Page 59 of Mr. Darcy’s Victorious Bride

Alban walked between Darcy and Elizabeth, one hand in each of theirs. He swung his feet off the ground between them. "Mr. Darcy. Is it finished? All of it?"

Darcy gave the question the consideration it deserved. The trial was finished. The fear was finished. Graves would answer to the King's Bench in the new year. The hanging would come, and neither required anything further from anyone on these steps. And what remained? Pemberley, and a ball long owed at Netherfield. There remained a family scattered across two counties, waiting to be told it could breathe.

"All of it," Darcy said.

Alban nodded, satisfied, a man concluding his business. Then he looked up at Elizabeth with the terrible clear practicality of the young. "Then can we go home? Nell will've ate another hat!"

CHAPTER 22

On the morning after the verdict, the Earl of Matlock had gone to his nephew's house in his own carriage and fetched his sister to Grosvenor Square himself. She had lain three nights behind its shutters before her day in the Lords. Its master slept in Gracechurch Street and suspected nothing. He had handed her down at his door before the eyes of the square. He had given the street a long, level look while the chair was managed up the steps. By evening all London knew that the Fitzwilliams had closed ranks around Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and that any person disposed to sharpen their wit upon her might apply to the Earl for satisfaction.

"He carried her shawls in," Richard reported, wondering. "With his own hands. I have not seen my father carry so much as his own gloves since the old King's jubilee."

So it was to Grosvenor Square that Elizabeth went, three days after the breaking of the staff, wearing her second-best morning dress and no very clear idea of her errand. The summons had come in Anne's hand. Mama asks for you. Come at eleven. Do not bring anyone. She has practiced something and will be furious if she is too tired to say it.

Richard met her in the hall. He had been forbidden to hover, and he was hovering anyway. "She threw her breakfast at Mrs. Jenkinson."

"Is that good or bad?"

"Good! Her aim is coming back. And she made Anne read her the newspaper accounts of the trial twice, and corrected the reporting aloud both times. Oh, and Graves's own clerk is taken. Yesterday morning, at a lodging house in Holborn, with his lordship's drafts of that kitchen-door letter still in his pocket, in his lordship's own hand. The same man who fetched the laudanum from Fetter Lane. He will stand beside his master at the King's Bench in the new year. Fenner is still gone." He took Elizabeth's bonnet, and his voice dropped out of its lightness. "She has been saving herself all morning, Elizabeth. Whatever it is, let her spend it. Do not help her with the words."

"I would not dare."

"No," Richard said, looking at her with sudden warmth. "You never would. I think that is why it is you she asked for."

The room upstairs was warm and bright. Lady Catherine sat propped in a great chair by the window with a rug over her knees. She wore dove-gray wool at her shoulders, and her white hair was dressed high, as for company. Anne sat beside her with needlework she was not doing. On the table at her ladyship's right hand, her good hand, lay a large old book in a slip of flannel.

Elizabeth curtsied. "Lady Catherine."

"Mrs. Darcy." The words came slow but came whole. The voice was thick, and it dragged at its edges. Underneath the wreckage it was still, unmistakably, the voice that had once silenced a Hunsford parlor. "Sit. There. Where I... can see you... without turning. Turning tires me."

Elizabeth sat where she was told. Who would attempt to steer this encounter?

For a moment the old woman looked at her. The fallen half of her face was in shadow, and the living half was unreadable. Elizabeth folded her hands and bore the inspection. She had been inspected by this woman before, in another life. She had been found wanting then. Obstinate, headstrong girl! She could hear the old verdict perfectly. What was she to be found now? She sat under the new inspection with her chin level, and waited.

"They tell me," Lady Catherine said, "that I am... much improved. My physician... is very pleased with me." A pause, hauled through. "He is a fool. I hired... better men... to worse purposes."

Elizabeth laughed before she could stop herself. It escaped whole, one bright disgraceful note in the hush of the sickroom. Anne's needle froze. Mrs. Jenkinson's mending froze. Lady Catherine's living eyebrow rose a fraction and stayed up. Elizabeth understood two things at once: that it had been a test, and that she had passed it. Her ladyship had made a joke! It was her first, perhaps, in forty years. The whole room had been braced to pretend she hadn't, and the obstinate headstrong girl had laughed out loud.

"You are not... frightened of me," Lady Catherine said. "You were never... frightened of me. Do you know... how rare that is?"

"I am beginning to learn, ma'am."

"Everyone is frightened... of something." The good hand moved on the arm of the chair. "I was frightened... of small things. Precedence. Names. Blood. I gave a man... nine hundred pounds... because I was frightened... of a country gentleman's daughter." Her ladyship said it without flinching, in the flat pace her mouth allowed her. It was worse and better than any weeping could have been. "You know... what came of it. You wear it."

"Yes."

"I will not apologize."

"I know," Elizabeth said.

"You would not... believe me... if I did. You are too... intelligent. An apology... from me... would be a performance... and you have had... enough performances... from this family." Lady Catherine drew a breath that cost her. She turned her good hand over and gestured, once, at the flannel-wrapped book on the table. "Anne."

Anne rose and unwrapped it. It was a Bible, very old, bound in cracked calf. The de Bourgh arms were stamped small and worn on the cover. Anne laid it open on the table where the light fell on it. The leaves at the front were ruled for a family register, page upon page of it. It held births, marriages, and deaths in inks that went from black to brown to ghost. A hundred and fifty years of a proud line, entered in careful hands.

"The family Bible," Lady Catherine said. "From Rosings. I had it... brought up." Her eyes came round to Elizabeth, and they were fierce, and tired, and entirely determined. For a moment they were the eyes from the sickroom doorway months ago, the ones that had dismissed her. They did not dismiss her now. "Your name... is not in it. My sister's son... married... and his wife's name... was never entered. That was... my doing. My instruction." A breath. "It was... incorrectly given."

Elizabeth sat very still.