Chapter Sixteen #2
“I came here as a child,” she said finally.
“With my mother, before Aunt Anne died. She passed only a year after Papa, so I suppose I would have been seven then. I remember the lake, the gardens, Fitzwilliam trying to teach me to skip stones. Quite badly. And I remember Mrs Reynolds, who gave me gingerbread and called me Miss Annie.”
“Mrs Reynolds mentioned that,” Elizabeth said. “She was rather fond of you.”
“She was kind.” Anne looked at the view a moment longer, and when she spoke again her voice was different. Quieter. More careful. “Mother talked about Pemberley, you know. Constantly. About Aunt Anne, about Uncle George, about how things should have been managed.”
Elizabeth paused a moment, then asked delicately, “Did she ever say anything about your uncle’s death?”
Anne looked at her, and Elizabeth saw those eyes sharpen, the eyes George had said were his Annie’s. Not suspicion, but attention. The quiet, careful attention of a woman who had spent her life listening from the edges of rooms where nobody thought she mattered.
“She said he died because he would not listen,” Anne said. “I remember that quite clearly, because it struck me as a strange thing to say about a man who had died in his sleep. But Mother says strange things often enough, and I learned young not to ask what she meant by them.”
Kitty caught Elizabeth’s eye, and there was surprise in the glance.
Elizabeth was becoming less surprised every time someone said they had the feeling something was not quite right about George Darcy’s death, but it was interesting to hear that Lady Catherine might have a more solid theory about it.
Not that Elizabeth could exactly ask her.
“Shall we ride back?” Georgiana said. “The light is going.”
They turned their horses toward home. Anne rode beside Georgiana, the two of them talking about music, about London, about things that young women talk about when nobody is telling them to be quiet. Kitty fell back to ride beside Elizabeth.
“He died because he would not listen,” Kitty said, low.
“Lady Catherine meant he would not listen to her,” Elizabeth agreed. “About Wickham.”
“Yes. But it is a strange way to put it.”
“Everything Lady Catherine says is a strange way to put things. That doesn’t make it less true. Even if Lady Catherine has her suspicions of Wickham, what then? I can’t ask her about it, and suspicions aren’t proof.”
Kitty grimaced, because she knew what Elizabeth was saying was the truth. Anne called to her then, and Kitty urged her horse forward, pasting a smile back on her face. Elizabeth was left to follow them back, musing on what Lady Catherine had meant by he would not listen.
That evening, while the household was dressing for dinner, Nana found Elizabeth in her parlour.
“You need to take that girl to London,” Nana said, without preamble.
Elizabeth had been thinking the same thing since the ride, watching Anne come alive in the saddle, watching the colour return to her face, the stiffness leave her spine, watching her talk and laugh and be, for a few hours, something closer to the woman she might have become if Lady Catherine had let her.
“With Georgiana and Kitty, for the Season,” Elizabeth clarified.
“Yes. She needs it. She needs concerts, exhibitions, assemblies. She needs to discover that she has opinions of her own and that people will listen to them. And she needs,” Nana said, with the particular vehemence she reserved for matters she considered urgent, “to be away from that woman long enough to remember who she is.”
“Lady Catherine will never agree.”
“Lady Catherine’s agreement is not required. Anne is a grown woman. She is three-and-twenty, which is older than you are, and she has a right to her own life. What is needed is someone brave enough to offer it to her.”
“And someone to stand between her and her mother when Catherine objects.”
“You have Darcy. Darcy has Lord Matlock. Between the two of them, Catherine can be managed. She will rage, she will threaten, she will make everyone’s life a misery for a fortnight.
Then she will sulk. Then she will claim it was her idea all along.
I have watched her do it a hundred times. It is her way.”
Elizabeth found Darcy after dinner, in the library. Lord Matlock was with him, and she decided that fate had done her a favour, because she could make the case to both of them at once.
“I would like to invite Anne to London for the Season,” she said. “With Georgiana and Kitty. All three of them, together.”
Lord Matlock set down his glass. Darcy looked at Elizabeth, and his face opened. Not surprise; recognition. As though he had been waiting for someone to say what he had been thinking for years.
“Anne has never had a Season,” Lord Matlock said. “Catherine would not permit it. She said Anne’s health would not stand it, which was nonsense then and is nonsense now. The girl is not robust, but she is not dying, whatever Catherine may have convinced herself.”
“She rode this afternoon,” Elizabeth said. “For the first time in years. She was magnificent.”
“Was she?” Lord Matlock looked pleased. “She was a good little rider as a child. Lewis taught her. He would have been glad to hear it.”
“Then you support the idea?”
“Wholeheartedly. Darcy?”
“I think it an excellent idea. Anne is not a child, and she has been kept in that house long enough.”
“Catherine will rage,” Lord Matlock observed, without particular concern.
“Aunt Catherine will rage,” Darcy agreed. “But Anne deserves a life, Uncle. She has waited long enough for one. Elizabeth and I have the opportunity to give her this; if she agrees, we must not let Aunt Catherine stop her.”
They told Anne the following morning, before breakfast, in the small parlour where the early sun came through the east windows and made the room bright.
Elizabeth had asked Georgiana and Kitty to be there too, because she wanted Anne to see the welcome waiting for her, and because Georgiana had rehearsed a small speech about how much she wanted her cousin’s company that Elizabeth did not have the heart to prevent.
Georgiana did not get through the speech. She managed, “Anne, we would like you to come to London with us for the Season, if you would...” before Anne put her hand over her mouth and her eyes filled, and the speech became unnecessary.
“Yes,” Anne said. “Yes. If you are sure. If it is truly...”
“It is truly,” Kitty said, taking Anne’s hand, which was clearly far too inadequate a gesture, because Anne threw her arms around Kitty instead, then turned to Georgiana and repeated the embrace.
“Mother will not allow it,” Anne said, after a moment, when she could speak again.
“Your mother’s permission will be obtained,” Elizabeth said. “Darcy and Lord Matlock have already agreed to manage her.”
Anne looked at Elizabeth with an expression that was gratitude, terror, hope, all mixed together, and Elizabeth thought of what Nana had said: she needs to remember who she is. Perhaps this was the beginning of that remembering.
From the doorway, unseen by anyone but Elizabeth, Nana watched the scene with her arms folded and her chin lifted and an expression that was, for once, entirely without complaint.
“Good,” she said. “That is one thing done properly in this house.”
And from the far corner of the room, George Darcy stood motionless, watching his niece cry for joy over a thing her namesake would have taken for granted, and said nothing at all. He did not need to. His face said everything.
Elizabeth looked away before her own expression could betray her, and said, briskly, “Now then. Breakfast. And we had better eat quickly, because Lady Catherine will be down by nine, and I should like to enjoy the morning while it lasts.”