Chapter Ten
Willowbrook Somerset
Darcy
Madam,
You do not know me, nor, until very recently, did I know anything of you beyond your name and direction.
I hope you will forgive the liberty of my addressing you.
I would not have presumed upon an acquaintance which does not exist had circumstances afforded me any other reasonable means of informing you of what has occurred.
I am the owner of Willowbrook cottage in Somerset.
Before my arrival here I knew that the former tenants, the Harding family, had quitted the house in March, my attorney having informed me of the termination of their tenancy some months ago.
I however did not know, until I came to Willowbrook myself, that letters addressed to Miss Julia Harding had continued to arrive during the house's vacancy.
Your letters have accumulated in the care of the man left to watch the property.
As the Hardings left no direction by which their correspondence might be forwarded, he kept them in expectation that some means of sending them on would eventually be discovered.
He ought to have made enquiries sooner, and I regret that the matter was allowed to continue for so long without being brought to anyone's attention.
I must also acknowledge an impropriety of my own.
In attempting to discover the identity and direction of the person who continued to write to Miss Harding, I opened your most recent letter.
I will not attempt to excuse an intrusion which I know I had no right to make.
I can only tell you that my intention was to discover where notice of the Hardings' removal might be sent, so that you should not continue writing in ignorance that Miss Harding, whom I believe to be a member of the former tenant's family, was no longer here to receive your letters.
I have written to my attorney concerning the family's present whereabouts.
Unfortunately, Mr. Harding left no forwarding direction upon quitting Willowbrook, and my attorney has received no communication from him since.
Further enquiries are being made, and should they produce anything of use, I shall see that the information is conveyed to you.
I regret that I can offer you so little after so many months, and still more that you were not informed sooner.
Yours, etc.,
Fitzwilliam Darcy
Darcy set down his pen and read the lines back to himself. He had sat down after dinner determined to write the letter, convinced that informing Elizabeth of the truth was the only proper course left to him.
Satisfied that he had said what was necessary, he reached for the sand. Then his hand stopped.
For a moment he regarded the freshly written missive, then the stack of letters addressed to Julia Harding.
Once his reply was sent, there would be nothing more for him to do but await whatever Mr. Humphrey might discover.
Elizabeth would know that Julia was no longer at Willowbrook, and the strange business of the seventeen letters would cease to concern him.
Darcy found that prospect less satisfactory than it ought to have been.
The letter he had already opened had raised considerably more questions than it answered.
There was the extraordinary resemblance between Julia and Elizabeth, their first encounter before a milliner's window, some dispute upon Oakham Hill, and a friendship which had plainly become intimate before Julia's sudden departure.
Elizabeth had written of these things as one writes to someone who already knows the whole history.
Darcy knew none of it.
His gaze settled upon the sixteen older letters. Somewhere amongst them, he supposed, lay at least part of that history, perhaps even Elizabeth's own account of why Julia had left Hertfordshire so suddenly.
He rubbed a hand across his face and looked away. The correspondence was upon his property, certainly, but that did not make it his. He could call it an examination of papers left at Willowbrook if he wished. It remained another person's private correspondence, and he knew it.
For several minutes his better judgement prevailed.
Then curiosity prevailed over that.
His reply need not be sent until morning. There was nothing to be gained by sealing it tonight, and no harm, he told himself, in understanding a little more of the circumstances before he did so.
It was a poor excuse.
Darcy accepted it nevertheless.
He drew the oldest letter from the pile. This time there could be no pretence of necessity. He knew who had written it and where she lived. If he broke the seal, it would be because he wished to know what she had written.
He regarded it for another moment.
Then he opened it.
Longbourn,
Hertfordshire
16th March 1811
Dearest Julia,
I had hoped, as always, that my next letter would begin by congratulating you upon being out of bed, or at the very least by abusing you for frightening us all so unnecessarily.
Instead, Polly returned from the cottage yesterday to find it shut up and you gone, and I have been fit for very little sensible conversation since.
She learnt from one of your neighbours that Mrs. Tunley took you away in great haste after you worsened again overnight.
I confess I was angry with your aunt for perhaps half an hour, which was exceedingly unjust of me, for I know very well that she has scarcely left your side these three months past and must have had good reason for deciding upon the journey.
Still, she might have sent word. I should have liked something more substantial than a neighbour's recollection and Polly's account of it, particularly when the subject was you.
Only two weeks ago your aunt told me that the fever had begun to turn.
You had slept several hours and taken some broth, and she thought you a little stronger.
I believed her immediately. Perhaps I ought to have been more cautious, but I have never discovered any advantage in expecting the worst merely for the satisfaction of being proved correct.
When she told me last week, however, that the apothecary feared you had become delirious and that your fever had worsened considerably, there was very little I could do but pray.
