Chapter Eleven
The physic garden was behind the kitchen wing, tucked into a south-facing corner where the old stone walls held the warmth of the sun even in late October. Elizabeth found it by accident, or rather the way one does when looking for something without knowing what it is.
She had been walking the grounds with Kitty, ostensibly to learn the paths and outbuildings that a mistress ought to know.
In truth she was restless, her mind turning over Mrs Reynolds’s words from the day before, the unsettled feeling in the house, the housekeeper’s conviction that something was wrong.
She needed to move, and she needed to think, and she found she could do both better outside than in, where every room held either a ghost or a husband or both.
They had passed the kitchen garden, where the last of the autumn cabbages sat in stolid rows, and the herb beds, where the lavender had gone grey, woody, the rosemary putting out its final pale flowers. Beyond these, half hidden by a yew hedge, was a smaller garden Elizabeth had not seen before.
“What is this?” she asked Kitty, stepping through the narrow gap in the hedge.
It was a proper physic garden, the kind that great houses had maintained for centuries before physicians became fashionable and apothecaries took over the business of healing.
The beds were laid out in the old formal style, each one bordered with low box hedging, and though the plantings had gone wild in places, Elizabeth could see the logic of the original design: herbs grouped by use, medicinal plants separated from culinary ones, the dangerous specimens given their own bed near the far wall.
She knew what she was looking at before her mind caught up with her eyes.
The tall spires, their flowers long since faded to brown seed heads, standing in a dense clump against the south wall where they would have caught the best of the summer sun.
Foxglove. Digitalis purpurea. She had grown up in the country and knew every hedgerow plant by name, and her father’s library had contained Withering’s treatise on the foxglove, which she had read at fourteen with the same indiscriminate appetite she applied to every book in the house.
Foxglove, which in careful doses could steady a failing heart. Which in larger doses could stop one entirely.
Which produced symptoms, in excess, that would look to any physician like a sudden and natural failure of that organ.
Elizabeth stood and stared. The autumn sun was warm on her shoulders.
A blackbird sang from the top of the yew hedge.
The kitchen garden was full of ordinary sounds, a door opening, a maid’s voice calling to someone about turnips, the scrape of a wheelbarrow on gravel.
Everything was normal. Everything was exactly as it should be, except that Elizabeth was standing in front of the plant that had killed her husband’s father, and it was growing twenty yards from the kitchen door.
Kitty had come through the hedge behind her. She looked at the garden, then at Elizabeth, then at the foxglove.
“Oh,” she said. Quietly.
Kitty had read Withering too. Or if she had not read the whole of it, she had read enough, because Elizabeth had told her about it at fourteen, breathless with the thrill of a new discovery and desperate to share it with someone.
That was the year they had walked every hedgerow around Meryton identifying plants, Elizabeth reciting their properties while Kitty collected specimens and pressed them in a book they kept hidden from their mother, who would have found the whole enterprise unwholesome.
“It has been here for years,” Kitty said, looking at the established roots, the self-seeded plants that had spread beyond their original bed. “Long before Mr Darcy died.”
“Anyone in the household could have picked it. Anyone who knew what it was.”
“And Wickham was educated here. Alongside Darcy. He would have known this garden.”
They stood together in the autumn sunshine. The blackbird went on singing. The foxglove stood in its bed against the wall, tall, brown, entirely innocent, entirely damning.
George Darcy was in the parlour when Elizabeth returned.
She had not summoned him; she did not know how to, or where he spent his time usually.
He simply appeared, the way he had the first time, filling the doorway with his too-solid presence, and the temperature of the room dropped several degrees in the time it took Elizabeth to close the door behind her.
Kitty, who could not see him but could feel the sudden chill and see from the expression on Elizabeth’s face that they were not alone, wrapped her arms around herself and sat in the chair nearest the fire.
“I need to ask you something difficult,” Elizabeth said, without preamble.
George Darcy sat. The chair did not creak, but the cushion compressed. “Ask.”
“The night you died. I need you to tell me exactly what happened. Not the confrontation with Wickham, not what led to it. The evening itself. What you ate, what you drank, when you began to feel unwell. Everything you can remember.”
