Chapter 31 #2
His valet blinked, opening his mouth almost as if he meant to protest. But then he closed it again and bowed. “Very good, sir.”
The door closed, and silence rushed back in, thick and unhelpful.
Darcy sat motionless, hands clenched in the sheets, his body trembling with the aftermath of something it did not know how to release. The fire in his nerves faded by degrees, leaving behind a deeper cold—one that settled not in the room, but in his bones.
Brutus remained where he was. Had he even blinked? Darcy was tempted to throw a pillow at him just to provoke some sort of reaction.
He did not lie back down. He stared into the dark, past the end of the bed he knew so well, heedless of the random comforts beside his bed—his book, a glass, even a lantern he could reach for and light.
None of them mattered now, none would bring relief.
For he was certain—without metaphor, without exaggeration—that whatever had passed through him had not been a dream of fear.
It had been a rehearsal.
Elizabeth gasped awake into stillness.
The house lay cool and hushed around her, the sort of quiet that came only in the small hours, when even the timbers seemed to have settled into rest. Moonlight slipped through the curtains in a pale band, silvering the far edge of the bed and the floor beyond it.
For once—remarkably, blessedly—there was no nausea waiting for her when she drew breath.
No urgent pressure behind her eyes. No sense of the room tilting, or her body lagging behind her will.
She lay still a moment, testing the reprieve.
Her hand drifted, absently, to her ribs.
Too easy to count them now. Her fingers traced the line of her hip, sharper than she remembered, then her cheek, hollow beneath the bone.
She had grown thin. She knew it without mirrors, without comment.
Food had held no appeal; even the thought of it had turned against her.
And yet just now, there was a faint stirring where appetite might once have lived.
Nothing hot. Nothing seasoned. Nothing that would require explanation or company.
Bread.
Mrs Hill would surely have set a loaf aside in the larder; she always did. That would be enough. More than enough.
Elizabeth swung her legs over the side of the bed and rose carefully, expecting protest that did not come.
The floor was cold beneath her feet, but it grounded her, and she welcomed the small, ordinary discomfort of it.
She took a shawl from the chair and slipped it about her shoulders, then eased the door open and stepped into the passage.
The stairs creaked softly under her weight as she descended, though the sound seemed loud enough to alarm the sleeping house. She paused once, listening, then continued. No doors opened. No voices stirred. Longbourn slept on, unaware.
The larder yielded its prize without complaint. She broke off a crust rather than trouble herself with a knife, the bread firm and plain and smelling faintly of yeast. She took a bite as she turned away, chewing slowly as she made her way back toward the stairs.
It was then that she noticed it.
A thin line of light lay along the edge of the passage, spilling out from beneath the door to her father’s library. Not the faint ghost of moonlight—this was warmer, truer. Candlelight.
Elizabeth slowed, the crust forgotten between her fingers. The house was meant to be dark. Her father was meant to be abed. And yet the light remained, untroubled by her pause, as though it had been there some time already.
Elizabeth pushed the door open without knocking.
Her father sat on the floor. Not slumped—arranged, after a fashion—one knee drawn up, the other stretched awkwardly beneath a scatter of papers.
Letters lay everywhere, some half-folded, others spread flat as though they had resisted being shut away again.
Two small leather-bound diaries rested open near his feet, their spines cracked with age.
A book lay face-down beside them, forgotten.
He held a single sheet close to the candle, angling it this way and that, his lips moving soundlessly as he squinted at the faded hand.
He did not hear her at once.
“Papa?”
The sound of her voice struck him like a hand to the chest. He looked up sharply—and for a bare, unguarded instant, something like a whimper escaped him, half breath, half sound, before he struggled to his feet.
He crossed the small space between them in two strides and took her by the shoulders, as though to assure himself she was solid.
“There you are,” he said, the words coming out hoarse and nearly strangled.
Then he drew back, straightened, and the familiar air settled itself over him once more, like a coat resumed.
“Late rising, my dear. Quite unlike you. A pity, too—there were at least two gentlemen earlier who called to inquire after your health. And Charlotte Lucas, besides.”
Elizabeth smiled faintly. “How disappointing for them.”
“Oh, I should think so. Still, matters improved thereafter. Miss Bingley arrived with Mrs Hurst, which you may count as providence in your favour. You have escaped a great ordeal.”
She laughed—a small sound—and he bent to gather a handful of papers from the floor, shuffling them aside to clear the window seat. “Come,” he said. “Sit, before I lose track of you again.”
Elizabeth obeyed, settling into the cushioned recess.
Her father’s gaze dropped at once to the crust of bread in her hand.
He made a thoughtful sound—approval, perhaps—and returned to collecting the scattered correspondence, stacking it with more care than usual, though it was clear there was no hope of restoring order.
“Papa,” she said, watching him. “What on earth have you been doing? It is the middle of the night—or very nearly the morning—and you look as though you have not slept in a week.”
He paused, letter in one hand, the candle guttering slightly in the other.
“Reading,” he said lightly. “Remembering. And…” He glanced at the floor, at the ring of paper and leather and ink that had formed around him. “Trying, rather unsuccessfully, to persuade the past to explain itself.”
“May I see?”
Her father hesitated only a moment before handing her the letter he had been holding to the candle, as though it were no more remarkable than any other scrap in the room. Elizabeth took another bite of her bread and unfolded it carefully one-handed, the paper thin as linen and twice as fragile.
Her eyes went first to the date. She blinked, then laughed softly and looked up at him.