I confess I am still bewildered by how an illness from which you had seemed to be recovering could worsen so greatly within a week that they now speak of a fever of the brain.
What puzzles me still more is why you were not taken to the hospital in London which your aunt had mentioned before.
All I know, from what Polly was able to learn from your neighbour and my subsequent enquiry, is that Mrs. Tunley has taken you instead to your father's house in Somerset.
There is something very provoking in discovering how little one knows precisely when the knowledge becomes necessary.
You mentioned perhaps only twice that your father rented a cottage called Willowbrook in Somerset, for you rarely spoke of home, but I remember it because I teased you for contriving to live nearly as far from Hertfordshire as England would conveniently allow.
I have directed this missive to Willowbrook as you gave it to me, and I can only hope it reaches you.
If you are too ill to read it, perhaps your aunt, or anyone close to you, may do so for you.
I suppose it will be your aunt, since she has already endured several of my letters during the illness which kept you isolated and prevented me from seeing you myself, and therefore knows perfectly well what she is undertaking.
If even that is too much, let it wait. I care very little when you read it, provided there comes a day when you can.
There is little worth reporting from Longbourn.
Lydia and Kitty quarrelled over the militia but reconciled over a gown, so the natural order of the household remains undisturbed.
Mama has asked after you repeatedly, though I suspect half her attention has lately been claimed by Miss Long's newly arrived niece, who was astonished to learn of the circumstance of there being another face in England so like mine.
Mary attempted to educate me upon scarlet fever and the several ways in which an illness may deteriorate into something worse, but Jane reminded her of the impropriety of such observations when we do not even know what condition you are in.
You will forgive Mary, for you know no one can prevent her from repeating whatever she has lately found interesting in a book.
Perhaps she meant to put my mind at ease.
I am afraid she achieved precisely the opposite.
There. That is better. I had promised myself I would not send you a letter composed entirely of worry.
I mean to continue writing as I did while you were at your aunt's.
You need not answer. Indeed, I shall be very cross if you waste your strength attempting it merely because you imagine courtesy requires it.
Get well first. You may repay all the letters I shall write afterwards, when I shall insist upon answers to every one and be perfectly merciless about it, though I would much rather demand those answers from you face to face than receive them in writing.
For now, sleep, take whatever dreadful things are prescribed for you, obey your aunt for once in your life, and recover.
You have left several conversations unfinished, and I have no intention of allowing you to escape them so easily.
My prayers are with you, dear friend. Though perhaps I ought to call you sister.
It is a strange thing that I never thought to do so while you were here, when everyone in Meryton was so determined to make sisters of us merely because we shared a face.
Now that you are gone, and farther from me than you have been since we met, I find the word suits us rather better than I ever supposed.
Yours, with much love,
Elizabeth
Darcy made to set the letter aside when he had finished, but his hand paused before it reached the table. His eyes returned instead to several passages he had already read, as though a second reading might tell him something about its writer that the first had not.
He had not known precisely what he expected to find, though certainly nothing so deeply felt.
Some explanation of Julia Harding, perhaps, or something which might account for the extraordinary persistence of seventeen letters sent without reply.
Instead, he had found a young woman frightened for someone she could do nothing to help, offering what comfort she could across the distance between them.
Though perhaps I ought to call you sister.
His eyes returned to the words.
Julia Harding was not her sister. So far as Darcy could determine, there was no relation between them at all.
Yet Elizabeth had written with an anxiety he understood rather better than he wished to.
He knew what it was to watch someone dear to him suffer and discover that affection, however great, could do very little to mend what had happened.
His thoughts went briefly to Georgiana.
Darcy loved his sister deeply, and he was painfully conscious of how few people Georgiana possessed who loved her for herself.
There was Richard, certainly, and other close family members, but he had often wished she might have a friend near her own age to whom she could attach herself with confidence, someone whose concern for her did not arise from duty or family obligation.
Elizabeth's letter brought the old wish unexpectedly to mind.
She had four sisters of her own, if he understood her references correctly, yet she had made room in her affections for a woman who had no claim of blood upon her and, in Julia's absence, had discovered that sister was the word which best described what she had become.
That counted for something.
It also sharpened Darcy's curiosity about the writer. Who was she?
From the two letters he had read, he knew only the beginning and the end of those five months. Fifteen letters lay between them, and somewhere within those pages was a great deal more of the woman who had written them.
Darcy looked towards his reply to Elizabeth, which remained upon the desk awaiting sand and seal. He ought to finish it now and have it ready for the morning post. That was unquestionably the proper course.
Instead, after a moment's hesitation, Darcy shook his head.
Against his better judgement, he drew the next letter from the pile.