Hidden Tears
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Elizabeth smiled to herself as she wrapped her warmest pelisse about her shoulders, bracing for a January morning that seemed determined to freeze every good intention.
The engagement party had dissolved only when the last candle guttered, leaving the entire household—servants included—collapsed in grateful slumber.
The day ahead promised a campaign of cleaning, repairs, and the delicate art of measuring for new draperies, for the combined efforts of the Gardiner and Lucas children had left the furnishings in a state that made Hill’s daily dusting list look like a page out of a historical fantasy.
The steward’s cottage would provide a more manageable task for Elizabeth, and so she took her measuring tape, a charcoal pencil, and her improvement journal and crossed the frosted yard.
The south-facing window wanted widening.
The chimney drew well enough, but the hearth was too shallow for proper warmth.
A set of shelves along the east wall would hold Charlotte’s books, and if the brickwork proved sound behind the damaged plaster, perhaps a second room could be fashioned from the lean-to at the rear.
And she smiled to herself, considering how Darcy’s elopement jest would flourish if ever her mother caught wind of it. She could almost compose the letter herself: Dear Mamma, we have eloped. Please do not take to your bed for longer than a fortnight. Your loving daughter, Elizabeth.
Her mother would never take to her bed. She was more likely to write the entire militia and order a cavalry charge to chase down their carriage and force them back to marry at St. George’s, as no lesser location would do.
The cottage emerged through the bare trees, its thatched roof pale against the sullen sky.
The exterior bore the marks of recent patching, but Darcy’s attentions had been diverted by Georgiana’s illness before he could conquer the interior.
Elizabeth unlatched the door and stepped inside, greeted by darkness and a chill that seemed to resent intrusion.
She flung open the shutters, inviting what little January light dared to enter.
The hearth was cold, and the furniture covered with cloth.
She glanced at the desk and the small crack underneath it where Darcy had stuffed that letter he had not meant to send.
The plaster would have to be done to ward off any drafts, and the windows sealed.
She examined the door to the bedroom. The hinges were rusted, and it squeaked, but the entire room was too small for a lady.
She would suggest expanding it to add shelving for books and a proper wardrobe for her clothes.
Elizabeth pulled out her improvement journal and began her circuit of the room, noting the condition of the windows, the state of the floorboards, and the places where the plaster had cracked or crumbled.
The thatch was sound—Darcy’s workmen had done an excellent job—but the walls needed attention.
Several patches of damp exposed the underlying brickwork, including a section near the hearth where the mortar had begun to fail.
The interior wall between the sitting room and bedroom was in even worse shape, with visible cracks, missing plaster, and discolored patches, slightly raised in one area but sagging in the next.
She tapped at the wall, suspecting a missing or broken brick, and to her horror, the plaster crumbled, revealing a cavity. Elizabeth peered into the opening, scarcely larger than a breadbox, the type of space someone would hide coins or treasure.
She withdrew a packet wrapped in oilskin, opened it, and found documents. The papers were aged, and the ink faded, folded together. She could barely make out the writing, a tidy hand with the words:
To the Bennet girl who imagines she would marry a Darcy.
Elizabeth stared at the words. This was a feminine hand—certainly not Darcy.
Could it be Georgiana? Or even more far-fetched, Caroline Bingley or Mrs. Hurst?
Charlotte? Someone was trying to warn her away from Darcy.
Or the letter from a hundred years ago. To Alice, the original Bennet girl who would have married a Darcy?
Her hands shaky, she untied the faded ribbon that held the papers together and unfolded them.
The first one was a letter, dated 1723, written in a man’s hand of strong, round letters. She brought it to the window where the light was better and read.
My dear Alice,
I write to you as a widower and a fool, knowing I should have written years ago and knowing also that you may not welcome my words now. But I cannot let another decade pass in silence. I cannot let the rest of my life slip away without asking you once more: is there any hope?
I have loved you since we were children.
