Chapter Twenty-Eight #2
Elizabeth ran. She ran through the gallery, down the corridor, found Darcy in the study.
“Your father. Now. The gallery. He’s going.
” Darcy stood up from his desk without a word and followed her.
She sent a maid for Georgiana with a message that said only Gallery, now, please hurry, and by the time they reached the long gallery George was still there, still at the window, but fainter.
“He’s here,” Elizabeth said. “By the window. He is... he is fading, Darcy. He does not have much time.”
Darcy turned to the window. Georgiana arrived, breathless. Elizabeth took her hand, positioned her beside her brother. The three of them stood before the window where George Darcy had spent so many hours watching the grounds he could not leave.
“Tell them,” George said. His voice was fading too.
“Tell Fitzwilliam that I am more proud of him than I ever managed to say in life. Tell him he was right about Wickham, and I was wrong, and the greatest regret of my death is that I did not listen to my own son when he tried to tell me the truth. Tell him that the way he has cared for this family, for Georgiana, for Pemberley, has been everything I could have hoped for and more than I deserved.”
Elizabeth spoke his words. Darcy listened, his jaw tight, his eyes bright, and he did not look away from the place where his father stood.
“Tell Georgiana,” George said, and his voice cracked, “that she has her mother’s courage, her beauty, her heart. That I have watched her grow into a woman Annie would have been proud of, and I am sorry, I am so sorry, that I was not there to see it in life.”
Elizabeth repeated this too. Georgiana’s face was wet, but she was smiling through it, a fierce, broken smile that was more Darcy than Darcy.
“And tell them both,” George said, “that their mother is waiting for me. I can feel her. She has been waiting for six years, and I have kept her waiting long enough.”
Elizabeth’s voice broke on the last sentence. She got the words out, just. Darcy reached for Georgiana’s hand. Georgiana gripped it. They stood together, brother and sister, facing the window where their father was fading into the November light.
George looked Elizabeth full in the face one last time, and he said one more thing, for her alone.
“Thank you, Mrs Darcy.”
She could not speak, but she curtsied, deeply and respectfully, the way she would have curtsied to her husband’s father if she had been presented to him while he was still alive.
George Darcy looked past Elizabeth. Past Darcy.
Past Georgiana. Past the window and the grounds and the grey sky.
He looked at something Elizabeth could not see, and his face changed.
All of the grief, the rage, dissolved. What was left was pure, uncomplicated joy. He said, in a tone of utter delight:
“Annie?”
He was gone. The gallery was empty.
Nana stood in the doorway. Elizabeth did not know how long she had been there.
She said nothing, her small hands clasped before her, looking at the place where George had been.
After a moment she straightened her cap, turned, and left.
There was a household to run, and Nana had kept herself busy doing it for a hundred and thirty years.
Elizabeth wept. Darcy put his arm around her, held her. Georgiana pressed against her brother’s side. The three of them stood in the gallery, grieving together: for the man they had lost, the man they had found, the woman who had been waiting for him on the other side.
Anne de Bourgh found Elizabeth later that afternoon, in the rose garden.
Elizabeth had gone out because she needed air, needed sky, needed to be somewhere that was not inside Pemberley’s walls.
The rose garden was bare for winter, the beds turned and mulched, the stems cut back to dark stubs.
Lady Margaret smiled from her bench, as she always did.
The November cold bit through Elizabeth’s pelisse, but she did not care.
She sat on the stone bench opposite Lady Margaret, watching the lady in the Tudor gown with its stiff ruff, its panniered skirts.
She wondered what Lady Margaret’s life had been like, married to Sir Roderick.
Perhaps there were excellent reasons why Lady Margaret’s ghost never went inside Pemberley.
Anne came down the path from the house, wrapped in a shawl, her thin face pinched by the cold. She sat beside Elizabeth without asking permission, which was new. The old Anne would have asked. The old Anne had asked permission for everything.
They sat in silence for a while. Then Anne said, quietly, “Elizabeth. May I ask you something? You need not answer if you would rather not.”
