Found in the Attic
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Elizabeth supposed her father trusted her entirely, or there were no family secrets worth hiding, because he gave her the key to the attic rather than answer a few simple questions about his great-aunt Alice.
Granted, no questions Elizabeth presented at the breakfast room were simple, and her father had a volume of Plutarch he was assiduously marking up.
So, Elizabeth climbed the narrow, creaking staircase, skeleton key in hand, and pushed her way into the narrow crawlspace. She shuddered at the thought of spiderwebs, but she had brought a hefty tallow candle and any live spiders would wisely flee from the open flame.
Setting the candleholder away from the dusty dropcloths, she knelt before an ancient trunk and lifted the lid.
Mr. Bennet had not given her any indication where his great-aunt’s belongings would have been stored, because he had not been able to fit into the narrow passageway since the girls were born.
None of her sisters had wished to join her because the masters had arrived despite Darcy’s departure.
Mary pounded out another sonatina by Pleyel, while the art master, Mr. Cecil, had both Kitty and Jane sitting at the large bow window overlooking a bleak wintry landscape to develop their eye for shadows and shapes.
Mrs. Bennet, meanwhile, mispronounced every French greeting, and when prompted to correct, she merely increased her volume, without any improvement.
Somewhere closer, Mrs. Beaumont’s measured voice drifted up the servants’ staircase: “The fan is a language, Miss Lydia. One does not wave it about like a flag of surrender.”
Elizabeth perused the contents: old linens, yellowed and musty; a child’s christening gown, impossibly small; a stack of letters tied with ribbon so faded it had lost all color. She reached for the letters and was untying the ribbon when footsteps sounded on the attic stairs.
“Lizzy?” The light of a second candle preceded Charlotte’s voice, and then she appeared, her face flushed from the climb and her mourning dress grey with dust.
“Charlotte!” Elizabeth rose too quickly, banging her head on a low beam. “Ow. What are you doing up here?”
“Your father sent me.” Charlotte picked her way carefully between a broken spinning wheel and a stack of mildewed books. “He helpfully informed me that you had taken up residence among the dead Bennets and would I be so kind as to verify you had not joined their number.”
“He is very droll.”
“Yes, and that you are digging up ghosts and might use some company.” She settled onto a trunk that groaned ominously beneath her. “What exactly are you excavating?”
“I am looking for Papa’s great-aunt Alice, well, not her shade, but any letters or journals she might have left behind.”
Charlotte tilted her head. “Your sisters are downstairs with the improvement masters, and you are looking for an obscure aunt? Would this have anything to do with how the entail changed with female heirs? That this aunt might have inherited?”
“No, she was bypassed entirely.” Elizabeth opened the letters one by one, finding none dated in the correct time period. “There was a boy, a second son borrowed from the Darcy family.”
“Ah…” Charlotte said, as if it explained everything. “So you are up here looking for a Darcy while the real one has ridden away on a bleak winter morning after signing away his inheritance.”
Elizabeth ignored Charlotte’s knowing insinuation. “Alice’s journals might shed light on this George Darcy who was made a Bennet heir and why he left so abruptly and never returned to Longbourn.”
“Many reasons. He had his duties at Pemberley. The roads were unreliable a hundred years ago, and he was not needed as your family line continued down through your direct ancestors.”
“Yes, but the tenants say he was in love with Alice, and if the families were friends, why were they never wed? She resided here at Longbourn unwed until the close of her days.”
“So, you are chasing a long-dead love story while neglecting one that might still have life?” Charlotte tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
“You might say I am.” Elizabeth grinned and handed her a bundle of documents. “Make yourself useful, then. We are looking for anything connected to Alice Bennet. Letters, keepsakes, a diary if we are very fortunate.”
“When would they have been alive?” Charlotte asked.
“Anywhere from the 1690s to the 1770s. I have already gone to the family plot and found Alice’s marker. She was born July 18, 1696, and died December 16, 1775,” Elizabeth said. “Although any love story would likely be around the 1710s.”
“A hundred years ago.” Charlotte’s hands made quick work of the journals, setting aside anything outside of the date range. “You still haven’t explained to me this interest in George Darcy. All I know is that Mr. Collins was closer to your father in the tree than Mr. Darcy.”
