Eight
Three weeks into her employment, Elizabeth had learned the rhythms of Darcy House the way a sailor learned the tides—by necessity, by repetition, and by the understanding that survival depended on knowing which way the current would pull.
She knew, for instance, that Mrs Hatfield inspected the nursery linens on Tuesdays.
That Barton polished the silver on Thursdays with a devotion bordering on religious.
That Alice could be bribed with sugar biscuits to stay an extra hour with Anne when Elizabeth needed to mend her stockings in peace.
And she knew that Mr Darcy never missed dinner.
Georgiana was present most evenings, bright and warm, steering the conversation with the easy grace that made Elizabeth forget, sometimes for whole minutes, that she did not belong at this table.
The Colonel appeared three or four nights a week, filling the room with laughter, campaign stories, and an appetite that alarmed Cook.
Lord Lofton joined them when Georgiana’s wedding plans required his presence, which was increasingly often.
But there were evenings when Georgiana had obligations elsewhere—a ball with Lord Lofton’s family, a supper at Matlock House, the endless social machinery of a woman about to marry well.
The Colonel had his own business. On those nights, the table shrank to two.
Elizabeth at his left, Mr Darcy at the head, and far too many empty chairs next to them.
Those dinners were careful, quiet, and exquisitely proper.
Barton stood at his post by the sideboard.
Two footmen served and cleared. The conversation revolved around Anne’s progress, her questions, and the latest instalment of her ongoing correspondence with the Almighty.
It was pleasant and entirely safe. Elizabeth contributed her observations.
Mr Darcy contributed his. The butler poured the wine, and nobody said anything that could not have been printed in The Times.
And yet.
There was a quality to those evenings she could not name.
A charge in the silence between courses, a weight to the glances that were too brief and too carefully directed at the plate.
She caught him, once, watching her hands as she broke bread, and his gaze had moved away so quickly she might have imagined it. She did not imagine it, though.
She told herself it meant nothing.
Tonight was one of those evenings. Georgiana was at the opera with Lord Lofton. The Colonel was dining with fellow officers at his club. The table was set for two. Elizabeth had returned that afternoon from Somers Town, and she had not spoken a word since the soup was placed before her.
Mr Darcy noticed.
“Miss Bennet.” His voice was quiet and careful, as if approaching a subject he was not certain he had the right to approach. “Is something amiss?”
She set down the spoon she had been holding without eating, turning it in her fingers until the soup had gone cold.
“Forgive me, Mr Darcy. I am poor company this evening.”
“You are never poor company.” He said it simply, without weight, and then seemed to hear the words he uttered. He returned his attention to his plate.
She should leave it there. She should eat her soup and discuss Anne’s arithmetic and retire at a respectable hour. She should not burden her employer with her family’s troubles. It was not his concern, it was not her place, the servants were listening, and propriety demanded silence.
Propriety could go hang. This was too big a worry, and she needed to speak it aloud.
“I am worried about my youngest sister.” She chose the words with care, stripping them of detail, of history, of the grief that clung to Lydia’s name in any room where the Bennets gathered.
“She is more subdued than usual. I visited her today and I found her—” She paused while Barton refilled Mr Darcy’s glass, and glanced at a footman who stood three feet away. “Struggling.”
She did not say with what. Mr Darcy’s expression shifted—a tightening around the jaw, a flicker in his eyes that told her he understood precisely what she was not saying.
He set his glass down.
“In that regard, Miss Bennet, I have information that might help your sister’s melancholy.” He held her gaze. “Or at the very least, offer her some measure of closure.”
Elizabeth’s hand stilled on the tablecloth, her pulse quickening.
Information. What information could he possibly have about Lydia’s situation that the Bennets did not already know?
They had lived through it. They had buried their father because of it.
What could Mr Darcy, of all people, tell her that seven years of wreckage had not already made clear?
She wanted to demand he tell her now. The question pressed against her teeth, urgent and sharp.
But the footman was clearing the soup, and a second course was being laid.
Barton was adjusting a candlestick with meticulous attention, absorbing every syllable.
This was not a conversation for silver and candlelight and listening ears.
