Chapter 36 #2
“Christ,” he muttered under his breath. “You’re as ignorant as a wee lad.”
“No one has told me anything that survives examination. Lord… my uncle has produced certain volumes which justify further study, but offer very little in the way of answers.”
“And who is your uncle?”
Darcy locked his jaw. Well, what matter if he confessed it? He had uncovered too much of himself already, and it would be the work of a moment for a curious man to discover his relations. “Hugh Fitzwilliam, Lord Matlock.”
Harrowe grunted—if it was a sound of surprise, his face did not register it. “You were sayin’?”
Darcy threw one hand in the air. “I was saying that I am buried beneath conjecture and riddles and family pride dressed up as duty. I am told I stand at the centre of a history no one can explain, and I am running out of time to pretend that does not matter.”
Harrowe reached for his own cup and drank, grimaced, then drank again. “That’d be the old way,” he said. “Keep it tight. Keep it quiet. Guard the thing so fierce they forget why they’re guardin’ it at all.”
“You speak as though you know them.”
“I know of them,” Harrowe replied. “Which ain’t the same thing. Which line are you?”
Darcy stiffened, the hair raising on the back of his neck. “I beg your pardon?”
“Well, you must’ve come from one of the old knights. Bedwyr would be my bet, but there’s also Peredur. Not likely to have been Gwalchmei or his younger brother Gwrgi. Bors forsook inheritance for heaven. Certainly not Cei… Nay, it’s got to be one of the first two.”
Darcy’s hand dropped hard on the table. “How did you…”
“Which is it? Bedwyr or Peredur?”
Darcy had to clamp his mouth shut with an audible click before he could answer. “I… Both. So I am told.”
Harrowe gasped, like a man beholding the sunrise after an age of darkness. “By thunder… it’s happened, then!”
Darcy rubbed his eyes. “If you please, this all still sounds like madness to me.”
“Nay, nay!” Harrowe was holding a hand in the air, his eyes scattering about the room as if pulling together the threads of an unravelled tapestry.
“Darcy… that’s the Bedwyr line. It must be—the male line.
And the other—Peredur’s descendants are now the Fitzwilliam family.
Blimey, I was a blind old fool to miss that! ”
Darcy laced his hands and tapped his thumbs together impatiently. “Perhaps you would be so good as to enlighten me. How did you surmise in a few seconds what was kept secret from me for the whole of my life?”
Harrowe laughed and poured himself more of that tar-like tea. “Simple elimination. Those are the only two lines that utterly vanished from the record.”
“Vanished? Something can only vanish if you know where it began. Something that old?” Darcy shook his head.
“There are perhaps two civilizations in the entire world who kept family records over a thousand years. The Chinese and the Hebrews, once. Even Rome could not manage it without mythmaking. And you would have me believe two English families achieved it in silence?”
“More than two, Mr Darcy.” Harrowe leaned back in his chair and hooked one heavy boot on a nearby stool.
“The Benedictines traced at least five lines they believed descended from Arthur’s household knights.
Two ended as most families do, within a handful of generations.
One was butchered entirely when the Normans came through.
Names broken, lands seized, records scattered.
And Gwrgi—now he’s got an interestin’ tale.
The king’s nephew, died in the war, but not before siring a son.
You’d know him as Gareth, and James I claimed, rather privately, I might add, to descend from that line. ”
He tapped the page with a blunt finger. “The other two did not end. They folded in upon themselves. No public annals. No marriages proclaimed for advantage. The blood runs quiet, turns inward, disappears where it ought to have been loud. You don’t do that by accident or oversight.”
Darcy pinched the bridge of his nose. “And you concluded from this absence that I existed.”
“I concluded,” Harrowe said slowly, “between the records and what I could see with my own two eyes that someone was still carryin’ the burden. An’ that whoever it was, he’d been raised not to look too close. The signs are too real to ignore now.”
Darcy pushed his chair back and rose, unable to remain seated. The room was too small, the walls too crowded with paper and ink, and the very bulk of their master’s physique.
“You speak of me as though I were an artifact,” he said. “As though my life were an appendix to a story I did not consent to inhabit.”
Harrowe watched him pace. “Aye,” he said. “That’s about it.”
Darcy stopped short. “You find that amusing.”
“No. I find it terrifyin’. Which is why I’m still breathin’. Anyone who treats this lightly’s already dead to it.”
He gestured, finally, to the cup Darcy had not touched. “Drink your tea, Mr Darcy. It won’t fix a damn thing, but it’ll keep you upright long enough to hear the rest.”
Darcy looked at the cup.
Then, at the man who had spent decades chasing a shadow that bore his name. And against his will—against reason, against pride—he sat back down. The tea was vile.
He swallowed it anyway.
She surfaced the way one surfaces from deep water—without knowing she had been below.
Voices were already there when awareness returned, arranged above her like figures leaning over a well.
They overlapped, separated, drew together again.
For a moment, she could not place herself among them.
The ceiling resolved first. The familiar crack in the plaster.
The tall shelves beyond, their shadows no longer shifting.
Jane’s voice reached her. “…has not truly woken since before dawn. Sir, I—”
Elizabeth swallowed. Her throat rasped in protest, dry and sore, as though she had been breathing smoke. She tried to turn her head and managed only a fraction of the movement.