“Mr. Collins was connected through standard blood descent, but Mr. Darcy’s line was grafted in by an agreement. He was the spare in case my father’s grandfather died before producing an heir.”
“Much like my husband who died before the wedding night.”
“Yes.” Elizabeth put her hand on Charlotte. “And I am so sorry. I know you were glad of the marriage and having your own household.”
Elizabeth paused, granting Charlotte the dignity of a moment to collect herself.
“I will not pretend to mourn him more than I knew him,” Charlotte finally said.
“But your sister, Jane, is now the heir. And do you know what she said to me? She came to see me after your mother had left. She told me that I would always have a place at Longbourn—that I was family now, that my marriage to Mr. Collins made me a Bennet in her eyes, and that she would not see me cast out or forgotten.”
Elizabeth felt tears prick at her eyes. “Jane said that?”
“She did. And I wept, Lizzy, which I have not done since Mr. Collins’s funeral, because I did not believe I had tears left.
” Charlotte’s voice was steady, but fragile beneath.
“I married for security. You know that. I make no apology for it. But I never expected to be seen as anything other than the woman who was practical enough to accept what you refused.”
“Charlotte.” Elizabeth hugged her. “I was wondering what would have happened to you had Darcy inherited the entail.”
“He would have likely been as kind,” Charlotte said, drawing back to fix her with her perceptive and sensible eyes.
“Your Mr. Darcy—and do not tell me he is not yours, because I have eyes—did the opposite of what I did. I married to gain security. He gave it away. He surrendered an inheritance that would have made him master of this estate, and he asked for nothing in return.” She paused.
“Do you not see the irony? I am mourning a man I married for his prospects, and you are mourning a man who gave up his prospects for you.”
“I am not mourning him, as he is not dead.”
“No. But he is gone, and you did not tell me if you miss him.”
“Charlotte, Alice might have missed this George Darcy, and I am up here searching through her letters. She spent several summers with him. I have barely been acquainted with Mr. Darcy.”
“It is not the length of time, Lizzy, and you know it, but the fury and fire between you.” Charlotte lifted her candlestick, placing the flame between them.
“Some people are like still water; others are like striking flint. Be honest, Lizzy. I was there at the first assembly in Meryton when the flint struck hard.”
“He insulted me.” Elizabeth felt herself stiffen and the candlelight guttered. “He called me—”
Charlotte put her hand up. “We’ve heard it at least a hundred times, Lizzy. If he hadn’t mattered, if you hadn’t considered him, looked at him and imagined yourself with him, or found him desirable, it would have been like water off a duck’s back.”
“I—” Elizabeth opened her mouth to protest, and then closed it again. “Charlotte!”
“So, tell me, Lizzy, did you truly hate him, or you appeared to dislike him, turned your mother against him, and then watched the entire neighborhood take up for you while you found every excuse to observe him for his faults so you could add them to a list as high as the Dover cliffs for fear that he would scale your defenses and sweep you off your feet?”
“You should have stayed in the library with my father. You could have entertained him with your wild tale.”
“I suppose I could have, but we are up in an attic chasing a doomed love story of people who existed a century ago.” She picked up a packet of letters. “Here, the correct time frame, I believe.”
Elizabeth grabbed the packet as if it contained gold, but Charlotte shook her head. “Set it aside to look at later. We have still many trunks to go through, and you have many answers you have not given me.”
“I no longer dislike him,” Elizabeth admitted as she sorted through a packet of receipts in her great-great-grandmother’s commonplace book and put it in the right side pile, as they belonged to Alice’s mother.
“I do not know what to feel. Everything I believed about him—every judgment, every conclusion—has been overturned. He gave us the entail. He confessed that he advised the Bingleys to leave, and he told me of his own accord, without being discovered. He stood in our parlor with flour in his hair and said he wished to marry me, and then he asked for nothing. Not even an answer.”
“So, what Lydia says is true,” Charlotte gasped, and Elizabeth groaned, because Lydia was the most skillful eavesdropper of the family, fitting her lanky body into the smallest of all spaces.