I have loved you through my marriage, though I tried to be a good husband and I believe I was.
I have loved you through the years of separation, when I told myself the distance was a mercy.
But Catherine is gone now, and she gave me a son.
I find myself thinking of you more than ever—of your laugh, your wit, and the fierce heart of the girl who declared herself ruler of the orchard and made me her loyal subject.
Of a girl who walks faster than any creature I have ever known.
But I was the one who walked away, and I always looked back, although our parents would not allow it.
Now that everyone is gone: my mother, my father, my older brother, and Catherine, who was to be my brother’s wife.
I wonder, dear Alice, if there is any chance—any possibility—that you might feel as I do; please write to me.
Send your letter through my sister Mathilda; she will see that it reaches me safely.
I do not ask for promises or commitments. I ask only to know that you are well.
Yours, as I have always been,
George
Elizabeth pressed her palm to her eyes. This, then, was the letter Alice had carried through the remainder of her days. Yet if he loved her still, if his wife was gone, why had she not replied? Through Mathilda, it would have been proper—old family friends, after all. Would it not?
Hasty now, to look for the answers, she unfolded the three sheets, thicker with dense writing, the same hand as Alice’s history of the Bennets. Dated right before she died in 1775—addressed to no one, or to everyone, or perhaps to the girl who would one day stand in this cottage and read it.
I write this because I cannot speak it, and I cannot carry it to my grave without someone knowing the truth.
George Darcy, whom the world believes was born at Pemberley in 1694, was my brother.
My true, full, legitimate brother—the son of Thomas and Philippa Bennet, born at Longbourn in the same year that the Darcy heir was born at Pemberley.
They were infants together, and then the Darcy child died, and my parents—God forgive them, for I cannot—sold my brother to take his place.
The Darcys needed an heir. My parents needed money, and they had two sons when they needed only one. Thomas, my eldest brother, remained at Longbourn. George was taken to Derbyshire and raised as George Darcy, son of William and Anne Darcy, heir to Pemberley.
I was not born until 1696. I never knew my brother as a brother.
I knew him only as the boy from the north who came to stay with us when I was twelve or thirteen—insurance, my parents said, against my brother Thomas’s uncertain health.
I did not know then that George was their son.
I did not know until I was fifteen, in love with him, and my mother, weeping, told me the truth.
A page torn from a family Bible was placed between the first and second sheet. The entry was written in a formal hand, the ink faded to brown:
George Bennet, son of Thomas and Philippa Bennet, born 14 March 1694.
Elizabeth held the torn page, her hands trembling, her heart pressed beneath the weight of revelation. George Darcy was a Bennet, a child bartered away, and a lie mortared into the very foundation of one of England’s proudest families.
And Darcy—her Darcy, the man she had promised herself to only a se’nnight past, whose name she would soon bear, whose children she had begun to imagine—was not a Darcy at all.
He was the son of a Bennet boy, sold to fill the void left by a lost child, raised in the shadow of a name that was never truly his.
This would destroy him. Everything he believed about himself—his name, his lineage, his proud connection to generations of Darcys stretching back through history—was false.
And Elizabeth had to force herself to breathe and to keep reading.
I loved him before I knew, and I loved him after.
But I could not marry my own brother. And I could not tell him the truth because it would destroy him.
He was George Darcy, master of Pemberley, respected throughout Derbyshire.
What would it have done to him to learn that his entire life was built on a purchased identity?
That his parents—the parents he adored—had bought him from strangers and raised him as their own?
I chose silence. I let him believe I did not return his love.
I walked as fast as I could away from him, and he left, married another.
And then I let him write to me, once, after she died, asking if there was any hope.
And I did not answer. I could not answer.
There was no answer that would not have broken him.
He died last year, and I only heard of it from an acquaintance who read it in a paper. My George died believing I had never loved him. That was my gift to him—a lie of silence, to protect him from a truth that would have destroyed everything he was.