Chapter Twenty #2
Catherine’s face was white, her jaw set.
But Elizabeth was watching her eyes, and what she saw there was not merely the rigidity of a woman under siege.
It was the look of a woman whose ground had shifted.
The bastard child she had been so certain of had dissolved, and in its place was Wickham, whose name she had been saying for years, whose character she had warned George about long before anyone else in this family had been willing to see it.
The ghosts arrived then. Elizabeth felt them: Nana first, crackling with vindicated fury; then George, drawn perhaps by the sound of his own name in his sister’s mouth.
“You are not surprised,” Elizabeth said. It came out before she could stop it. “You heard the name Wickham and you were not surprised.”
Catherine looked at her. For a moment the mask slipped, and what was underneath was older, rawer, more complicated than spite.
“I told George,” Catherine said. Her voice was different now. Quieter. “I told him that boy would be his ruin. He would not listen. He said I did not understand. He said I was jealous of a motherless child, as though I could not recognise a predator when I saw one.”
George, by the window, closed his eyes.
Catherine drew a breath. “Then George died. Hawkins told me Wickham was at Pemberley when it happened. I have thought about that for six years, Fitzwilliam. Six years.”
The room went absolutely silent. Lord Matlock straightened at the fireplace. Darcy’s hands, flat on the desk, did not move.
“What exactly are you saying, Catherine?” Lord Matlock asked finally.
“I am saying I warned George. He did not listen, and he died. I am saying that Wickham was there. That I have never been easy about it.”
“Do you have evidence?” Darcy said. “Anything beyond a feeling?”
“If I had evidence, do you think I would have kept it to myself for six years?” Catherine’s voice rose.
“No, Hawkins knew no more than that Wickham was here. But I have a feeling. I have always had a feeling. I told George he would live to regret his blind spot when it came to Wickham, and he died instead. I cannot prove that Wickham is anything worse than a seducer, a fortune hunter, a man with no honour. But I know what I know.”
Elizabeth watched the frustration move through the room.
Catherine had given them exactly what Anne had hinted at: a suspicion, a conviction, a lifetime of being right about Wickham’s character.
None of it was evidence they did not already have; that Wickham had been at Pemberley the day George died.
None of it could be acted on. It was Lady Catherine’s certainty, which was as boundless as it was useless, because Lady Catherine was certain about everything, and being right this once did not make her word proof.
“You should have come to me,” Darcy said. “Years ago. You should have told me what you suspected, instead of nursing it in silence and continuing to spy on my household.”
“I was protecting this family. I went about it badly, I will grant you that.” It was as close to an apology as Catherine was capable of, and it cost her visibly. She stood. “I will not apologise for the instinct. Only for the method.”
“The method,” Lord Matlock said, his voice heavy with weariness, “was to plant a spy in your nephew’s house and deliver a poisoned accusation to his wife. That is not instinct, Catherine. That is malice dressed up as duty.”
Catherine turned on her heel and swept toward the door.
“We were not finished, sister!” Lord Matlock said crossly, and followed her out. Lady Matlock sighed, looked at Elizabeth with an expression that managed to convey both sympathy and resignation, went after them.
The door closed.
The study was quiet. Darcy stood behind his desk, both hands flat on its surface, his head bowed slightly. Elizabeth sat in her chair by the window and did not speak, because she could see that he was not finished thinking.
George stood at the window still, his back to the room. He had not moved since Catherine spoke his name. Nana watched him from the corner with an expression Elizabeth had never seen on her face: something almost gentle.
“She should tell him,” Nana said. “About the murder. He is ready.”
“Not yet.” George’s voice was rough. “Let him come to it himself.”
“He is coming to it. Look at him. He is thinking about the timing. About Wickham being here the night you died. He is almost there.”
“Then let him arrive.”
Darcy spoke. His voice was quiet, the anger spent, what remained something more careful.
“Elizabeth.”
“Yes?”
“My father learned about Wickham and Sally Wilson. He summoned Wickham to Pemberley. They dined together. By morning my father was dead, and Wickham rode away.” He lifted his head and looked at her. “I am beginning to wonder whether my father’s death was what the physician said it was.”
The ghosts fell silent.
Elizabeth held perfectly still. This was the moment she had been steering toward for weeks, the conclusion she had wanted him to reach on his own, from the evidence, from the living world. He had reached it. She had to decide what to say.
“I believe you are right to wonder,” she said. “But how could anything be proved, after six years?”
He sat down. He sat in his father’s chair, behind his father’s desk, and said nothing. The fire shifted. Nana opened her mouth; George shook his head, once. She closed it again.
“And even if we could,” Darcy said at last. “Then what? Wickham is married to your sister.”
The impossibility of it filled the room. Lydia, sixteen years old, married to a man who may have murdered his own benefactor. Lydia, whose reputation and future were bound to a man whose exposure would destroy her along with him.
“I know,” Elizabeth said.
Darcy looked at her across the desk. “You have known this was coming. You have been leading me here, carefully, one piece at a time, because you knew that once I saw it I could not unsee it. You wanted me to be ready.”
“Yes.”
“Lydia is why you hesitated. Why you did not simply tell me what you suspected, weeks ago.”
“Yes.”
He was quiet again. Then he said, “Thank you. For not telling me. For letting me find it myself. I would not have believed it, Elizabeth, if you had simply said it. I would have thought you were letting your dislike of Wickham colour your judgement, because even though I despise him myself, I did not think him capable of this. But the evidence...” He stopped. “The evidence does not lie.”
“No,” Elizabeth said. “It does not.”
George Darcy turned from the window and walked through the wall without a word.
Nana watched him go. For the first time in Elizabeth’s memory, she looked uncertain.
She glanced at Elizabeth with an expression that was almost a question.
Then she too faded, leaving Elizabeth and Darcy alone in the study, the fire burning low, the weight of what they now both knew pressing down on them.
“What do we do?” Elizabeth asked.
Darcy considered. She could see him turning it over, examining it from every angle, the way he always did. The fire crackled. Outside, the November wind pressed against the windows.
“If we pursue this,” he said, “and if we find proof, then Wickham hangs. Lydia is a murderer’s widow at sixteen. Your family will be ruined. Kitty and Mary will never make good marriages. The scandal will touch Bingley, Jane, Georgiana, ourselves. All of it, ruined.”
“I know.”
“If we do nothing, then we live with it. We live knowing that my father was murdered, that the man who did it is married to your sister and walking free.”
“I know that too.”
He looked at her. Elizabeth’s heart ached, because she had wanted to relieve his burdens, to help him carry the weight he had been carrying alone for six years. She could see in his face that he had now realised the weight was twice what he thought it was.
“We will not do nothing,” he said. “But we must be exceedingly careful about what we do, how we proceed, who knows. Lord Matlock and I will continue the enquiry into my father’s death.
Quietly. If there is evidence to be found, we will find it.
When we know what we are dealing with, we will decide together what comes next. ”
“Together,” Elizabeth said.
“Together. I am done carrying things alone.”
He held out his hand across the desk. She took it. They sat together in the quiet while the November dark came down around Pemberley, the ghosts keeping their own counsel in the corridors beyond.