Chapter 32
Chapter Thirty-Two
Elizabeth shook her head. “‘Take’ me? Papa, what do you mean?”
Her father kicked one foot over the other and squirmed slightly in his seat before answering.
“For more than a few generations,” he said haltingly, “there have been women—never many at once, and never predictable—who grew… peculiar, as they approached maturity. Not as children. Not as girls—at least, not so far as I have been able to discover. They were all said to be clever, lively, always much admired.”
Elizabeth pursed her lips. “And?”
“And then…” Her father shrugged. “Something altered. Some heard voices, even talked to people who were not there. Some spoke too much, or not at all. Some were thought touched. Others dangerous.” He snorted and scraped a hand over his face.
“One was even burned at the stake for a witch. But in every case, the family did its best to contain the… inconvenience.”
Elizabeth’s mouth had gone dry. “Aunt Abigail.”
“Yes,” he said, gesturing to the haphazard mountain of old letters piled on his desk.
“Collins’ mother. And uncounted others before her.
Sixteen that I have evidence of so far, but no telling how far back the troubles go.
Oh, and from what I have read, it seems many of them had an unaccountable fondness for very large canines… but that may be coincidence.”
She rolled her eyes. “What became of them?”
He hesitated. “Those who married were said to have improved. Or appeared to. Whether it was affection, distraction, protection, or simple relief, I cannot say. They settled, had children, and near as I can tell, their daughters were not necessarily affected.”
“And those who did not marry?”
He spread his hands. “You have read the letter.”
Elizabeth looked down at the deed again. “Do you mean to say the women in our family share a hereditary weakness? Madness?”
“No,” he said promptly. “No, I do not believe so—it is not in the blood, for the women were not all Bennets. Some belonged to families long vanished from Hertfordshire. Others lived at Netherfield, before the division. What they shared was not a name.”
She drew a breath. “But a place?”
“Precisely.” Papa swallowed. “And then, I was blessed with five daughters.”
Elizabeth’s mouth tightened in an approximation of sympathy.
“I told myself,” he went on more lightly, “that it had all burned itself out. Two generations passed without incident. Three, if one is generous, for my second cousin Lilith was never right from birth, so I do not think…” He sighed.
“Well, I allowed myself to hope that whatever our forebears had been managing—poorly or otherwise—had resolved itself without our intervention.”
“And now?”
“And now,” he said, meeting her gaze with a frankness she had not seen before, “my daughter has been ill for weeks, and the land is behaving as though it has lost its anchor.” He lurched to his feet and paced to the darkened window.
“I find myself awake at midnight, reading letters I once dismissed as the ravings of tired men who went to their graves long before I ever held you in my arms.”
She folded the deed carefully. “Why did you never tell me? Or Mama?”
A corner of his mouth lifted. “Because I value my sanity.”
Despite herself, Elizabeth smiled, and then it faded. “You believe I am like these others. Running mad.”
He turned to face her. “Yes… And no.” He frowned.
“You are not speaking to walls as if they were people, or telling us a storm or an earthquake is to arrive days before it does. You are not hearing voices in your head… at least, not that you have confessed. Indeed, whatever has afflicted you appears quite different to their sort of madness. But the other coincidences… how it was always the best and brightest young lady of her generation, how Sir Reginald complained of oddities in the land… Yes, Lizzy, I think somehow, whatever this is must have affected you in ways never seen in any other.”
She swallowed, and her hand wandered through the stack of letters until her fingers touched one they liked, and she pulled it out to read. This one was about a girl named Ruth, written by the lady’s mother to a sister, it seemed.
Ruth is much improved. Marriage has done what no persuasion could. She is settled now, occupied, and far less given to those fancies that once troubled us so. The arrival of our blessed Elinor has completed her joy, and I thank God daily that she is no longer so restless in her mind.
Elizabeth read the lines twice.
Much improved. Settled. The words carried relief rather than joy, gratitude rather than affection—as though what had been feared had at last been contained.
“You are searching for a remedy,” she said softly.
Her father was silent for a few seconds, then he sucked in a breath and swallowed. “Can you blame me? What would you do, Lizzy, if you saw your favourite child wasting away, day by day? Would you not turn the world upside down to find an answer?”
