29. The Hidden Chamber #2
Prue drew in a gasp that triggered a fit of coughing, pointing a trembling finger at the window. “I knew it! That window is the exact incarnation of Lady Renwick’s description. The light, the stone, the very air of antiquity—it is all there!”
Elizabeth followed the beam of light with a practiced, skeptical eye.
“It is a very fine window, Prue. Though I suspect that if one were to visit every medieval abbey, one would find a great many of them possessed of narrow windows and dark corners. I fear Lady Renwick has simply discovered that old stone buildings are, by their nature, somewhat gloomy.”
Elizabeth swept the candlestick along the walls, where traces of painted saints remained—a blue robe here, the suggestion of a halo there—all worn to mere shadows by time and the violence of the Dissolution.
A stone basin was set into the wall near the altar: a piscina, she recalled from her father’s books, once used by priests to wash the communion vessels.
The altar itself was carved oak, ancient and bare, save for a cloth of faded velvet that had aged from crimson to the color of dried blood or fallen autumn leaves.
“The monks,” Elizabeth murmured, trailing her fingers along the cold stone. “Before the Dissolution.”
“My father says the Darcys received these lands from Henry VIII after he seized the monasteries,” Prue said. Her voice had lost its customary animation, subdued by centuries pressing down upon them. “They built the great house on the foundations of holy ground.”
A sudden, sharp chill prickled the nape of Elizabeth’s neck, and she glanced toward the dark archway of the entrance, as if half-expecting to see a phantom of the past. She immediately straightened her shoulders, dismissing the sensation.
Superstition was the refuge of the idle mind, and she had no patience for it.
“A common enough story,” Elizabeth said, her voice echoing slightly against the barrel vault. “Half the great estates in England stand upon such stolen foundations.”
“Yes, but this…” Prue turned slowly, taking in the arches, the faded saints, and the piscina still set into the wall as though waiting for a priest who would never return.
“This is precisely as Lady Renwick described it. The blackened ceiling. The altar cloth.” She crossed to the wood, running her fingers along its edge.
“In chapter fourteen, Lady Cecelia descends to the chapel seeking refuge, and she discovers the altar conceals a hidden compartment—a relic chamber where the monks secreted their treasures from the Crown’s commissioners. ”
Elizabeth’s throat constricted, and her usual skepticism faltered.
If this place were truly the inspiration for Renwick’s work, then it could not have been discovered by accident.
Her mind unspooled a painful, unwanted thread: Darcy, bringing Amelia here in the golden, intoxicating days of their secret romance, showing this hidden place to win her favor, maybe even kissing her passionately around the reliquary, no doubt playing the grand, brooding lord, revealing the secrets of his estate to a lover who would turn them into scandalous prose.
“Lady Renwick was a woman of considerable imagination,” Elizabeth said, though the words lacked conviction. “Resemblances between her fiction and reality are often quite coincidental.”
“The angle of the light through that window is no coincidence.” Prue pointed to the lancet, where the afternoon sun fell at precisely the slant the novel described. “Nor is the path worn into the stones from door to altar. She knew this place, Elizabeth. She stood exactly where we are standing.”
The inevitable truth settled into her bones, heavy as the surrounding stone.
The air was cold, carrying the mineral smell of ancient, damp walls.
Sound behaved strangely here—their voices seemed to echo and be swallowed at once, as though the chapel remembered prayers it had not heard in three hundred years.
Lady Renwick had known Pemberley. Had known it intimately enough to render its hidden chapel in prose so accurate that a reader might find it with a map and a candle.
So Lady Renwick was Lady Amelia’s nom de plume.
And this was the additional detail Darcy wished to confess.
That he had known all along that the characters, Lord Laycock, Lady Cecelia, Lady Venetia, and the monks and the brothers, and more, were all drawn from his life or of those Lady Amelia knew.
And Elizabeth, wandering these halls, was following the ghost of a woman who had once held the keys to Darcy’s heart, standing in a room Amelia had made immortal, and holding keys Amelia had never possessed—perhaps never even wished for.
“You have gone rather pale,” Prue observed.
“The air is close,” Elizabeth managed, gesturing toward the stairs. “We should return to the house.”
But Prue did not stir. Her eyes narrowed with the shrewdness Elizabeth had learned to expect, and her posture became that of a hunter who has finally cornered her prey. “You know something of Lady Renwick, and why she possessed such intimate knowledge of these grounds.”
Elizabeth turned away, feigning an interest in the fading paint of a saint’s robe, but her silence was a confession in itself.
She could neither confirm the suspicion nor summon the energy to weave a further deception.
They regarded one another across the dim, echoing space, candles smoking, the stillness broken only by the rhythmic drip of water deep within the masonry.
Prue was far too perceptive to be brushed aside, and Elizabeth realized, with a weary heart, that the truth was already an open secret between them.
“Since you have already deduced, let us spare the theatrics.” Elizabeth regarded the ferrety-eyed Miss Duntze. “Lady Renwick has toured Pemberley, much like Miss Entwhistle proclaimed, and Lady Amelia was at Kympton for Thomas’s christening. Therefore..”
“I knew it.” Prue raised her candlestick in triumph, the flame spluttering. “Lady Amelia wrote as Lady Renwick. Being a woman of scandalous reputation and radical opinions, she published under a pen name because no respectable house would associate with her otherwise.”
Elizabeth said nothing. Her silence was admission enough.
Prue’s nose twitched, and she headed toward the staircase. “I wonder, do you also hold the key to the locked cabinet in the library?”
“I do.”