Epilogue #2
She stopped. She did not announce herself.
He was making his final circuit. The front door’s bolt. The hall table, the card tray—there were a few more cards on it now that London was reconvening. The umbrella stand. He straightened two umbrellas. His hand rested briefly on the mahogany one before he moved on.
He stood at the centre of the entrance hall facing away from her.
When he turned, Elizabeth saw that his white eyebrows were level, his coat immaculate.
He was not, she understood, saying goodbye to the house.
He was concluding his inspection to his own satisfaction, making sure everything was right before he left it.
Tracy turned towards his office without looking up. He did not see her.
Elizabeth sat down on the top step, in the dark, and stayed there for a little while.
Then she heard Fitzwilliam’s footsteps below. She said nothing. He appeared on the ground floor, looked at the entrance hall, then back up the stairs and saw her there.
He came up and sat beside her on the step. It was not dignified, but neither of them mentioned it.
“I will miss him,” her husband said at last. “He sat outside the nursery all night when Georgiana was born, did I ever tell you?”
“No.”
“And when my father was ill, he was the one who came to find me when . . . it was time. I was in the library, I had been in there for hours. He made sure I was with Papa when . . . He knew I would never forgive myself if I was not.” He was quiet for a moment.
“After, when I came into the hall and sat down, he sat down too. Kneeled right there beside my chair. He did not say anything. He just stayed until I recollected there was much to be done and rose again.” He paused.
“I have never asked him why. It was not at all the done thing.”
“No,” Elizabeth said.
“He brought Georgiana her meals himself for a week after father died and she would not come downstairs. Every meal, on a tray, carried up by hand. He never explained that either.” Darcy looked down at the entrance hall below them, the lamps burning, everything in its place.
Elizabeth leaned her head on his shoulder.
From above them came the small, tyrannical cries of a baby who wished to be fed.
Neither of them moved immediately. They sat just a moment longer in the dark and on the step before Fitzwilliam rose and held out his hand.
She took it.
Darcy had sent for Fitz the evening before, because some things required his cousin’s irreverence to be endurable.
He arrived at eight o’clock with mud on his boots and an alert, unhurried manner. He said nothing when Darcy told him. He accepted a brandy, looked at the fire for a moment, and then said, “Right, then. What time?”
“Ten. The farewell is in the morning.”
“I will be here at nine.” He drank his brandy. “How is your long-suffering wife?”
“She is well. Thomas keeps her up at night.”
Fitz snorted. “Thomas keeps you up too.”
Darcy did not deny it.
“There is news of Wickham,” Fitz said, in a different tone. “I had a letter from Calcutta last week.”
“And how does he find it?”
“Hot.” Fitz’s expression was one of deep satisfaction.
“He is working harder than he has in his entire life, which is to say he is actually working. He is among people entirely indifferent to his charm and he has been denied entrance to any games of chance on the grounds that he is pockets-to-let. At this rate, he should be able to pay his debts back in approximately thirty years.”
“Excellent.”
Fitz set down his empty glass and rose. “Nine o’clock,” he said, and let himself out.
Darcy’s cousin was back at five past nine, which for Fitz was essentially dawn.
The staff assembled in the entrance hall without being summoned, because everyone knew what was happening this morning.
Mrs. Aldworth. Franks. Cook. The footmen.
The maids. Larson, the new butler, stood at the edge of it all, correct and attentive, because Tracy had spent a year quietly training him.
Tracy spoke at full volume, with gravity.
His satisfaction with the state of the house.
His confidence in the succession. His new direction was in Marylebone, only a fifteen-minute walk away.
His availability for consultation on certain inventory matters for no more than one month.
His observation that Parliament’s return would make considerable demands upon the household, and that Larson had been fully prepared for them.
He looked at Mrs. Aldworth. Something passed between them—the friendship established through twenty-five years together as the senior servants at Bereford House.
“Tracy,” Fitz said, “I have been thinking about that business with the umbrella since November. I want you to know I have discussed it with two of my colleagues, both of whom wanted me to recruit you.”
Tracy inclined his head. “The colonel is very good.”
“He said I was very good,” Fitz said in an aside to Darcy. His smile was lopsided. “I have not been called very good since Vienna.” He paused. “Of course I cannot tell you what I did in Vienna.”
