charity.
She took us in after Mama's death, and we are grateful — we have nothing else to be grateful for.
But she is elderly, and her own circumstances are modest, and she is frantic to see us settled before she dies.
She knows what we will be left with once she is gone. She knows, and so do we.
Elizabeth lowered the letter for a moment.
The Sempills she remembered had been prosperous, their standing in their county entirely assured, Annabelle's future so certain it barely needed discussion.
That Annabelle and her sister were now entirely dependent on an elderly woman's limited charity — it was difficult to reconcile with the girl she had known.
It did not excuse what had been attempted at the garden party. But it was beginning to explain it in ways that were harder to dismiss than she would have preferred.
She read on.
There is more, I am afraid. Something which makes our situation not merely difficult but desperate in a way that admits of no delay.
Fiona is with child.
Before you think the worst of her, know that she was genuinely in love — or believed herself to be.
A gentleman who courted her properly, who spoke of marriage, who persuaded her that intimacy before their wedding was no great matter given the understanding between them.
Then his family learned of our circumstances.
He was ordered to break the connection, and he did so without hesitation or regret.
Fiona was left with nothing — no prospect, no recourse, and a condition that will become visible within weeks.
When it does, what little remains of our reputation will be destroyed entirely.
Our grandmother will be humiliated in her own community.
Fiona will be unmarriageable for the rest of her life, dependent on whatever charity she can find.
And I — my prospects were poor enough before all of this. After, they will not exist at all.
That is why we did what we did at the garden party.
I am not proud of it. I am ashamed to tell you it was not the first such attempt, only the most ambitious.
We had never aimed so high as Mr Darcy — a gentleman of his fortune was rather beyond our usual reach.
But my grandmother had visited Castlewood some days before the party, posing as a passing admirer of the house.
She was shown around quite willingly and identified the room best suited to our purposes.
When Mr Darcy appeared at the party, it seemed as though fortune was offering us something extraordinary. We could not afford to refuse it.
We did not count on you.
The pages trembled in Elizabeth's hands.
She thought of Fitzwilliam's expression that afternoon — the careful composure, the alarm barely contained beneath it.
He would have done the honourable thing.
He would have had no choice. He would have been bound to a woman he did not know, by a scheme he had no part in creating, for the rest of his life.
I do not write only to confess, Elizabeth, though perhaps I owed you that much.
I write because I need help, and because you are the only person from my former life who might still show me a scrap of compassion.
All my other friends have fallen away. I have no one else to turn to.
No one who might remember who I was before desperation made me into someone capable of all this.
What I need — what would save us — is money. I know what I am asking. I know I have no right to ask it, least of all from you, least of all on behalf of a scheme directed at your own husband.
But if you could prevail upon Mr Darcy — if you could find it in your heart to speak for us — a sum sufficient to send Fiona abroad before her condition is discovered would preserve what little dignity we have left.
There are places on the Continent where such things can be managed quietly.
Where a child can be placed with a family who will care for it properly, and a young woman's past need not follow her forever.
I am not asking for much, by his standards. I am asking for everything, by ours.
If that is truly too much — and I would not blame you for thinking so, I would not blame you for throwing this letter directly into the fire — then write back.
Tell me only that you remember I exist. That you have not entirely forgotten the girl I was before all of this began.
That would be, perhaps, enough. It may have to be.
I heard about your marriage, of course. How the engagement was announced at the garden party itself, and the wedding following so swiftly after.
I cannot help but feel that my schemes contributed to placing you in a situation you never sought.
If my foolishness helped to trap you as surely as I hoped to trap Mr Darcy, then I owe you an apology for that as well, and I offer it without reservation.
I do not expect forgiveness. I have no right to it. But I remember that you were kind to me at school, even when others were not — and I find I cannot forget it, even now.
Your devoted friend, Annabelle Sempill
Elizabeth sat for a long time after she finished, the pages resting in her lap, looking out at the garden without seeing it.
What Annabelle had attempted was wrong. It could have destroyed Fitzwilliam's happiness entirely, bound him to a stranger through malice and calculation, and he would have borne it because his honour demanded no less. That Elizabeth had disrupted the scheme did not diminish what it was.
And yet.
She thought of Fitzwilliam. Then, against her better intentions, she thought of Jane.
Of Lydia. Of any of her sisters placed in Fiona's position — compromised, abandoned, their future erased by a man who had walked away without looking back.
What would she do? How far would her own principles hold if it were Mary depending on charity that might vanish without warning, if it were Kitty facing ruin with no recourse and no time left?
She could not know. She had never been tested by any such extremity. But she had enough honesty to admit she was not certain what she would be capable of, if she were.
She rose and moved to the writing desk. Paper, ink, quill — all waited in neat arrangement. She sat down, drew a fresh sheet forward, and dipped the pen.
Then stopped.
What could she offer? She had no independent means — none whatsoever.
She could not promise Fitzwilliam's money, could not in good conscience even raise the subject with him.
Not for this. Not for the woman who had tried to trap him.
And yet silence felt equally impossible — to ignore such a letter, to turn away because acknowledging it was inconvenient, went against something too fundamental in her to be set aside.
She thought of what Fitzwilliam had said about partnership. About decisions made together. She had not yet found the courage to apply that principle to anything genuinely difficult. This was as difficult as anything she could imagine.
She could not promise money. She could not promise his forgiveness or his charity or anything that was not hers alone to give. But she could promise not to look away.
She began to write.
My dear Annabelle,
Your letter reached me this afternoon and has given me a great deal to think about, not all of it comfortable.
I will be honest with you, as you were with me.
I cannot offer financial assistance — and I want you to understand that this is not careful evasion.
It is the plain truth of my situation. I am newly married with no independent means, and what you are asking would require my husband's knowledge and consent.
I think you understand why I cannot seek that on your behalf, given what passed at Castlewood.
I will not dress that reality in softer language than it deserves.
I do not forgive what you attempted at the garden party.
I am not certain forgiveness is mine to extend in any case — it was not I who would have borne the worst of it.
But I find I cannot condemn it as simply as I expected to when I began reading your letter.
Desperation is not an excuse. It is, however, an explanation, and I have enough honesty to admit I do not know with certainty what I would do in your position, with my sister's ruin advancing daily and every other avenue exhausted.
You asked me, if nothing else, to write back. To confirm that someone from your former life remembers who you were before all of this.
I do remember. You were quick and funny and rather formidably certain of yourself, and half the girls in our year were somewhat in awe of you, though few would have admitted it. That person existed. Whatever has happened since does not erase her entirely.
I make no promises beyond this letter. But I have not closed the door.
Elizabeth Darcy
She sealed it before doubt could stop her, and sat for a moment with the letter in her hands.
She would need to tell Fitzwilliam. Not today — she did not yet have the words in the right order, and the thought of his face when she explained what she had done made her chest tighten uncomfortably.
But soon. Whatever their marriage was becoming, it could not be built on a secret kept because the truth was inconvenient.
She had written this letter without consulting him. They had spoken of partnership not a fortnight ago, of decisions made together rather than alone, and here she was already making one unilaterally, for reasons she was not sure she could adequately explain even to herself.
She looked at the sealed letter, and then at the window, and then at nothing in particular for a while.
The knowing she ought to tell him and the finding of the courage to do it were, she was discovering, two rather different things.