She held the letter up to his face. “This is your answer? That marrying me off would… what? Cure me?”
He grimaced. “I believe marriage has served, in the past, as a sort of… mitigation. A shelter. Perhaps not a complete healing in the usual sense, but the only thing that is ever said to have brought any relief.”
“And whom would you have me marry? The first man who walked up the steps?”
He looked at her then with something raw beneath the wit.
“I would have you live,” he said. “And if I thought that could be secured by the attachment of your hand to the nearest agreeable fool, I might be tempted to press the matter. Wickham, after all, seems to like you well enough, and I think it would take very little to tempt him. Why, a mere hundred pounds should suffice.”
She met his gaze, understanding blooming painfully clear. “But you do not believe that will serve for me.”
“No,” he said quietly. “Because I have watched you. And because I have watched him.”
Her breath caught. “If you mean—”
“I am not blind, Lizzy,” he said gently. “Nor am I so foolish as to mistake coincidence for cause. But you were not unwell before he came. And you were not untouched by him, whatever either of you may pretend.”
She looked away, the room suddenly too narrow for breath. “You mistake me,” she said, and the words were careful—too careful. “Mr Darcy is—was—only a neighbour. Less than that—an acquaintance.”
“A mere ‘neighbour’ does not leave a permanent mark on a lady’s mind from the first moment,” her father replied, still mild.
“Nor does an acquaintance alter the weather of a household. That ‘shock’ you spoke of at the Assembly when you tried to shake hands? The way you fled Collins at the ball, and the only place I ever saw you looking at ease the whole night was when you were seated beside Darcy? No, my child, I cannot pretend to understand, but my eyes tell me that he is a… a shelter of sorts for you.”
She shook her head. “Papa, you cannot mean—”
“I mean only what I saw,” he said. “And that is what I went to speak of.”
Her eyes came back to him at once. “Went?”
“The morning after the Netherfield ball,” he said, and his tone changed then, losing its lightness. “When the house was in an uproar, and your mother complained later that she could not find me, I had taken a horse to call at Netherfield before breakfast.”
Elizabeth stared. “You never asked me!”
“I had not intended to. It was a private errand, and I was not certain of my footing. I thought to speak to him plainly. To ask what he intended. No more than that.”
Her hand tightened on the letter she still held. “And?”
“And he was already gone,” Papa said. “Risen early. Left word with Mr Bingley while he was still in his dressing room. Did not even stay to break his fast but was gone with the first light.”
“You would have obligated him,” she said slowly. “Challenged his honour. Papa, do you not see? You would have nearly forced an offer from a man who would never intend to make one!”
“I would have asked him whether he understood what he had stirred,” her father replied. “And whether he meant to stand by it.”
Elizabeth’s throat worked. “You had no right.”
“Perhaps not,” he said. “But I am your father, and I have rights that do not require permission.”
She placed the letter carefully on top of the others. “Well. What a mercy for him that his rights do not oblige him to answer for yours.”
Darcy did not ring for a light. He carried one down himself, the flame sputtering in his hand, his breath still ragged from the dream he could not yet dismiss as such.
The house lay silent around him, wrapped in that peculiar stillness that followed alarm rather than peace. Brutus padded at his heel, close enough that Darcy felt the brush of fur against his calf each time he slowed, each time his steps faltered as though the floor might yet be hot beneath them.
He set the candle down on his desk hard enough to make the flame gutter and immediately reached for another, then another, until the room took on the layered glow of necessity rather than comfort. Books lay open where he had left them. The Liber de Terris et Finibus rested among them.
He did not sit.
He moved from shelf to shelf, from desk to cabinet, pulling volumes down without ceremony: old chronicles his father had insisted upon keeping; a battered collection of ballads that were contemporaries or protégés of Harrowe; a Latin tract copied and recopied by monastic hands, its margins crowded with cramped corrections and faint glosses.
He opened them all at once, spreading them across the table, the chair, the floor, the window-seat.
Brutus settled beside the hearth and watched him with grave attention, head lifted, ears pricked, as though this, too, were a vigil.