Chapter 6
ELIZABETH
The scream came at half past ten the following morning.
Elizabeth heard it from the parlour, where she sat with Charlotte pretending to read while they both listened to the sounds of a house that had become a stage set.
The maid, Jenny — a Rosings girl, sent daily to assist at the parsonage — had gone out an hour earlier on an errand to the village.
The path took her past the embankment. Fitzwilliam had ensured this.
The scream was high and raw and carried through the open window like a blade.
Charlotte's teacup rattled against its saucer.
Elizabeth reached over and steadied it without looking.
They had rehearsed this. They had spent the previous afternoon in Elizabeth's room, speaking in whispers, building the scaffolding of their performance with the desperate thoroughness of women whose lives depended on getting it right.
When the body is found, we panic. Not too much — enough to seem shocked, not so much that it looks theatrical. Charlotte cries. I hold her. We did not know he went out last night. We assumed he was in his study. We went to bed. We heard nothing.
Elizabeth set down her own cup, rose, and crossed to the window with a pace that she calculated — quick enough to suggest alarm, controlled enough to suggest composure.
Through the glass, she could see Jenny running up the path from the village, her cap askew, her face a mask of terror.
Behind her, the embankment dropped away toward the stream, and somewhere down there, arranged with Fitzwilliam's careful precision on the rocks below, lay what remained of William Collins.
"Something has happened," Elizabeth said, and her voice emerged with exactly the right quality of concern — steady, urgent, not yet afraid. She turned to Charlotte. "Stay here. I will go."
Charlotte shook her head. The movement was small and convincing — a wife's instinct, overriding a friend's instruction. "No. I'm coming."
They went out together. Jenny met them at the gate, sobbing so violently that her words came out in fragments — body, sir, the rocks, oh God, oh God — and Elizabeth gripped the girl's shoulders and spoke with an authority she did not feel.
"Jenny. Breathe. Tell me what you saw."
"Mr. Collins, miss. Down by the stream. On the rocks. He's — oh, miss, I think he's dead."
Charlotte made a sound. It was masterful — a small, choked gasp that could have been shock or grief or simple disbelief, and that contained, beneath its surface, the genuine horror of a woman confronting a reality she had created.
Her hand found Elizabeth's arm and gripped hard, and Elizabeth felt the tremor running through her friend's body and thought: She is not acting.
She is terrified. And no one will ever know that the terror is not for the reasons they imagine.
They went down the path. Elizabeth kept Charlotte's arm and guided her, which served the dual purpose of providing physical support and ensuring that Charlotte's approach to the body was controlled.
They could not rush. They could not seem too knowing.
They had to let the scene arrive at them with the full force of apparent surprise.
The embankment was steep — a ten-foot drop to the stream bed, where moss-covered rocks jutted from the shallow water.
Collins lay at the base, face-down, his left arm extended and his right folded beneath his body.
His coat was torn. His hat lay upside-down in the stream, rocking gently in the current.
The wound on his head — the wound that Charlotte's paperweight had made — was hidden beneath him, and the rocks beneath his skull were dark with what could only be blood.
Fitzwilliam had done expert work. The scene told a simple story: a man walking in the dark, an uneven path, a misstep, a fall.
The torn coat suggested impact with branches during the descent.
The position of the body was consistent with a headlong tumble, the kind of accident that killed country parsons with reliable frequency.
There was nothing — nothing — to suggest that this man had died anywhere other than the spot where he now lay.
Charlotte began to cry. Real tears — Elizabeth could see them tracking down her cheeks — though whether they were grief or relief or the simple physiological response to a terror that had been building for hours, Elizabeth could not say.
She put her arm around Charlotte's shoulders and drew her close.
"Don't look," she murmured. "Don't look, Charlotte."
"Is he — Elizabeth, is he—"
"We must go back to the house. Jenny, run to Rosings. Tell them what you have found."
The girl fled. Elizabeth stood on the embankment with Charlotte weeping against her shoulder and looked down at the body of the man they had killed, and felt the ground beneath her feet become something new — not the solid earth of Kent but the shifting, treacherous surface of a lie that would have to be maintained for the rest of her life.
They came quickly. Darcy first, on foot, appearing on the path from Rosings within minutes as though he had been waiting — which, of course, he had.
Fitzwilliam was close behind. Then a footman from Rosings, then the housekeeper, then a growing crowd of servants and tenants drawn by the commotion, until the embankment resembled the aftermath of a village accident, which was precisely what it was meant to be.
Darcy took charge of the scene with an authority that no one questioned.
His voice carried — calm, measured, the voice of a man accustomed to command — and people moved at his direction as though it were the natural order of things.
He sent a man for the magistrate. He posted a servant at the head of the path to prevent gawkers from approaching.
He dispatched another to the village for Dr. Gresham, though there was nothing Dr. Gresham could do.
