Chapter Eighteen #2
They mounted in silence. The horses walked steadily, their breath clouding in the cold air, and Elizabeth let the silence hold. This was Darcy’s way. He did not think aloud. He took things in and turned them over and came back with something considered.
“I asked you last night whether you would tell me what you have been building,” he said at last. “This is it, is it not? This is what you wanted me to hear.”
“Part of it. I wanted you to hear it from Mr Wilson, not from me.”
“Why?”
“Because it is his story. And because I thought it would mean more to you, coming from a man who was there, who has carried it for six years.”
Darcy looked ahead at the path. “My father shook his hand. He was not a man who shook hands with tenants. He shook Mr Wilson’s hand because he was grateful, and because he was ashamed that his blindness about Wickham had cost that family their daughter’s honour. And then he sent for Wickham.”
“Yes.”
“And just days later he was dead.”
Pemberley came into view ahead of them, pale stone against the dark November woods. Darcy pulled his horse up and sat looking at it.
“I have spent six years believing my father died without ever seeing the truth about Wickham,” he said. “That he went to his grave blinded by affection. And now I learn he did see it. At the very end, he saw it, and he tried to act on it, and he did not have time.”
“He did not have time,” Elizabeth agreed, and felt the weight of what she was not saying.
They rode on. As they came down the slope toward the house, Elizabeth glanced up at the windows and saw George Darcy standing at the one he always stood at, watching them return.
He could not know what had just happened.
He could not know that his son, riding beside her in silence, was turning over the same questions that had kept his father’s ghost pacing these corridors for six years.
Elizabeth looked away before Darcy could follow her gaze, and the window, when she glanced back, was empty.
At Pemberley, Darcy gave the horses to the groom and went directly to find Mrs Reynolds.
Elizabeth followed. She had intended to engineer this conversation herself, but Darcy was ahead of her now, moving with the quiet purposefulness she had seen in him when a problem presented itself and he intended to solve it.
He found Mrs Reynolds in her sitting room, waited for Elizabeth to enter behind him, and closed the door behind them.
“Mrs Reynolds. When my father died. Was Wickham at Pemberley?”
Mrs Reynolds looked at Darcy, then at Elizabeth. Whatever she saw in Elizabeth’s face must have told her that the time for caution had passed.
“Yes, sir. Mr Wickham came in answer to your father’s summons over the Sally Wilson business.
Your father spoke with him privately in his study.
They dined together that night, and seemed amiable enough.
I remember thinking that the trouble must have been resolved, to Mr Darcy’s satisfaction.
” She paused. “Your father died sometime that night.”
“Wickham was in this house the night my father died.”
“Yes, sir. He did not spend the night, riding back to Lambton late in the evening to stay with friends there, and he did not return to Pemberley. I did not think anything of it at the time. Mr Wickham was always coming and going.”
Darcy did not move. Elizabeth watched him absorb it: the final piece, the one that turned a sequence of events into a pattern.
His father had learnt the truth about Wickham.
His father had summoned Wickham. They had dined together.
By morning his father was dead. Wickham had gone.
The physician had said it was his heart, and nobody had questioned it for six years.
“Thank you, Mrs Reynolds,” Darcy said. His voice was perfectly controlled. “That is all I needed to know.”
He left the room. Elizabeth stayed.
“You told him,” Mrs Reynolds said.
“He heard it from Mr Wilson. About Sally, and about his father knowing.”
Mrs Reynolds sat down. She looked older suddenly, and weary. “I should have said something. Years ago. I should have gone to him and told him what I felt, what I suspected.”
“You had nothing to go on but a feeling.”
“A feeling is not nothing, Mrs Darcy. You taught me that.”
Elizabeth touched the older woman’s hand, briefly. Then she went to find Kitty.
Kitty was in the library reading, alone except for the ghostly Miss Pardoe. She looked up when Elizabeth came in and read her face at once.
“He knows?” Kitty said.
“He knows his father confronted Wickham. He knows Wickham was here when his father died. He hasn’t said the word murder, but I believe he is thinking it.
” Elizabeth closed the door behind her and leaned against it.
She felt suddenly drained. The morning had required a kind of performance she was not accustomed to: not lying, exactly, but steering, guiding her husband toward a conclusion she already held while pretending to be discovering it alongside him. It had worked. She was not proud of it.
Kitty closed her book. “Then it begins.”
Elizabeth sat down in the chair beside her sister, allowing herself to slouch, though Miss Pardoe glanced over the top of her book and gave her a disapproving little frown for it. “Yes. It begins. And I still haven’t told him about the ghosts, Kitty.”
“I know.”
“He thinks this is it. He thinks Sally Wilson and the timing and his aunt’s doubts are what I’ve been hiding from him.
He thinks this is the secret. He looked at me with such.
.. he was grateful, Kitty. Grateful that I had found this for him, and led him to it carefully, so that he can corroborate it for himself with the people who were there.
And all I could think was that it is only a small part of the truth, and when he discovers the rest he will wonder why I didn’t trust him with it. ”
“You are protecting him.”
“I am lying to him. There is a difference, whatever we tell ourselves.”
Kitty did not argue. “How long can the ghost secret hold? Now that he is pulling on the thread himself?”
“I don’t know,” Elizabeth said. “He will go to Lord Matlock, I think, and they will investigate. They will look into the physician’s verdict, into Wickham’s movements. None of that requires ghosts.”
“And Lydia?” Kitty’s face was tight. That was always what it came back to: Lydia, married to the man they were building a case against, sixteen years old and bound to a murderer.
“One thing at a time,” Kitty said. “Darcy and Lord Matlock will investigate. We deal with Lydia when we must, and not before, because we don’t yet know what shape this will take.”
She thought about Sally’s quiet pride in a son who wanted a pony.
About Darcy’s face when he looked at William and saw a boy who existed because Wickham had taken what he wanted and walked away.
She thought about George Darcy, somewhere in the corridors of this house, pacing as he always paced, not yet knowing that the son he had failed was fighting for him at last.
“You are doing the right thing, Lizzy,” Kitty said. “I know it doesn’t feel like it. But you are.”
Elizabeth was not sure she believed that. But she was sure of this: it had begun, and there was no stopping it now.
She tried not to think about what Darcy’s face would look like when he finally learnt the whole truth.