“What did Lydia overhear?” Elizabeth’s voice was guarded.
“His not-a-proposal, that he wishes to marry you but would not tell you why.”
“Did she repeat this to my mother?” Elizabeth wiped a bead of cold perspiration from her forehead.
“She did, but your mother refused to believe any man who just gave away an entire estate would not demand an answer. What I want to know is why you did not give him one.”
“Because he is an infuriating prig!” The words exploded from her chest. “He comes to Longbourn as the presumptuous heir. He tells my father he intends to marry me without consulting me, and then he is kind and generous, looking at me as if he sees through me. He told me, grinning, that I did not hate him, that he knew it was a farce, yet deliberately withheld a formal offer precisely to deny me the satisfaction of refusing him!”
“And you are angry about this?”
“I am bewildered by it.” Elizabeth pulled a thread from the edge of a moth-eaten shawl.
“When a man behaves exactly as you expected, you can manage him. When he behaves as nobody would expect—when he gives away his inheritance and confesses his worst fault and walks out without demanding so much as a kind word—what do you do with that? How do you explain it?”
“Lizzy.” Charlotte unraveled the shawl from Elizabeth’s hands before she destroyed it. “You do not explain it. You feel it in your heart.”
“Yes, well.” Elizabeth felt her chest tighten and put her hand over it. “That is the difficulty, isn’t it? I cannot explain what I feel.”
“You do not need to. When Mr. Collins died, I did not try to explain my grief or measure it. I did not judge whether I had cried enough or whether others believed I was relieved. I knew my chances for another marriage had disappeared. A widow before her wedding night. A joke to some, and a proverb to others. But, Lizzy, you are so much more fortunate than I am. You have a man who noticed you, and you were terrified. Because you are Elizabeth Bennet, and you do not allow yourself to want things you cannot have.”
“Are you finished?” she asked when Charlotte took a breath.
“Because you must not think I did not notice what I was doing. Because I did, every time I sharpened a remark or threw a dart at him. I told myself he was proud, disdainful, and yes, all those things, but also—” she stopped, and the string was cutting into her finger.
“I told myself a great many things, Charlotte, and they were all very clever, and some of them were even true, and none of them were the real reason.”
“What was the real reason?”
Elizabeth unwrapped the bag and shook out a miniature, no larger than a playing card, painted on ivory and set in a plain brass frame. The portrait showed an infant—perhaps six months old—painted in the soft, round-cheeked style of the last century.
“I was afraid that I would become like Miss Bingley.”
“I beg your pardon?” Charlotte blinked. “Why would you?”
“I did not wish to be a pest who follows him from room to room. Who contrives to sit beside him, and practices accomplishments for his approval. She is so transparent in her longing that every person in the room can see it. I watched her try to hold on to a man who was not reaching for her, and it was—” She swallowed.
“It was the most mortifying thing I have ever witnessed. And I thought: if I allow myself to feel this—if I allow myself to want Fitzwilliam Darcy—I will become like her. Trying to hang on to lightning.”
“Except he is the lightning that has already struck you, Lizzy.” Charlotte looked down and turned the miniature over. The writing on the back was simply labeled George. No date, no surname, nothing. Just George.
A baby with dark eyes, little hair, and strong eyebrows. Elizabeth slipped the miniature into her pocket. Had George given this to Alice as a keepsake? And had she worn it close to her heart?
“Charlotte, I think we found what we were looking for.” She gathered the items she had set aside. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“Seeing through me and saying what Jane could not.”
“Jane sees you perfectly well, but she is too kind to say the uncomfortable things.” Charlotte squeezed her arm. “I have no such handicap. It is one of my few advantages.”
“Will you come for Christmas dinner?” she asked. “Jane would want you here. We all would.”
“As would I,” Charlotte replied.
Arm in arm, they made their careful descent from the attic, candles guttering. Charlotte had once reached for a future and lost it, but she had been unafraid to cast her lot with Mr. Collins and the chance to be mistress of Longbourn.
Alice, by contrast, had carried her keepsake through a lifetime, mourning a love she had never dared to claim. Elizabeth, at least, was certain of this: she would not be Alice Bennet.