Chapter Eleven #2
She came in briskly; she had been listening at the door, if ghosts could be said to listen at doors. She looked at George Darcy with fierce love and exasperation in equal measure.
“You told her about the brandy,” Nana said.
“She asked.”
“She would have. She is thorough.” Nana turned to Elizabeth. “You found the foxglove.”
“I did. And I have a question for you, Nana. You said you saw him die. You said you screamed at him not to drink. Did you see Wickham prepare the brandy?”
Nana’s face changed. The usual briskness fell away. What was left was old, tired, furious.
“I saw him put something in the glass as he poured. I watched him hand the glass to George. I watched his face as George drank. I have seen many faces in a hundred and thirty years, Mrs Darcy. I know what a man looks like when he is watching something he has planned come to pass. He was not anxious. He was not hopeful. He was satisfied. He looked like a man watching a trap close. I screamed and I tried everything I could to make George spill his glass, but I could not.”
“Unfortunately,” Elizabeth said gently, “your testimony is not the kind anyone living would accept.”
“No,” Nana agreed. “It is not.”
George Darcy stood. He did not pace; he was not a man who paced, any more than his son was. He walked to the window, stared out over Pemberley’s grounds. His posture was so like her husband’s that Elizabeth’s heart wrenched.
“I had two children,” he said, and the anger in his voice was not directed at Elizabeth but at something larger, encompassing the whole wretched scope of what Wickham had done and what his death had left behind.
“Two children and no wife and a house full of responsibility. Now my son bears it all. My daughter barely knew me. And this, this is what I have. A ghost’s fury and a garden full of foxglove and no way to prove any of it. ”
“You could have married again,” Nana said, and her voice was gentler than Elizabeth had ever heard it. “You should have. You were young enough.”
“I could not.” He looked away from the window, back at them. “Annie was... she was everything. I could not put another woman in her place.”
“I know. You loved your Annie too much.” Nana paused.
Something crossed her face that Elizabeth had never seen there before: a tenderness so old, so deep, it seemed to come from somewhere beyond the woman herself.
From the girl who had been widowed at twenty, who had raised a son alone, who had lived almost eighty years more.
“It is all right, boy. You did your best.”
George Darcy looked at his great-grandmother. For a moment the rage left him, and he was simply a man who missed his wife, who had failed his children, who wanted someone to tell him it was all right. Nana had told him. It was enough.
Then the moment passed. The anger returned. The room was cold again.
Elizabeth looked at the two of them, the matriarch and the great-grandson, bound by blood, grief, the walls of a house they could not leave. She understood something she had not understood before.
This was not a haunting. This was a family. Her family, now.
And families, living or dead, deserved the truth.
“I need to tell you both something,” she said. “There is a complication I have not mentioned, because I was not sure how to say it, and because I was afraid of what it might mean. But you deserve to know, and I cannot keep it from you any longer.”
Nana’s eyes narrowed. George Darcy turned to her with the full force of his attention, and the pressure of it was considerable.
“Wickham is married,” Elizabeth said. “To my youngest sister. Lydia.”
The silence that followed was of a different kind than the one that had come after George Darcy’s account of his death.
That had been the silence of grief revisited.
This was the silence of something fundamental shifting, of two ghosts recalculating everything they had asked of her in light of a fact that changed the shape of every possible outcome.
George Darcy spoke first. “Your sister.” He looked at Kitty, sitting by the fire, watching the flames silently. “Not this one?”
“No, that is my sister Kitty. Lydia is the youngest of us; only sixteen. She eloped with him in the early summer. My family was saved from disgrace only because your son, my husband, paid Wickham’s debts and bought him a commission in the regulars and made certain they married.
Darcy did it for my sake, though I did not know it at the time.
He has never spoken of it as anything but a duty, but it was more than that, and we both know it. ”
“And you did not tell me this,” George Darcy said slowly, “because?”
“Because if Wickham is brought to justice for your murder, my sister is a murderer’s widow at sixteen, and the Bennet name, and the Darcy name, are dragged through every scandal sheet in England.
” She nodded at Kitty, who had looked up, realising she had become part of the discussion.
“I have two sisters yet unmarried who cannot afford such a scandal to tarnish their prospects. I was afraid that if you knew, you would not care about the consequences to my family. I would not blame you for that. Your claim to justice is real and righteous, and it does not become less so because the man who killed you had the poor taste to marry my sister first.”
Nana was watching her with an expression Elizabeth could not read.
George Darcy sat down again. Slowly. The cushion compressed beneath him, and he put his hands together, and he sat silently for several minutes.
“I would not have demanded that your sister suffer,” he said, at last. “I am angry. I am, I think, angrier than any man has a right to be, living or dead. But I am not cruel, and I was not cruel when I was alive, whatever else I was. Your sister is little more than a child when he married her, taken in by him as more than one innocent young woman has been. She is not my enemy.”
“No,” Elizabeth said. “She is not. But she is part of the problem, and I needed you to understand why this cannot be solved with a magistrate and a courtroom. Even if we had evidence, which we do not, the cost of using it would be catastrophic.”
“Then what do you propose?”
Elizabeth looked at him. She looked at Nana.
She thought of the foxglove in the garden, the brandy six years gone, the death certificate that said heart failure, the physician who had seen nothing amiss, the household that had grieved and moved on, the world that had forgotten George Darcy’s death as anything other than a sad but unremarkable loss.
“I do not know yet,” she said. “But I am not going to stop trying to find proof.”
It was not enough. She could see that it was not enough, in the set of George Darcy’s jaw and the tightness around Nana’s mouth. But it was honest, and honesty was the only currency she had left that was worth anything.
Nana spoke into the silence. “The girl. Your sister. Is she safe?”
The question surprised Elizabeth. She had expected recrimination, or at least frustration. She hadn’t expected Nana to ask about Lydia.
“I don’t know,” Elizabeth said. “His debts were paid, but I don’t doubt they are mounting again. His temper will be worsening, constrained as he is by a wife to fetter his pursuit of his pleasures. And now I know what he is capable of when he feels cornered.”
“Then you had better find your answers quickly,” Nana said. “For her sake as much as ours.”
It was, Elizabeth reflected afterward, the most unsettling thing Nana had ever said to her.
Not because of the words themselves, but because of what they implied: that the danger was not only in the past but in the present, not only to the dead but to the living, and that the longer she took to find a solution, the more people stood to be hurt by a man who had already proved that he would kill to protect himself.
Somewhere in the house, Darcy was waiting for his wife to come down to dinner.
She would go. She would smile. She would sit across from him, be charming, warm, present, and she would not tell him that she had spent the afternoon with his dead father and his dead great-great-grandmother, discussing the plant that had been used to murder one of them, the man who had done it, the sister who had married him, the impossibility of bringing any of it to light.