“This is from more than sixty years ago! I have never even heard of the writer. Is this the urgent mystery that has deprived you of sleep?”
Papa made a vague, helpless gesture and bent to gather more papers, as though order might yet emerge if he persisted long enough. “From my great-uncle to my grandfather. Read it. At least the end. The rest is rather dull.”
Elizabeth lowered her gaze again. The letter was precisely as he had said—mundane, almost comfortingly so.
Complaints about London lodgings. The filth of the market.
The price of candles. A longing for home—Longbourn, she supposed—that expressed itself in careful sentences and domestic detail.
She read a few lines, then another, her attention wandering until…
Here. The tone altered.
“‘…I regret to say that Aunt Abigail is not improved by the change to London from Longbourn. Indeed, she is rather gone-off, in both spirits and sense, and her behaviour has grown such that I scarce know how to account for it…’”
Elizabeth’s chewing slowed.
“‘…she speaks at times with a confidence wholly unconnected to her circumstances, and at others not at all. She will sit for hours and then rise in the most severe agitation, always with some warning about a storm coming, and sometimes two days before it does so. She quite terrified my mother-in-law yesterday by chasing her from Aaron’s nursery with cries of pestilence. Pestilence! The very idea! The physicians have done what they can, though the bleedings have only weakened her…’”
Elizabeth swallowed.
“‘…there is talk of confinement, though I cannot think where she might be placed. She is no longer young, but I begin to fear for the children, who are all quite frightened by her manner and questions…’”
The candle wavered. Elizabeth angled the page and read on, her brow knitting.
“‘…I do not understand it any better than you. Father said she was so merry and quick of wit when she was young, until this nonsense took her. I wish to Heaven she had never been raised at Longbourn, for the place seems to agree with her no better than with the others of her disposition.’”
She folded the letter and held it in her lap, the bread forgotten in her hand.
“That is—” Her voice caught, and she stopped, surprised by it. “That is dreadful.”
“Yes.”
Elizabeth looked up at him. “Who was she?”
“My grandfather’s aunt,” he replied. “Or his uncle’s sister, depending on which line you trace. She lived at Longbourn for most of her life.”
Elizabeth glanced back at the letter. “They speak of her as though she were a burden of some long standing. As though she had ceased to be… herself.”
“They did,” Mr Bennet said. “And they were not unkind people, by the standards of their time.”
She was silent for a moment, then asked, very softly, “Why were you reading this, Papa?”
He did not answer at once. He gathered the remaining papers into a neater stack, though it was clear he was no longer seeing them. When he finally looked at her, the humour had not left him—but it had thinned, drawn back to something more honest beneath.
“Because,” he said, “I have been telling myself for years that such tales were family nonsense. That every house has its eccentric women and its unfortunate stories, and that ours were no different. And because I am no longer certain that was ever true.”
Elizabeth frowned faintly and rose, setting the letter aside. As she did, her hand brushed one of the papers her father had stacked too neatly to be accidental. She lifted it without thinking… and then paused.
“This is… a deed.”
Papa cleared his throat and looked away.
Elizabeth turned the page once, then again, her brow creasing as she took in the heavy hand, the formal phrasing, the seal impressed so deeply it had left its ghost on the paper beneath.
“‘…that long southern portion of the Ashbourne holding, being the enclosed grounds and dwelling set beyond the old thorn hedge, extending east to the fallow brook and west to the standing oak, together with such yards, orchards, and appurtenances as are customarily kept in husbandry, the same being land held apart from the greater demesne,’” she read. “‘Transferred from—’”
She stopped. “‘From Sir Reginald Netherton.’ Who is that? And where is Ashbourne?”
There was no answer. She looked up at him at last. “Papa?”
He exhaled, a sound caught somewhere between a sigh and a laugh that never quite formed.
“Ah. So. We have arrived there sooner than I had hoped. Ashbourne was the name all these lands shared before Sir Reginald separated them, and sold the lands we now know as Longbourn to my… let me see, he was my great-great-great… perhaps another great…” He shook his head and trailed off.
“Some ancestor. Anyway, the land Sir Reginald kept was later named Netherfield.”
Elizabeth crossed the room and perched again on the window seat, the deed spread across her knees. “You are going to have to begin properly,” she said. “Because at present I feel as though I have stepped into the middle of a conversation that began before I was born.”
“That,” he said, pulling a chair closer and sitting opposite her, “is not an inaccurate description.”
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, fingers loosely linked. For once, he did not appear amused by his own reluctance.
“When Longbourn was first separated from Netherfield,” he began, “it was not a matter of convenience or profit. Not in the way such sales usually are. The land was simply… set aside. Peeled off, as you might say. Not because it was unwanted, but because it was… difficult.”
“Difficult how?”
“In ways that were never written down plainly,” he said. “Which is the first thing one notices when one begins to look. The language is evasive. Purposefully so. There is a great deal of emphasis on stewardship, on suitability of residence, on continuity without explanation.”
She glanced back at the deed. “It reads like a legal apology.”
“Yes,” he said dryly. “That is an excellent way of putting it.”
He leaned back and rubbed a hand over his face, as though the words themselves were wearying. “The Bennets were not chosen for distinction, Elizabeth. Nor for power. Nor even for sense, in some cases. We were… available. Respectable enough to hold land. Obscure enough not to draw attention.”
“And this… Aunt Abigail?” she asked quietly.
His gaze met hers. “There it is. You see how quickly you find it. It always was the cleverest ones. I ought to have known it would take you.”