And then he came to Elizabeth.
She was standing apart from the crowd with Charlotte still pressed against her side, maintaining her expression of shocked concern with an effort that was beginning to tell on the muscles of her face.
Darcy approached with that deliberate stride that she was learning to recognise — not hurrying, because Darcy never hurried, but covering the ground between them with a purpose that suggested every step had been calculated.
"Miss Bennet. Mrs. Collins." His voice was pitched for the ears of those nearby — solicitous, proper, the grave courtesy of a gentleman in the presence of a tragedy. "You must come away from here. This is no scene for ladies."
His hand found the small of Elizabeth's back. The touch was light — barely perceptible through the fabric of her dress — but it communicated everything: I am here. The plan is holding. Do not falter.
She let him guide them away from the embankment and back to the parsonage, where Mrs. Jenkinson had already arrived from Rosings and was bustling about with sal volatile and strong tea.
Charlotte was installed on the sofa, a blanket over her knees, her performance of grief now steady and seamless, because she had discovered that the hardest lies are the easiest to tell, because they require nothing but the repetition of a single, simple word: No.
I don't know why he went out. No. I heard nothing. No.
The magistrate came. A stout, red-faced man named Harding, who removed his hat in the doorway of the parsonage and turned it nervously in his hands and addressed every question to Darcy rather than to the widow or her guest.
"Most unfortunate, sir. Most unfortunate indeed. The path is treacherous in the dark — I have said so many times to her ladyship."
"Mr. Collins had been drinking," Darcy said.
Not a question — a statement, delivered with the quiet authority of a man supplying the narrative he expected others to adopt.
"His housekeeper will confirm that the sherry decanter was emptied yesterday evening.
He went out walking, as was his habit, and the path is unlit. The conclusion seems clear."
"Indeed, sir. Indeed. A man in his cups on an uneven path — one sees it often enough. A terrible accident. I shall record it as such."
He glanced at Elizabeth — a brief, assessing look that lingered a fraction too long on the rouge that concealed her bruises — and then away. If he noticed anything amiss, the presence of Mr. Darcy and the weight of Lady Catherine's patronage ensured that he kept his observations to himself.
The body was removed. The crowd dispersed.
The afternoon settled over the parsonage with the heavy quiet that follows upheaval, and Elizabeth sat in the parlour with Charlotte and Mrs. Jenkinson and drank tea she could not taste and answered questions she did not hear and waited for whatever came next.
It came at four o'clock. A footman from Rosings, bearing a message: Lady Catherine insisted that Mrs. Collins and Miss Bennet remove to Rosings immediately. It would not do for a widow and a young lady to remain at the parsonage under such circumstances.
Elizabeth read the note and looked at Charlotte, and Charlotte looked at Elizabeth, and the understanding that passed between them was silent and absolute: We are leaving the scene of the crime. We are going to his aunt's house. We are walking deeper into the lie.
"How kind of her ladyship," Charlotte whispered.
They packed. Elizabeth's hands were steady now — the trembling had stopped sometime around noon, replaced by a cold, focused calm that she suspected was shock but chose to interpret as resolve.
She folded her dresses, her stockings, her single good shawl.
She packed the small pot of rouge that had become, in the space of twenty-four hours, the most essential item she owned.
She looked at her face in the mirror — the bruise darkening beneath the powder, the split lip scabbing over, the shadows under her eyes — and thought: This face will be the face of Mrs. Darcy. This is the face he has purchased.
The carriage brought them to Rosings as the sun was setting. Lady Catherine received them in the entrance hall with an imperiousness that, for once, served a merciful purpose — her condescension required no response beyond grateful silence, and grateful silence was all Elizabeth had left to give.
"You will have the rooms in the east wing," Lady Catherine announced. "Adjacent to one another, naturally. A connecting door. Mrs. Jenkinson will see to your needs."
Adjacent rooms. A connecting door. Elizabeth absorbed this information and stored it alongside all the other details she was collecting — the layout of Rosings, the location of the servants' stairs, the distance from her bedroom window to the ground.
Not because she planned to escape. Because knowing the dimensions of your cage was the first requirement of surviving it.
They were shown upstairs. The rooms were large, well-furnished, and impersonal — guest chambers prepared with efficiency but without warmth. Elizabeth's window overlooked the south garden, where a row of yew trees stood like sentinels in the fading light.
Charlotte came through the connecting door as soon as Mrs. Jenkinson left them. She closed it behind her and leaned against it and looked at Elizabeth with eyes that held nothing but exhaustion.
"It's done," she whispered.
"It's done," Elizabeth confirmed.
They stood on either side of the room and looked at each other across the distance of everything that had changed, and everything that had not.
They were still friends. They were still alive.
And the cost of both — the debt they had incurred and the men who held it — was a weight that settled over them like the first heavy snow of winter, cold and quiet and immensely, immeasurably heavy.