Chapter Ten
The coded letter to Jane took Elizabeth three attempts.
The first was too transparent. Anyone who intercepted the post would have understood she was implying Wickham murdered Mr George Darcy, and Elizabeth could not afford that.
The second was too opaque; she read it back and could not understand it herself.
The third struck the balance she needed, woven into a chatty account of the household and the rose garden restoration and Kitty’s music lessons with Georgiana.
“The house continues to reveal its character in the most unexpected ways. I have learnt a great deal about the family history, some of it difficult to hear. One particular chapter concerns the passing of my husband’s father in the presence of person we both know, whose conduct, I am coming to believe, was far worse than any of us imagined.
I need your counsel, Jane. Not your comfort, though I will take that too.
Your judgement. I find I do not trust my own. ”
Jane would understand. Jane always understood. She would read “a person we both know” and her mind would run through the possibilities, and she would arrive at the right answer, because Jane, for all her sweetness, was far from being a fool.
Elizabeth sealed the letter, set it on the tray for the morning post, and sat for a moment in the candlelight, trying not to think about how long it would take to reach Netherfield.
She began the necessary investigation with Mrs Reynolds the following morning, over the menus.
This was the natural order of things: the mistress of the house consulting the housekeeper about meals, about provisions, about the running of the household.
Elizabeth had been doing it since her arrival, learning the rhythms of Pemberley with dutiful attention, because she understood that a great estate ran on a thousand small decisions, each one apparently trivial and each one essential.
Mrs Reynolds had been patient with her, gently guiding her through the complexities of a household that numbered, between family, guests, and servants, upward of fifty souls.
And that was just the ones that were alive and needed feeding.
Today, however, Elizabeth had a different purpose. She needed Mrs Reynolds to talk about the past, and she needed it to sound like nothing more than a new wife’s curiosity.
“I have been looking at the family portraits in the gallery,” Elizabeth said, as Mrs Reynolds poured her tea in the housekeeper’s sitting room.
It was a warm, cluttered space, fragrant with dried lavender and the particular beeswax polish that Mrs Reynolds favoured.
“Georgiana has told me a little about her mother, and I should like to know more. I feel I ought to understand the family I have married into, and there is a great deal of it.”
Mrs Reynolds’s face softened, the way it always did when Lady Anne was mentioned.
“Lady Anne was the finest woman I ever knew, ma’am.
I came to Pemberley the year she married Mr Darcy, and she was kindness itself from the first day.
She knew every servant by name within a fortnight, and she never forgot a birthday or a sick child.
When she died, this house lost its heart. ”
“And Mr Darcy? The late Mr George Darcy, I mean.”
“A good man, ma’am. A very good man.” Mrs Reynolds set down the teapot.
“He was not easy to know, not at first. Reserved, like his son. But fair, always fair, and generous with it. He loved his children fiercely, though he did not always show it in ways they could see. After Lady Anne died, he closed in on himself. The house felt it.”
“The house felt it?” Elizabeth looked at the housekeeper with interest.
Mrs Reynolds paused, and something moved behind her expression, a hesitation that was not reluctance but something more careful, as though she were choosing how much of herself to reveal.
“Pemberley is an old house, Mrs Darcy. Very old. I have been here a long time, and I have learnt, well. I have learnt to feel when things are right and when they are not. After Lady Anne died, the house was not right. I cannot explain it better than that. There was a heaviness, a coldness in certain rooms. The master felt it too, I think, though he would never have said so. He spent more time in his study, alone.”
Elizabeth realised Mrs Reynolds was describing an awareness of the house’s unseen residents that went beyond intuition. Lady Anne had not lingered as a ghost, but the ghosts would have grieved her passing.
“Did Mr Darcy have many visitors in his last months?” Elizabeth asked, keeping her voice light, curious. “I know so little about that time.”
“Not many, ma’am. He had withdrawn from society after Lady Anne. Lord and Lady Matlock visited several times; Lady Matlock was worried about Miss Georgiana having no mother, of course, and Colonel Fitzwilliam came regularly; the master was very fond of his nephew. And Mr Wickham, of course.”
