21. The Sonnet’s Fate #2
“Oh, Mrs. Darcy!” The maid bobbed a curtsy, her face luminous with barely contained delight.
“Such a morning we’ve had! Sidney’s produced another three babies overnight.
Thomas found them at dawn and has been counting them ever since.
He’s determined to name them all, though I’ve tried to explain that snails do not generally answer to their names. ”
Elizabeth managed a smile. “I have every confidence in Thomas’s pedagogical abilities. If anyone can teach snails to recognize their appellations, it will be him.”
“He’s named the new ones ‘Spotty,’ ‘Speedy,’ and ‘King.’ I’ve no notion why ‘King’—perhaps because His Majesty also moves rather slowly these days?” Hannah clapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh, I ought not to have said that. Please don’t tell Mrs. Reynolds.”
“Your secret is safe.” Elizabeth poured herself tea, though her appetite had vanished somewhere between her chamber and the breakfast table. “Has Mr. Darcy breakfasted?”
“The master took a tray into his study, madam. Very early. He said he was not to be disturbed.” Hannah’s expression flickered—a trace of puzzlement, perhaps, that the master should hide himself on the morning after such a romantic dinner.
“Except when Mr. Blythewood arrives. The solicitor, that is. He’s expected before noon. ”
Blythewood. The name explained Darcy’s avoidance, if not the precise reason he had not crossed that threshold. It had to be the Apethorpe threat or something lurking in Lady Amelia’s papers.
“Thank you, Hannah.” Elizabeth set down her teacup, the liquid untasted. “I find I have a slight headache this morning. I believe I shall rest in the library rather than walking in the gardens.”
“Shall I send for a powder, madam? Or perhaps some willow bark tea?”
“No, thank you. Quiet will suffice.”
She escaped before Georgiana could question her—or before Hannah’s radiant assumptions about romantic dinners and their natural conclusions could become any more painfully apparent.
The library was dim and cool, curtains half-drawn against the morning sun. Elizabeth wandered the stacks without purpose, trailing her fingers along leather spines, breathing in the scent of old books, beeswax, and something faintly floral. The locked cabinet drew her, as she had known it would.
Oak, solid, with brass fittings that gleamed.
She stood before it, studying keyhole and hinges, the careful construction that guarded its contents from curious eyes.
Not for the first time did she wonder why Lady Amelia had entrusted her papers to Darcy.
But then, she had also entrusted her son, and Darcy was both honorable and noble enough to keep her wishes.
Secrets lay inside that cabinet. Papers and correspondence. Essays and unfinished manuscripts. And Darcy would guard them without reading them—that much she knew. Lady Amelia’s family did not know that and wished to review or destroy them.
Elizabeth was mistress of Pemberley, and she had a right to ask Mrs. Reynolds for the key. It would be such a simple request, and Mrs. Reynolds would grant it, and then… Elizabeth would know.
Her hand rose toward the cabinet door, then stilled.
No.
She lowered her hand.
Thomas had taught her this, quite unintentionally.
In his first days at Pemberley, when he would not speak, would not be held, and would accept comfort only from Hartley, Elizabeth had discovered that pressing the matter only deepened his retreat.
She had learned to wait—to remain present, patient, and available until he chose to come to her in his own time.
Lizba, he had called her, and then finally. Mine.
Darcy was not a two-year-old, but he bore burdens she could not yet see.
He had promised to tell her everything, and demanding entry to his secrets would only send him further behind his walls.
So she turned to the shelves and found a well-worn volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets—not the one Darcy had read from, but one marked with his notes in the margin.
The book fell open easily to a marked page titled “Sonnet 29”.
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate…
She heard his voice as she read—the roughness, the way it caught on certain words. Disgrace. Outcast. Curse my fate.
She had thought he was reading toward the turn—the part where love lifts the speaker from despair. But perhaps the earlier lines had mattered more. She had watched his mouth rather than attended to the words, anticipating what would follow the poetry rather than what the poetry itself might reveal.
Why should Fitzwilliam Darcy—master of Pemberley, possessor of ten thousand a year, respected by all—feel himself in disgrace? Why look upon himself and curse his fate? What outcast state did he beweep, alone, when no one observed?
Lady Amelia. The name surfaced unbidden, bringing with it everything Elizabeth had gathered over the past weeks.
The daughter of an earl who had valued independence over respectability, freedom over protection.
The woman who had borne George Wickham’s child and refused to marry, even when it meant disgrace.
“George is not the marrying kind,” Darcy had said, practically spitting the words. “And Amelia valued her independence above respectability.”