CHAPTER 74 #3
“No. Only exposed to the consequences.” Elizabeth looked toward the windows. “Jane will be sorry, Kitty will think herself blamed, Mary will extract a principle from it, and my mother will make a grievance large enough to cover Hertfordshire. But I do not want her here, Fitzwilliam. Not now.”
The plainness of it did not sound cruel. It sounded tired.
“Then she must not come.”
Elizabeth let out a small breath. “How simple you make it.”
“Only because you have already done the harder part.”
She glanced at him then, softened enough to forgive the comfort because it had not pretended there was no cost.
“You are thinking of your father,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Shall I ask?”
“Not yet.”
She accepted that. It was one of the many ways in which marriage had become more exacting than courtship: she knew when not to open a door merely because she had the key.
A footman came along the gallery and bowed.
“Your father asks whether you will attend him, sir.”
Elizabeth’s hand tightened once on Darcy’s arm.
“Go,” she said.
“Will you return to the sitting room?”
“I shall return to the chair which has acquired so many friends.”
He touched her fingers before releasing her. “I will come to you after.”
“Yes,” she said. Then, more softly: “Do.”
His father had been moved to the smaller study adjoining his rooms, where the light was gentler and the fire less likely to make Mr. Grant complain.
October had drawn the afternoon down early; the corners of the room were already dim, and the old brass fittings on the desk caught the firelight in dull, broken gleams.
George Darcy was stronger than he had been a month before. That was visible in the angle of his head, the steadier line of his mouth, the fact that his hand rested on the chair rather than gripped it. Illness had not made him small. It had made every inch of command more expensive.
On the desk lay several cases.
Darcy stopped just inside the door.
His father saw where he looked and did not spare him.
“Mrs. Reynolds found them,” George Darcy said. “Or rather, she knew where they had been left. I had not forgotten. I had only neglected to open the drawer.”
Darcy did not move.
There were more cases than he expected. Not a careless scattering of ornaments, nor the contents of Lady Anne’s dressing-table brought out in grief, but old cases placed with deliberate order.
Two were worn dark morocco, their edges rubbed by generations of hands.
One was longer, lined in faded blue velvet.
The last was small, square, and set apart.
Darcy knew the pearl case. He had seen it open once when he was very young, while his mother fastened the necklace at her throat and smiled at him in the glass.
He did not know the sapphires except by rumour.
His father touched the longer case first.
“These were your great-grandmother’s wedding jewels. Sapphires and diamonds. They came to Pemberley with her settlement and were kept here afterward. My mother wore them. Then Anne.”
He opened the case.
The sapphires lay against old velvet, dark and deep as winter water, each stone circled by diamonds small enough not to shout and clear enough not to need to.
They were not fashionable ornaments bought for display.
They had the settled gravity of things that had outlived several tempers, several marriages, and more than one mistress of the house.
“They were never meant to be only Anne’s,” his father said. “Nor my mother’s. They belong to Mrs. Darcy.”
Darcy’s throat closed.
His father opened the second case. Pearls, cream-coloured and quiet, lay in two soft rows, with earrings and a small clasp set with diamonds no larger than necessary.
“The pearls are worn often,” George said. “The sapphires are not.”
Darcy looked down at the dark stones.
“They are worn when it is necessary that no one in the room should forget who Mrs. Darcy is.”
Darcy looked up then.
His father’s face was tired, but not uncertain.
“You will give them to your wife.”
“From you?”
“From Pemberley.” George’s hand remained on the edge of the case. “And from me, if she can bear it.”
Darcy looked at the jewels again. The sapphires were too grand for apology. The pearls too intimate for payment. Together they were worse than either, because they said what his father had not said when he ought to have said it.
“You should have sent them when I married.”
“Yes.”
The word came without defence.
Darcy had not expected it, and therefore had no answer ready.
“No,” George said, correcting himself harshly. “I should have received your wife before a stroke, a theft, and a frightened girl made her necessary.”
Darcy stood very still.
His father looked down at the open cases.
“I have no right to make a gift of what should already have been hers,” George said. “I must restore it.”
The words were plain enough to hurt.
His father touched the small case last.
“That is not for your wife.”
Darcy looked at him, then stepped nearer and opened it.
The ring lay inside, heavy gold and dark stone, the Darcy crest cut deep enough to leave its mark in wax.
He had not seen it for years. He remembered it on his father’s hand at Pemberley, on estate letters, on orders sent to tenants, on papers that carried more authority in one pressed seal than Darcy’s spoken denial had ever carried with his father.
He remembered returning it.
He had been too young to do it calmly and too proud to do it without shaking.
His father had said that if Fitzwilliam Darcy would not confess himself honourable, he had no right to wear the signs of honourable inheritance.
Darcy had taken off the ring, placed it on the desk, and said nothing, because every word available to him had seemed either pleading or contempt.
Now it lay between them as if time had not touched it.
“I thought it remained with you,” Darcy said.
“It did.” George’s voice roughened. “Too long.”
Darcy did not touch it.
His father looked at the ring as if it were another accusation. “No one should have been able to pretend you were less Darcy than I was. I permitted it. I made it easier.”
“It will not repair what was done.”
“No.” His father’s hand remained on the desk. “But leaving it there continues it.”
Darcy looked down at the ring until the crest blurred.
His father’s gaze moved to the pearls.
“Your mother wore those after you were born,” he said. “Not often. She was not well enough for many dinners.”
The room seemed to narrow.
“I remembered that wrongly for a long time,” George said. “As if the jewels had gone into the drawer because of you.”
Darcy looked at his father.
George did not look away.
“If Elizabeth is ill after the child, do not make an account of it against the child.”
Darcy could not speak.
“I did,” George said.
The words were very quiet. Not cold. Only stripped of every defence that might have made them bearable.
“Your mother was weaker after your birth. Mrs. Wickham pitied her very faithfully. She pitied me too. I let it teach me where to put my fear.”
“Upon me,” Darcy said.
George looked at the pearls. “Yes.”
There had been many explanations for his father’s rejection.
Some legal, some social, some born of forged papers, some of pride, some of the Wickhams’ patient art.
Darcy had not known this one had been waiting underneath them all: not the only root, perhaps not even the strongest, but old enough to have poisoned the ground before any later lie was planted.
“You should have believed me,” he said.
“Yes,” said his father.
Nothing in the answer repaired the past. That, perhaps, was why Darcy believed it.
George pushed the small case toward him. “Take it.”
This time Darcy did.
The ring was heavier than memory. Or perhaps his hand was.
There was no embrace. No forgiveness. No son restored in a single afternoon by jewels and old gold. Darcy would have distrusted it if there had been.
He bowed his head once, because he could do nothing else.
His father looked at the sapphire case.
“Give them to her yourself.”
“Yes.”
“And Darcy.”
The name stopped him.
Not Fitzwilliam. Not my son. Not yet.
But Darcy.
He turned back.
George’s face had lost much of its old command, but not the part that knew how to state a thing plainly when evasion had become intolerable.
“She should have had them before she had cause to need them.”
Darcy carried the cases himself.