Darcy ignored his cousin, because Tracy was looking at him.
He had been part of this house since before Darcy was born.
He had sat on the hall floor at two in the morning beside a young man who did not know what to do with his grief.
He had carried trays up dark stairs for a week to a girl of ten who would not come downstairs to eat.
He had stood at this door and welcomed Elizabeth on the sunny September morning she had arrived with enough composure to convince almost everyone that their marriage was perfectly normal.
“Thank you, Tracy,” Darcy said. There was nothing he could say that would be adequate, so he did not attempt it.
Elizabeth stepped forward with the package.
Tracy unwrapped it with his usual deliberateness, withdrew a new mahogany umbrella from its box to test its weight and examine the small brass cap.
He read the inscription—T. Tracy, B.H. 1779–1813—and brushed over it with his thumb. Tracy cleared his throat.
“The mahogany ones are heavier,” Darcy said.
“More reliable in wet weather,” said Elizabeth.
“Yes,” said Tracy. “Quite so.”
He opened the front door himself and stepped out into the January morning. It was misting outside and Tracy, with his back to them and ramrod straight, opened the umbrella as they all called out their farewells and the door closed behind him.
The household dispersed quietly. Mrs. Aldworth disappeared he knew not where.
Cook shepherded her girls back towards the kitchen, already talking about luncheon, because Cook’s response to sadness was to feed people.
The footmen went. The maids went. Larson made one careful circuit of the entrance hall—Tracy’s circuit, Darcy noted, to the inch—and then withdrew to his office.
Elizabeth pressed her hand briefly to Darcy’s arm and went upstairs to Thomas.
Darcy stood in the entrance hall with his cousin. “Lady Catherine wrote to thank you again for sending Mrs. Younge to her.”
“Did she?”
“Yes. After complaining about never knowing where to send your letters, she explained that Mrs. Younge was a very hard case but that she was . . . improving.” He removed a folded letter from his pocket and read.
“She is required to accompany me on my visits to the poor of the parish, which she finds disagreeable, as the cottages are small, the families numerous, and several of the youngest children have taken a liking to her and will not be discouraged.”
“Aunt Catherine,” Darcy said, handing the letter to Fitz, “has been refusing to make those visits for years. She only goes herself because she finally has someone she can direct to do all the things she does not wish to do.”
They both laughed softly and then Fitz cleared his throat. “I should probably tell you,” he said, “before you hear it elsewhere, that my brother is furious with me.”
“Why is that?” Darcy inquired. His cousin Edmund was very different from Fitz, and they often quarrelled.
“I may have mentioned to his mother-in-law—Lady Plimpton, you have met her, strict woman, very practical—that he lost four hundred pounds at cards in November.” He paused.
“In my defence, I assumed she already knew. She tracks Edmund’s expenditure with the rigour of a quartermaster.
I cannot account for the gap in her intelligence. ”
“How did it come up?”
“She asked me directly how Edmund had been keeping himself since Christmas. He has already paid it back, I thought it an innocuous reply.”
“You could simply not answer.”
“I considered it.” He placed his hat at its usual angle, which was to say slightly wrong. Fitz did not like wearing a hat any more than he did. “Edmund says I did it on purpose.”
“Did you?”
Fitz met his eyes with an expression of complete innocence that confirmed he had.
“He borrowed two hundred pounds from me in September and has not mentioned repayment. I admit nothing, I am merely observing the sequence of events and mentioning that I ought to have been paid first.” He moved towards the door.
“I may have sent flowers to Lady Plimpton, and she may have written back to say that she intended to have Edmund and her daughter in for dinner next week to discuss his habits, and that I would be welcome. I have accepted, naturally.”
“Naturally.”
Fitz opened the front door, admitting a gust of January damp. “Breakfast tomorrow? I want to see Thomas properly.”
“Eight o’clock.”
“Done.” He stepped out.
“Fitz.”
His cousin turned.
“Thank you,” Darcy said. “For coming yesterday. And today.”
Fitz looked at him for a moment. “He sat with you when I could not,” he said, and with that, he departed, leaving the door open behind him.
Larson closed it.
After dinner, Darcy walked his wife to the nursery and then went to fetch a book from the library. He thought he might read to her tonight, for he knew she was tired.