Chapter Twenty-Two #2
“To the eastern passage leading to the blue rooms. Yes. And Lady Catherine was in that passage, on her way to the yellow drawing room herself. She heard every word.”
Elizabeth sucked in a breath. “What did she do?”
“She did not enter the room. She stood in the passage and listened, and she looked as though she was deciding where to place a knife. Not now. Later. When it would do the most damage.”
“Catherine was considering Miss Bingley as a possible ally, before this,” Elizabeth said slowly.
“Another woman who resents me, who might be useful to her.” It had been quite obvious the previous evening; Lady Catherine had been dismissive of Caroline up until the moment she heard Caroline aim a sly barb in Elizabeth’s direction.
Then she had turned to look at her, eyes narrowing thoughtfully, and begun to listen.
“If she was, she is not any longer,” Nana said gleefully.
“Nobody insults Anne except Catherine. That is Catherine’s privilege, and she does not share it.
Miss Bingley has managed to alienate every woman of consequence in this house, Elizabeth.
Lady Matlock finds her tiresome. Jane has seen through her.
Anne has humiliated her. Georgiana and Kitty are laughing at her.
Now Lady Catherine, who looked down on her but might at least have become an ally through mutual dislike of you, despises her.
” Nana looked deeply satisfied. “She has no one left but her sister, who is useless, and her brother, who will never preference her over Jane. It is the most thorough social destruction I have witnessed in years, and the remarkable thing is that she did it entirely to herself.”
Elizabeth ought to have felt sorry for Caroline.
She did not, quite, but she did pity her: a woman so desperate to belong that she could not see she was pushing everyone away.
There was a version of Caroline Bingley who might have been liked, if she had ever stopped performing long enough for anyone to see her.
She was attractive, at least moderately clever, and rich.
If she had just allowed herself to shine as the person she actually was, instead of letting her jealousy and insecurity get the better of her whenever she felt threatened, she could easily have been the toast of her social circle rather than the butt of its jokes.
But Caroline could not seem to bring herself to stop the performance, and the performance was exhausting for everyone, including, Elizabeth suspected, Caroline herself.
But that was Caroline’s problem, not hers. Elizabeth had enough problems of her own, and knowing that Lady Catherine de Bourgh was no longer considering making Caroline into her pawn actually removed at least one concern from the mountain of them Elizabeth had to deal with.
George Darcy was waiting in her parlour when she came back from dressing for dinner that evening.
He was at the window, watching the last of the November light fade over the grounds, and he did not turn when she came in.
Elizabeth closed the door, checked that her maid had gone, and sat down at her writing desk.
She had fifteen minutes before she needed to go down.
“I do not care about Miss Bingley,” George said, when Elizabeth tried to tell him about Caroline’s destruction at Anne’s hands.
“She did not get what she wanted, and she is making a nuisance of herself about it but not so much as to cause any real trouble to anyone. She will leave Pemberley no better than she arrived. That is the whole of her story. Catherine is the one who matters.”
“Catherine is subdued since the confrontation. She has not spoken to me directly in days.”
“Catherine is never subdued. She is regrouping. There is a significant difference, and you would do well to remember it.”
He was right, and she knew it. Catherine had been quiet at meals, civil when addressed, and had kept largely to her rooms. But quiet and civil were not Catherine’s natural states, and their presence was more alarming than her usual fury.
“What can she do?” Elizabeth asked, rearranging the items on her desk because she needed to do something with her hands. “Darcy confronted her. Lord Matlock took his side. She has lost her spy, and she will lose Anne too.”
“She can go back to Rosings and write letters to every connection she has, telling them whatever story serves her purpose. She can whisper about your marriage, about your family, about the Wilson child. The truth does not matter, Elizabeth. What matters is what people believe, and Catherine has the ear of people who will believe her because it is easier than questioning her.”
“You are very cheerful this afternoon.”
“I am dead. Cheer is not my forte.”
Elizabeth smiled despite herself. George’s humour was rare, dry, and always delivered as though it surprised him as much as anyone. He gave her that rare, brief twitch of his mouth that passed for a smile before sobering again.
“There is one more thing,” George said. “Fitzwilliam has been in my study. Going through my papers.”
“I know. He told me he intended to.” She had looked in on him that morning, between consultations with Mrs Reynolds about the supper menu.
He had been sitting on a footstool in the study, surrounded by stacks of journals and papers, his coat off and his shirtsleeves rolled up.
He had looked up at her and she had seen the frustration in his face, the set of his jaw that meant he was not finding what he wanted but was not ready to stop.
She had brought him tea and left him to it.
“He will not find anything. I did not write down what Wilson told me. I sent a rider to Wickham carrying a note, asking him to come to Pemberley. There is no memorandum, no record of any kind. I was going to deal with it in person, and then I was dead, and the evidence died with me.” George paced to the window and back.
“My son has been in there since this morning. He has been through the desk drawers, the correspondence files, the household accounts for that year. He found my will, which he has already seen. He found a letter from Wickham thanking me for a gift of fifty pounds on his birthday, which made him angry. He found some letters I wrote to Annie, after she had passed; they were just a way for me to order my thoughts, manage my grief, but I kept them. They made him sad. But he did not find what he was looking for, because it does not exist.”
“He needs to look,” Elizabeth said. “Even if there is nothing to find. He needs to feel that he has been thorough, and I can’t tell him there is nothing to find, George, because there is no way I could know that. Only you could know that, and now is not the time for me to tell him about you.”
“I know. But I am...” George stopped pacing.
He stood at the window with his back to her, and when he spoke again his voice was rough.
“I am proud of him for it. For looking. For caring. He came back to the study after luncheon and started on the bookshelves, checking for papers tucked inside the volumes. I watched him take down every book on the second shelf, shake it, check for loose pages, and replace it. He is methodical. He always was, even as a boy; he would not leave a puzzle until he had solved it.” He turned from the window.
“He is a better man than I was, Elizabeth. I favoured a charming boy over my own son, and my son grew up to be the man I should have been.”
Elizabeth set down the pen she had been turning over in her fingers. George did not often say things like this. When he did, she could hear what it cost him, and she did not know where to look.
“He would be glad to know you think so,” she said.
“Then perhaps you ought to tell him.”
She met his eyes. George looked back at her, steady, waiting, and the challenge in his face was not unkind but it was real.
A month ago the idea of telling Darcy about the ghosts had felt impossible.
Now, after everything he had absorbed without flinching, after Sally Wilson, Catherine’s accusations, the slow, steady building of the case against Wickham, the idea of saying your father is here, and he is proud of you seemed less like madness, more like mercy.
But the ball was in three days. The house was full of guests.
If she told him now and it went badly, she would have to stand beside him and smile at three hundred people while her marriage fell apart.
That was, of course, if she was not immediately locked up in a madhouse.
“It is not the time,” she said again. “But... soon. After the ball, when the house is quiet again, I will tell him everything.”
She had said soon so many times that the word had lost its meaning. But this time she meant it. She thought George could tell, because he nodded, once, then went back to his pacing. Elizabeth went downstairs to dinner.