“Lizzy?” Jane’s hand closed over hers at once. It was cool. Close. Jane had been sitting there a long while.
Elizabeth opened her eyes. The effort sent a pulse of heat through her temples. Faces came into view—Jane, pale and intent; her father standing a little back, his shoulders drawn tight; Mr Bingley near the window, hat still in his hands as though he had forgot to set it down.
“You are awake,” Jane said, the words trembling despite her care. “Oh, praise be! Papa is here, and so is Mama. Everything is being seen to.”
Elizabeth tried to smile. Her mouth would not cooperate. Instead, she frowned, distracted by the absence of something she had been expecting.
“Where…?” The word scraped its way out. She swallowed and tried again. “Where is the dog?”
The question seemed to move through the room without landing anywhere. They glanced at one another until her father lowered his head and scratched his brow. “She keeps asking about some dog. It was but another dream, Lizzy.”
“No.” She shook her head insistently. “I heard him outside. Brutus—I know I…”
Jane blinked. “Mr Darcy’s wolfhound?” She cast a helpless glance over her shoulder at Mr Bingley, who only shrugged.
“Darcy took his dog back to London with him. I’ve no idea what she could mean. Does Sir William have a dog that might have wandered?”
Jane shook her head and turned a tight smile back to Elizabeth. “There has been no dog here, dearest. Only Mr Wickham and Mr Denny, still guarding the house.”
Elizabeth frowned harder. The library felt wrong without the weight of him at her side. She could have sworn she had but to drop her hand over the edge of the bed and it would find his nose. She searched the edges of the room, confused. “He was—”
Her father stepped closer. “Yes, yes, Mr Wickham is here.” He gave a dry chuckle—hollow. “He has scarcely left the library long enough to perform his duties. I shall have to ask the colonel to send me another man.”
That did not satisfy her, but the thought slipped away before she could gather it.
A wave of nausea rose instead, sharp and sudden. She closed her eyes and breathed shallowly until it passed.
When she opened them again, the room felt different. Not in shape, but in tone. The voices were quieter now, arranged, as though they had reached some shared understanding while she had been elsewhere.
“Mr Jones?” she asked hoarsely. The name surfaced with effort, dragged up from memory like a dropped object recovered from water. “Has he—”
Jane’s grip tightened. “Papa sent for him again, but…” She faltered. “He would not be of use to you now.”
Elizabeth frowned. “I do not—”
“What you need,” her mother’s voice broke in, thin and frantic from somewhere beyond Jane’s shoulder, “is air. Fresh air. Anyone can see that. This place is doing you no good at all, and mercy only knows what will happen if Kitty falls ill next. She always did have the most frail health, you know. Oh, and with but a se’nnight before Mary’s wedding! ”
Elizabeth tried to turn her head toward the sound. The movement failed halfway, leaving her oddly adrift. “No,” she murmured, or perhaps only thought it.
Her father spoke next. “Your mother is only saying what several have observed,” he said. “You have been here too long, my love. The disturbance, the strain—”
“—the burden,” another voice supplied gently.
Elizabeth’s eyes slid toward it despite herself.
Mr Wickham stood near the shelves, hands loosely clasped before him, his expression composed in a way that felt wholly out of place beside her own unravelling body. He did not meet her gaze at once. He was speaking to her father.
“There is very little to be learned of her condition, but you must see, sir, that keeping her here is only worsening it. I recall reading of such… peculiar circumstances. You are quite right to suspect this is not of the body but something else. Perhaps Lyme—away from here, and away from any memory of certain persons.”
Jane’s hand patted Elizabeth’s. “Yes,” she said quickly. “Yes, that is what I was thinking. Only until she regains her strength.”
Elizabeth’s fingers curled weakly in the blanket. She shook her head, or meant to. The motion barely registered. “I do not want—” The words dribbled into nothing.
Her father bent closer. “Hush,” he said softly. “No one is deciding anything without care.”
But his eyes did not meet hers when he said it.
Mr Bingley cleared his throat near the window. “If there is any place that might suit,” he ventured, earnest and helpless, “I would of course offer—though I fear Netherfield is scarcely quieter at present, and does not offer much in the way of distance.”
“Perhaps her uncle,” Mrs Bennet said at once. “Mr Gardiner has always been fond of her. Or the sea! People recover by the sea every day of their lives.”
The words tumbled over Elizabeth without meaning. She felt Jane’s hand tighten again, felt the faint press of her thumb against her knuckles, as though urging her to be calm, to trust.
“I do not recommend London.” This was Mr Wickham’s voice again. The air in winter is particularly bad.”
“Yes… yes! Then it must be the sea. Why, we shall take her to Bath for the waters. Mr Bennet, it is the very thing!” her mother urged. “Of course, it must be after Mary’s wedding.”
Elizabeth tried to pull her hand away and could not. Panic fluttered briefly, then dissolved into weakness.
“I do not want to go,” she said, or meant to say. The sound came out broken, scarcely more than breath.
Jane leaned closer. “Papa is doing everything he can,” she whispered. “Everything.”
Elizabeth closed her eyes.
Somewhere beyond the room, boots sounded on gravel. A voice called out, distant, indistinct. The house continued on around her, occupied, guarded, altered.
When she drifted under again, it was with the uneasy sense that she had been left behind in a conversation that would continue without her—and that whatever was decided there would not wait for her consent.