The name landed in Elizabeth’s chest like a stone.
“Mr Wickham visited often?”
“Indeed, ma’am. The master had been very good to him, educated him alongside Master Fitzwilliam, treated him almost as a second son.
Mr Wickham had a way about him, very easy, very charming.
The master enjoyed his company.” Mrs Reynolds’s mouth tightened, barely perceptibly.
“He visited rather unexpectedly, just before the master’s death.
I remember it particularly because the master had seemed, well, not distressed exactly, but unsettled.
As though something weighed on his mind.
And then Mr Wickham arrived, quite unannounced.
Though Mr Darcy did not seem surprised, as I recall.
Perhaps he had written to summon Wickham for something or other. ”
Kitty, who had accompanied Elizabeth on the pretext of discussing the linen cupboards, was examining a shelf of preserves with studious concentration. She did not look up, but Elizabeth saw her shoulders tighten.
“And Mr Darcy’s death,” Elizabeth said carefully. “Was it sudden?”
Mrs Reynolds was quiet for a moment. The lavender-scented room felt close, the ticking of the mantel clock unnaturally loud.
“It was, ma’am. Very sudden. He had been quite well, or so it seemed.
He dined as usual that evening, retired early, and in the morning he was gone.
” She pressed her lips together. “The physician said it was his heart. A sudden failure, he called it. These things happen, he said, in men of a certain age, though the master was not old. Not old at all.”
“It must have been a terrible shock.”
“For the whole house, ma’am.” Mrs Reynolds stopped, and when she spoke again her voice had changed, dropping into something lower, more private, as though she were sharing something she had never quite put into words before.
“I had thought the house heavy when Lady Anne passed. But after Mr Darcy died, it was nothing like that. It was as though the very stones cried out against the master’s passing. ”
Not the stones, Elizabeth thought. The ghosts. George Darcy’s rage, reverberating through every corridor, felt by a woman who could not see its source but whose instincts were sharp enough to register its presence.
She looked at Mrs Reynolds more closely, at this practical, warm, thoroughly sensible woman, and saw something she had not noticed before: a faint awareness behind the eyes, a quality of attention that went beyond the ordinary.
Mrs Reynolds did not have Elizabeth’s gift.
She did not see the dead or hear them. But she was sensitive to them, she felt them, the way some people felt a coming storm in their bones, and she had been feeling them for thirty years without ever understanding what it was she felt.
“And Master Fitzwilliam,” Mrs Reynolds continued, her voice thick now.
“He was away, in London. He rode day and night when the express reached him, though his father was long gone. I have never seen a young man look as he looked when he came home and took Miss Darcy in his arms. He has carried it ever since, though he would never say so.”
Elizabeth set down her teacup and found that her hand was steady, though the rest of her was not. “Thank you, Mrs Reynolds. I know this cannot be easy to speak of.”
“It is not, ma’am. But I am glad you asked, because you deserve to know, and it would be more painful for either Mr or Miss Darcy to tell you about it.
” Mrs Reynolds hesitated, then added, carefully, as though she had been turning something over for quite some time and had never found anyone to say it to, “I was fond of the late master. Very fond. And I have always thought, though it is not my place to say so, that his death did not sit right. Nothing I could put my finger on. Just a feeling. The house has never been the same since, and I do not mean only the grief. Something is unsettled. Something has been unsettled for six years, and I have never spoken of it to anyone, because what would I say? That the house feels wrong?”
“Feelings,” Elizabeth said quietly, “are not nothing, Mrs Reynolds.”
The housekeeper looked at her with an expression that was almost startled, as though she had expected to be dismissed and found instead that she had been heard. “No, ma’am,” she said, finally. “I do not believe they are.”
They parted at the door of the housekeeper’s room, and Kitty fell into step beside Elizabeth as they walked back through the ground floor. She was quiet until they were out of earshot, and then she said, low, “You cannot tell him, Lizzy.”
Elizabeth did not pretend to misunderstand. “I know.”