Chapter Twenty-Five #2
“Yes. Foxglove. Your father did not know it was coming. They dined together, talked afterwards in the library. Wickham brought him brandy to drink. George thought the matter was resolved. Then he went to bed and he did not wake.”
Darcy pressed his hand over his eyes. He stood like that for a long moment, his hand covering his face, his shoulders rigid. Elizabeth sat and watched him, did not touch him, because she could see that he needed a moment where nobody could see his expression. She gave it to him.
George watched his son. His face was stripped of everything Elizabeth was accustomed to seeing there: the anger, the restlessness, the driving need for justice.
What was left was simpler and more painful.
A father looking at his son, knowing he had failed him, unable to do the one thing a father wants to do: reach out, put his hand on his child’s shoulder, say you did well. I am sorry. You did well.
Darcy lowered his hand. His eyes were red, but he was composed.
“Ask him,” Darcy said. “Ask him if he can hear me, when I speak.”
“He can hear you. He has always been able to hear you. He simply cannot answer. That has been the worst of it for him, I think.”
Darcy turned to the empty space where his father stood and said, “I forgive you, Father. For Wickham. For all of it. You were deceived, and you paid for it with your life, and I do not blame you. I have not blamed you for a long time.”
George Darcy made a sound Elizabeth had never heard from him. It was not a word. It was not a cry. It was the sound of six years of grief breaking loose.
“He heard you,” Elizabeth said. “He is...” She did not know how to describe what was on George’s face, so she did not try. “He heard you, Darcy.”
Georgiana came when Elizabeth sent for her.
She came quickly, because the note Elizabeth sent with a maid had said only Come to my parlour at once, alone, and Georgiana was not a girl who needed to be told twice.
She knocked. Elizabeth opened the door. Georgiana came in, saw Darcy standing by the fire with his red-rimmed eyes and his ruined waistcoat, and stopped.
“What has happened?” she said. “Is it Lady Catherine? Anne told me what she...”
“Sit down, Georgiana,” Darcy said.
She sat. She looked between them, her brother and his wife, and Elizabeth could see her reading the room: Darcy’s face, Elizabeth’s swollen eyes, the charged quiet of the parlour.
Georgiana was good at reading rooms. She had been doing it since Ramsgate, watching for danger in the faces of the people around her.
“Elizabeth has told me,” Darcy said. “About the ghosts.”
Georgiana’s eyes went wide. She looked at Elizabeth.
“I told him everything,” Elizabeth said. “The gift. Nana. The household.”
“You told him.” Georgiana’s voice was barely audible. “He knows?”
“He knows. He believes me.”
Georgiana looked at her brother. Darcy met her eyes, and whatever she saw in his face made her exhale, a long, shaking breath.
She had kept Elizabeth’s secret for weeks, carrying it alongside her own fear of what would happen when her brother found out.
Now it was out. He was not angry. The relief in her face was as naked as Elizabeth’s had been.
“There is more,” Elizabeth said. “Georgiana, I need to tell you something I have been keeping from you. I kept it from you because I was trying to protect you, but I cannot any longer.”
Georgiana’s hands tightened in her lap, and she looked nervous again.
“Your father is here,” Elizabeth said. “His ghost. He has been at Pemberley since his death. He is in this room, right now, standing beside Darcy.”
Georgiana did not cry. She went white, so white that Elizabeth reached for her hand, afraid she might faint, but Georgiana gripped Elizabeth’s fingers hard and held on and did not faint.
She stared at the spot beside Darcy where Elizabeth had indicated, and her eyes moved as though searching for something she desperately wanted to see and could not.
“I can’t see him,” Georgiana whispered.
“No. Nobody else can. Not Kitty, not you, not anyone. Only me.” She squeezed Georgiana’s hand. “But he can see you, Georgiana. He is looking at you right now.”
George was looking at his daughter. Elizabeth had seen many expressions on his face over these weeks: fury, grief, self-loathing, the bitter dry humour he used to keep the grief at bay. She had never seen this. He was looking at Georgiana with such naked tenderness that Elizabeth had to look away.
“Tell her,” George said. His voice was barely audible. “Tell her I am sorry I was not there. After Ramsgate. She needed her father; he was dead. She had to face that man’s treachery alone. I have never forgiven myself for it.”
Elizabeth repeated his words. Georgiana’s face crumpled.
“It was not his fault,” Georgiana said. “He did not know what Wickham was. None of us did, until it was too late.”
“He knows that now,” Elizabeth said. “He learned the truth about Wickham just before he died. He confronted him. And Wickham...” She stopped.
This was the part she had dreaded. “Georgiana, Wickham killed your father. He poisoned him. That is why your father has not been able to leave this house. He is trapped here because his murder has never been acknowledged, and he has been waiting for six years for someone who could hear him.”
Georgiana’s grip on Elizabeth’s hand tightened until it hurt.
“Wickham,” she said. The name came out flat, stripped of everything.
“Yes.”
“The man who tried to seduce me at Ramsgate. The man who married Lydia. That man murdered my father.”
“I am afraid so.”
Georgiana looked at her brother. Darcy looked back at her. Something passed between them that did not need words: the shared knowledge of what Wickham had taken from them, the full accounting of it, laid out at last.