“You may ask me anything.”
“My mother said a great many things about you, these past weeks. Most of them were unkind, and wrong, and I did not believe them.” Anne paused.
“But some of what she described, the talking to empty rooms, the knowing things you should not know… they were not wrong. I have watched you too, Elizabeth. Not to gather evidence. Because I was curious. And I have come to my own conclusion, which is quite different from my mother’s. ”
Elizabeth waited.
“Did you chance to see my father at Rosings?” Anne asked. “When you visited with Mr and Mrs Collins?”
Elizabeth looked at her. Anne looked back, steady, unafraid, and Elizabeth saw Lady Catherine’s intelligence in those eyes, stripped of Lady Catherine’s malice.
“I did not,” Elizabeth said. She could be honest about this, completely honest, and the relief of it was sweet.
“Rosings, despite being old, is a quiet house. I believe your father moved on peacefully. George Darcy told me once that Sir Lewis was a good man, a happy one, and that he loved you very much. I think he had no reason to linger.”
Anne’s face did a complicated thing. Relief and grief and a small, private loss, all at once.
She had hoped, perhaps, that her father was still there, still watching, the way George had watched over Darcy and Georgiana.
And she had hoped, perhaps equally, that he was not: that he had been spared the long, trapped purgatory of Pemberley’s ghosts, that he was at peace.
“Thank you,” Anne said. “For telling me honestly.”
“How did you know?”
Anne smiled. It was a small, careful smile, the smile of a dragon’s daughter who had learned discretion from watching her mother fail at it.
“My mother built her case from suspicion and spite. I built mine from observation and logic. You are not mad, Elizabeth. You are extraordinary. And I will keep your counsel as long as you need me to.”
She stood, pulled her shawl tighter, walked back up the path to the house. Elizabeth sat in the rose garden with Lady Margaret’s spectral smile for company and thought: That girl is going to be far more formidable than her mother ever was.
That evening, Elizabeth and Darcy sat together in their sitting room, the fire burning low.
Georgiana and Anne had gone to bed. Kitty was with Lydia.
Jane and Bingley had discreetly retired, and the Matlocks were in their rooms. The house was quiet, and for the first time in weeks, the quiet felt like rest rather than threat.
“Lydia will need care,” Elizabeth said finally. “She is a widow at sixteen. She will need a home, at Longbourn or with us. She will need time, patience, people who love her despite everything.”
“She will have it. I have already written to your father.”
“You have?”
“This morning. I told him what happened, the public version. I said Lydia should return home to Longbourn as soon as she is well enough to travel, because I believe she needs her mother more than anything else at this time, and that I would provide whatever she needs.”
Elizabeth looked at him. This man, who had spent the previous day learning his wife could see ghosts, that his father had been murdered, then watching the murderer killed by an ancestor who had been sleeping for centuries, had got up this morning and written a practical, kind letter to her father about looking after Lydia.
“I love you,” she said, and it was not the awkward blurt of yesterday, but it was no less honest.
His eyes warmed, and he leaned down to kiss her. “I love you too, Mrs Darcy,” he murmured against her lips.
“What do we do now?” she asked, after a few quite satisfactory moments had passed.
“We live our lives,” Darcy said. “We take care of Georgiana, Anne, Kitty and Lydia. We let the world believe Wickham fell because he was drunk, and we carry the truth between us, and we do not let it poison what we have built.”
Elizabeth leaned against his shoulder. The fire burned. The house settled around them, and for the first time since she had arrived at Pemberley, the settling felt like contentment.
“Your father is at peace,” she said. “Lady Anne was waiting for him. He said her name, just before he went, and his face...” She stopped, because the memory of George’s face in that last moment, the joy on it, was still too raw to describe without crying, and she had cried enough.
“He is with her now. After sixteen years, he is with her.”
Darcy was quiet for a few moments, grief and joy warring on his face as he absorbed what she had just said. Then he said, “Good,” and kissed the top of her head. They sat together in the firelight. Pemberley held them. The dead rested. The living carried on.