He had told her the broad truth of it, the poisoning, the brandy, the morning when he did not wake. But she was asking for the details now, the specific, granular memory of his own death, and she could see what it cost him to go back to it.
“We dined at seven,” he said. “The household dined together that evening. Wickham was there. He was, he was very easy. Very pleasant. As though the conversation that afternoon, the confrontation about Sally Wilson, had not happened at all. I remember thinking that either he had taken it better than I expected, or he was playing a deeper game than I had credited him with.”
He paused, shaking his head slowly. Elizabeth could clearly see the regret on his face, the self-blame.
“After dinner, I went to my study. Wickham came to me there. He poured brandy. I have thought back on this a hundred thousand times. I remember that he stood at the sideboard with his back to me while he poured it, then brought over two glasses and put one into my hand. He said he wished to apologise properly, man to man, and to discuss the arrangements for the marriage. He was, I cannot describe it. He was the boy I remembered. The boy I had loved. Open, earnest, sorry for his mistakes. I wanted to believe it. God help me, after everything, I still wanted to believe it.”
Kitty, who could hear only Elizabeth’s half of the conversation, sat with her hands folded in her lap and her face turned toward the fire and did not move.
“I drank the brandy,” George Darcy said.
“He stayed for perhaps half an hour. We talked. He agreed to everything I asked, the marriage to Sally, the terms, the living at Kympton still agreed upon when its current incumbent passed, and a smaller degree of support in the meantime while he completed his studies and made his living as a curate. He was reasonable. He was contrite. He was everything I wanted him to be, and I was a fool, because I had spent twenty years believing in a version of George Wickham that never existed, and I could not stop believing it even when my own son told me the truth.”
His voice had dropped. The room was bitterly cold now. Elizabeth could see her breath, and Kitty’s, hanging in the air between them.
“I retired at ten. My heart began to trouble me on the stairs. A flutter, nothing more, the kind of thing one notices and dismisses. By the time I reached my bedroom, it had become something else. Not a flutter. A stutter. My heart was stuttering, slowing, beating in a rhythm that was wrong, that I could feel was wrong, though I had never in my life had cause to think about the beating of my own heart.”
He looked at Elizabeth, and the rawness in his face was terrible.
“I called for no one. I thought it would pass. I lay down on my bed. I waited. The stuttering grew worse. The room grew cold, or I grew cold; I could not tell which. The last thing I remember is the ceiling above my bed, then nothing, then waking to find that I was still in the room but the body on the bed was no longer mine.”
The silence that followed was absolute. Even the fire seemed to have stopped moving.
“Foxglove,” Elizabeth said.
George Darcy looked at her.
“Digitalis,” she said. “Derived from foxglove. In small doses it is used to treat conditions of the heart. In large doses it causes exactly what you have described: an irregular heartbeat, a slowing, a failure that looks entirely natural. Any physician examining you afterward would have concluded that your heart simply stopped. Because it did. It was made to stop.”
“You know this how?”
“I grew up in a country house, where there was an old physic garden. Not on the scale of Pemberley’s, of course, but I recognise every plant in it and know what they are used for.
And I read a great deal,” Elizabeth said.
“There is a bed of foxglove in the physic garden, not twenty yards from the kitchen door.”
George Darcy was silent. Then he said, in a voice that was barely a voice at all, “I showed him every corner of Pemberley, inside and out. Every garden, every path, every room. I showed him the physic garden when he was a boy. I do not recall telling him exactly what each plant was for, but I do remember warning him that while they could be of great medicinal benefit, some of the plants were dangerous in the wrong quantities, or given for the wrong reasons. And certainly, there are books in the library which could have given him the information that foxglove is one of them, and why.”
“You could not have known.”
“No. But I showed him the weapon he used to kill me, and that is something I must live with. Or not live with. Whichever term you prefer.” The ghost’s attempt at dark humour was so like something Darcy would have said that Elizabeth felt her chest tighten.
Nana arrived ten minutes later, which was ten minutes longer than Elizabeth had expected her to wait.