30. The Measure of a Mother #3
The Countess shrieked in a very different register, leaping onto the settee with surprising agility for a woman of her age. “Get those fleas away from me!”
The Earl rose, positioning himself in front of his wife as though the dog were a charging bull. Georgiana clapped her hand over her mouth, her shoulders shaking with suppressed laughter.
The hall boy stumbled in, stammering apologies. “He had to relieve himself, I—”
Jamison leaped into action, producing a tone of command that usually worked on dogs and footmen alike. “Soup bone, Harley. Come.”
But the dog cared only for his boy, circling around Thomas and tangling his lead around the child’s legs. Jamison grabbed the leash and pulled, causing Harley to bay like a bloodhound resurrected from a Lady Renwick novel—a sound that seemed to shake the very chandeliers.
“No!” Thomas wrapped his arms around the hound with fierce protectiveness. “Harley stay! Thomas want Harley!”
“Harley must go back to his room,” Elizabeth explained gently, though her voice barely carried over the commotion. “We have guests, sweetheart.”
The storm gathered: first the darkening of Thomas’s face, then the trembling lip, and at last the full tempest of grief and rage.
He flung himself onto the carpet, limbs flailing like an overturned beetle.
“Da! Da!” he cried, Darcy’s name torn from some bruised place within.
“Want Da. Now. Thomas bad boy. Da go away. Thomas bad, bad boy, and Da go away. Want Da!”
Elizabeth’s heart cracked open, and she swooped toward her son, sinking to her knees and gathering his small, thrashing body into her arms. Harley licked her face, which was not helpful, but she ignored him, focusing entirely on the boy who was falling apart in her embrace.
“You are not a bad boy.” Her voice was low, fierce, meant for Thomas alone. “Da loves you. Da went to London to help you, not because you did anything wrong. Do you hear me, Thomas? You are not bad. You are loved.”
Thomas’s sobs did not stop, but they softened.
He burrowed into her shoulder, his tears soaking the silk of her dress, his small hands fisting in her hair.
Harley, sensing that the crisis was real, stopped his antics and pressed against them both, offering the only comfort he knew how to give—warmth and presence and the steady thump of his tail against the carpet.
Elizabeth looked up to find the Countess watching her.
The older woman’s face had changed entirely. The rigid composure was gone; in its place was something raw, something that Elizabeth recognized because she had felt it herself in recent days. Grief, yes, but also wonder—the surprise of witnessing a truth one had not expected to find.
“She would have liked you,” the Countess said, her voice choked with emotion. “Amelia would do anything for Thomas. She climbed trees to catch beetles for him, and you gave him snails and a puppy who won’t leave his side. Your husband chose well.”
And that, perhaps, was the most significant compliment anyone had ever given Elizabeth—the unnotable second daughter of Longbourn, who had somehow become mistress of Pemberley and mother to a child who was not her own, but who loved her just the same.
“Thank you, Lady Apethorpe.” She inclined her head, Thomas still fastened to her neck. Her hair had escaped its pins again, her dress was rumpled and streaked with tears. She looked, she suspected, like a woman who had survived a skirmish rather than a tea party.
But she had won.
“Hartley,” she said, and the nursemaid stepped forward to receive Thomas. “Please take Thomas to the nursery. And perhaps Harley might accompany him.”
Thomas’s face brightened through his tears, a watery sunrise after the storm. “Harley come?”
“Harley may come.”
Hartley gathered both boy and dog with the competence of a woman who had seen worse—and they departed, leaving the drawing room suddenly, strangely quiet. The only evidence of the commotion was a single dog hair floating in a shaft of sunlight.
The Countess resumed her seat on the settee, though she discreetly scratched her arm where Harley had brushed against her. Her composure had returned, but something different lingered in her eyes.
“We did not come to take him from you,” she said, and the words carried a weight that Elizabeth had not expected.
“I want you to understand that. Whatever you may have feared, we have no intention of pursuing legal remedies. We only want Thomas recognized as your husband’s son and heir, and of course, we wish to see him and to know that he is well. ”
“He is well.” Elizabeth’s voice was steadier than she felt. “And he is loved.”
“Yes. I can see that.” The Countess paused, her gaze searching Elizabeth’s face. “You are not what I expected, Mrs. Darcy.”
“I imagine not. I am rarely what anyone expects.”
A ghost of a smile crossed the Countess’s face—and in that moment, Elizabeth saw something of Amelia in her. The sharp intelligence, the appreciation for wit, and the hunger for something beyond the ordinary. Whatever Amelia had been, she had inherited some of it from this woman.
“Our daughter left papers,” the Countess said, her voice carefully neutral. “Manuscripts, correspondence, journals. Mr. Darcy informed our son that they are here at Pemberley, in her cabinet.”
Elizabeth’s pulse quickened. “Yes. The cabinet is in the library.”
“Have you read them?”
“No.”
The Countess regarded her, blinking and nodding. “You are wise not to. Amelia was unsparing in her observations. She wrote to wound as much as to illuminate. I suspect her account of Mr. Darcy would not be kind, however much she may have enjoyed his devotion and the idea of being loved.”
Enjoyed, Elizabeth thought, the word turning sour in her mind. As if he were merely an accessory to her vanity—a gentleman of standing to bolster her pride and provide a backdrop for her own brilliance—held in reserve to be used, but never truly valued.
A cold weight settled in her stomach as she thought of Darcy in the library, his voice breaking as he spoke of a woman he had worshipped. Amelia loved being loved, which was not the same as loving.
“You have given me much to consider, Lady Apethorpe.”
“I have given you the truth. What you do with it is your affair.” The Countess rose, signaling that the call was ending. “We shall not trouble you further during our journey. But perhaps, when we return from the Lakes—if it would not be unwelcome—we might call again.”
Elizabeth rose as well, conscious of the dog hair on her dress, her disheveled hair, and her complete failure to maintain the dignity appropriate to a mistress of Pemberley. “You would be welcome, my lord and my lady. Thomas should know his grandparents.”
Something softened in the Countess’s face—a crack in the armor she had worn for so long. “Thank you, Mrs. Darcy. I believe my daughter would have underestimated you, just as she underestimated so many things. But I shall not make that mistake.”