Mr Darcy glanced around the room. His eyes moved from Barton to the footman to the open door, and he understood the same thing she did.
“Soon, Miss Bennet.” His voice was low and carried a weight she had not heard in it before. “I give you my word.”
She nodded and picked up her fork and did not taste what she ate.
He tried, after that, to shift the evening onto safer ground. He asked about the book she had been reading. He had seen it on the nursery table that morning, he said, and had recognised the binding. The Italian, Mrs Radcliffe. Was she enjoying it?
“I am, sir.” She managed three words and could not find a fourth. The mysteries of Schedoni and his crimes against innocent women felt, at this moment, rather too close to the bone.
“It is a fine edition. My mother purchased it the year it was published. She was fond of Mrs Radcliffe.” He paused for a second. “You are welcome to keep it as long as you wish.”
“Thank you, Mr Darcy.”
The meal continued. He offered observations about Radcliffe’s use of landscape, about the fashion for Gothic novels, about whether terror and horror were distinct emotions or merely different costumes for the same fear.
He was trying. She could see the effort in it, the careful construction of normality, and she was grateful for it even as her mind circled and circled and would not land.
What do you know? What could you possibly know that I do not?
She excused herself, climbed the stairs to her room, and perched on the bed. She pressed her palms to her knees, and the question sat in her chest like a stone. The night stretched ahead of her, and sleep was not coming.
She lay in the dark with her hands folded on her chest and her eyes open. Her mind was turning the same question over and over until the edges of it were smooth and she was no closer to an answer than she had been at dinner.
What information could Mr Darcy possess about Lydia’s situation that would offer closure?
Closure implied an ending, a door that could be shut, and Lydia’s door had been open for seven years with a draught blowing through it that chilled the entire family.
Wickham had taken her, used her, discarded her, and vanished.
There had been no reckoning, no consequence, no word.
No one challenged him to a duel. He was never punished.
He had simply ceased to exist in their lives, leaving only the wreckage behind.
She turned onto her side, pressing her face into the pillow, and tried to think of nothing. Naturally, her mind went instead to Somers Town, to Lydia.
She had arrived at the house at her usual hour.
Kitty had greeted her at the door, Jane was helping her mother with the mending, and Mary was at the table with a stack of borrowed books and an expression that discouraged interruption.
Elizabeth had kissed her mother, embraced Jane, and gone upstairs.
Lydia’s door was closed. Elizabeth knocked but no answer came. She knocked again, then opened it.
The room was dim. The curtains were half-drawn, as they always were now. Lydia no longer bothered to open them fully and nobody pressed her. She was sitting in the chair by the window, her back to the door, her hands in her lap. She did not turn.
“Lydia. Good morning, dearest.”
She did not reply, did not move, did not acknowledge her sister. Elizabeth stepped into the room and closed the door behind her. She crossed to the bed and sat on the edge of it, facing her sister’s profile.
“I brought you something. I found a novel I thought you might enjoy. You should take it before Kitty commandeers it for herself.”
She held the book out but Lydia did not reach for it. She did not appear to have heard. Her eyes were fixed on the window, on the patch of grey sky visible between the curtains, and whatever she was seeing, it was not the sky.
“Lydia.”
Elizabeth waited in the quiet. She could hear the sounds of the house below—Kitty’s footsteps, the clink of a cup, her mother’s voice giving some instruction. Normal sounds. In this room there was only stillness and the faint rasp of Lydia’s breathing, shallow and slow.
“Dearest, I am here. Will you not speak to me?”
She spoke gently and clearly, directly at her. Lydia did not respond, did not blink, did not turn her head. She did not give the smallest indication that she was aware another person had entered the room and was speaking her name.
One minute passed. Then two. Then five.
Elizabeth’s chest tightened. This was not Lydia being quiet, being subdued or tired or melancholy. This was Lydia absent. She was sitting in the chair and she was somewhere else entirely, locked behind a door that Elizabeth could not see and did not know how to open.
She rose from the bed. She crossed the room and knelt before the chair and took Lydia’s shoulders in both hands and shook her, firmly, not roughly but with enough force to make her head snap forward.