“I want to hear him,” Georgiana said. “I cannot see him, but you can, Elizabeth. Will you... can you tell me what he says? Can we talk to him?”
“Of course,” Elizabeth said.
What followed was the strangest conversation Elizabeth had ever been part of, and the most sacred.
She sat between Darcy and Georgiana, relaying George’s words as he spoke them, and George spoke to his children for the first time in six years.
He told Georgiana about the roses: that seeing Georgiana restore the garden with Kitty had given him more joy than anything since his death.
He told Darcy about the study, about watching him go through the papers, about the letters to Annie.
He said he had watched Darcy shake every book on every shelf and had wanted to tell him there was nothing to find, and had not been able to.
He told them he was proud of them. He said it more than once, in different ways, as though he needed to be sure they heard it, as though six years of silence had dammed up so many words that they were all coming now, too many, too fast. Darcy listened with his jaw tight and his eyes bright.
Georgiana wept quietly, wiping her face with the handkerchief Elizabeth gave her, and asked questions in a steady voice that belied the tears: was he in pain, could he sleep, did he like Mrs Annesley, had he seen Georgiana play the pianoforte?
Yes, he said, to the last. He had stood in the music room more times than he could count and listened to her play, and she played like her mother, from the heart.
That was when Georgiana broke. She put her face in her hands and cried. Darcy put his arm around her. George Darcy stood in front of his children, unable to touch either of them, grieving as they were grieving for what had been stolen from them all when Wickham put foxglove in his brandy.
Elizabeth sat and said nothing, because there was nothing to say. She was the bridge between the living and the dead, and bridges do not speak. They hold.
After a long time, George said, quietly, “Thank you, Elizabeth.”
She nodded. He turned and walked through the wall. He was gone. The room was warmer for his absence, and sadder.
The three of them sat in the parlour for a while after George left.
Georgiana dried her eyes. Darcy sent a servant for brandy for himself and for Elizabeth, who drank it though it was barely four in the afternoon.
She had not eaten since the previous evening.
The brandy hit her empty stomach like fire.
“Wickham,” Darcy said, after a long silence.
He was standing at the window again, the glass in his hand, looking out at the grounds.
“We have the truth of it all now from my father, but the testimony of a ghost cannot count for anything in the living world. We have Mr Wilson’s account, and Mrs Reynolds’ corroboration of those parts of it she knew of, which establish motive and timeline but not the act itself.
We have a physician who signed a death certificate six years ago and may or may not remember the details.
” He turned from the window. “There is no legal path. Not one that would survive a magistrate’s scrutiny, let alone a court. ”
“I know,” Elizabeth said.
“If I could challenge him, I would. I would call Wickham out, put a bullet through him, hang for it if necessary, but that would destroy this family as surely as a trial would. It would not bring my father back.” His voice was steady.
The fury was there, banked, controlled, directed inward where it could be managed.
“There must be another way. We cannot prove murder, but we can make it impossible for Wickham to harm anyone else. We can cut off his income, his connections, his ability to move through society as though he is an honourable man.” He made a face.
“Except we cannot do any of those things, because of Lydia.”
“Lydia will not leave him willingly,” Elizabeth said. “She is sixteen and married and she still thinks she loves him, even though she has begun to fear him.”
“Then we make it possible for her to leave, and we wait until she is ready. Between us, Lord Matlock and I have resources that Wickham cannot match.” Darcy set down his glass.
“I will not let your sister remain in danger, Elizabeth. I promise you that. Whatever it takes, however long it takes, we will find a way to bring Lydia home.”
Elizabeth looked at her husband. He was standing in the last of the November light, his face drawn with grief, anger, resolve.
She thought: this is the man who proposed to me so badly at Hunsford.
Who wrote me a letter so honest it changed my life.
Who listened to his aunt call me a madwoman this afternoon and chose me before he knew the truth.
Who is now promising to save my sister from a murderer because she is mine and therefore his responsibility.
He has never once in his life walked away from a responsibility.
“I love you,” she said. She had not planned to say it. It came out the way the ghost confession had come out: blunt, graceless, true.
Darcy looked at her. “I know,” he said. “I have known for some time. You are not as subtle as you think you are, Elizabeth.”
She laughed. It was a terrible laugh, half a sob, but it was a laugh. Darcy smiled. Georgiana, still red-eyed, smiled too. For a moment the three of them were just a family, sitting in a parlour, finding their way back to each other.
“The ball,” Elizabeth said. She looked at the clock. Half past four. Three hundred people arriving in two and a half hours. She had not dressed. Her face was a disaster.
“The ball,” Darcy agreed. “We will stand in the receiving line. We will dance. Pemberley will be as majestic as she has ever been, and the new Mrs Darcy will be praised as the finest hostess Pemberley could wish for. Tomorrow, when Aunt Catherine has gone and the house is ours again, we will sit down together and decide what to do about George Wickham.”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “Tonight we will host the finest ball Pemberley has seen in twenty years, because Nana has been planning it for a hundred and thirty, and I’d rather face Wickham himself than tell her it’s been cancelled.”
Darcy held out his hand. Elizabeth took it. They went to dress for the ball, and Georgiana went to find Kitty, and the house hummed around them, waiting.