The rightful heir. Not Mr. Darcy with his ten thousand a year and his insufferable pride, but herself. Elizabeth Rose Darcy, daughter of the elder son, possessor of a claim that superseded his. The irony was so bitter she might have laughed if she had not been on the verge of tears.
Upon reaching your majority on November 1st, you will have the legal right to claim your inheritance. However, you must act by your twenty-first birthday, or the inheritance will pass irrevocably to the current occupant.
November first. Less than three weeks away. Her twenty-first birthday—a date she had anticipated with no particular excitement beyond the small celebration her family usually observed, or, according to her mother, she would be of age to marry Mr. Collins. Now, apparently, it marked a deadline of immense consequence.
To prove your claim, you will need three documents: the marriage certificate of John Darcy and Rose Bennet, your baptismal record as Elizabeth Rose Darcy, and a witness statement confirming your identity. These documents exist and can be found, but you must seek them before your birthday arrives.
Documents. Proof. Evidence of a life she had never known. If these papers existed, then someone had been hiding them for twenty years. Someone who knew the truth about her identity and had chosen to keep her in ignorance.
Someone like the man she had called father her entire life.
The danger that claimed your parents’ lives has not passed. Those responsible for their murders believe you perished in the flames they set to conceal their crime. Your safety depends upon their continued ignorance of your survival, but as you approach your majority, the risk of discovery—and elimination—grows daily.
The words blurred as tears she had not realized were falling splashed onto the paper.
Her real parents. Her mother. Her father. People she had never known. Murdered. Dead.
You must decide whom to trust with this knowledge. Your life maydepend upon choosing wisely, for there are those who would kill again to prevent you from claiming what is rightfully yours.
Time is running short. Your twenty-first birthday approaches, and with it, either your inheritance or your doom.
A Friend of Your Parents.
Elizabeth stared at the signature, unsigned yet intimate. A friend of your parents. Not her parents, as she had always known them—Mr. and Mrs. Bennet—but John Darcy and Rose Bennet. People who had lived and died twenty years ago, leaving behind an infant daughter who had grown up ignorant of her true identity.
Tears streamed down Elizabeth’s face as fragments of memory and observation suddenly aligned into a new and terrible pattern. Mrs. Bennet’s lifelong coldness toward her, the subtle distance always maintained. Her darker coloring compared to her sisters’ fair features. The strange sadness that sometimes crossed Mr. Bennet’s face when he looked at her, especially on her birthdays.
Even Mr. Darcy’s peculiar behavior began to make an awful kind of sense. His fixation on her at the assembly and Lucas Lodge, the intensity of his gaze that had made her so uncomfortable—was it possible he had seen something familiar in her features? Some resemblance to family members she had never known?
“No,” she whispered, the sound carried away by the autumn breeze. “It cannot be.”
Yet the pieces continued to fall into place with merciless precision. Her father—no, heruncle—had forbidden all contact with the Netherfield party. His explosive reaction to learning she had revealed her middle name. His retreat into isolation whenever the Darcy name was mentioned.
He had known. All these years, he had known she was not his daughter but his niece, the orphaned child of his murdered sister.
And so had her mother, although by what miracle she’d kept the secret, or threat… perhaps to all of their lives… she’d held her tongue.
And the murderer, those who wanted her dead, were still around. Who benefited from her death? From her parents’deaths?
Fitzwilliam Darcy’s father, of course. The second son became the only son. And from him, the current Mr. Darcy, master of Pemberley and the ten thousand pound income.
How long Elizabeth sat on the cold stone, she did not know. The world she’d known had crumbled around her. Everything she had believed about herself, about her family, about her place in the world, had been stripped away in the space of a few paragraphs. She was not Elizabeth Bennet, second daughter of a modest country squire. She was Elizabeth Rose Darcy, orphaned heiress to one of England’s greatest estates, hunted by murderers who believed her safely dead
The sound of approaching footsteps broke through her shocked reverie. She looked up through a veil of tears to see Lieutenant Wickham walking up the path.
“Lieutenant Wickham,” she acknowledged, struggling to compose herself. “I did not expect to encounter anyone on my morning walk.”
“The finest views often draw the finest company,” he replied smoothly, though his gaze sharpened as he noted her reddened eyes. “Forgive me, but you seem distressed. Is something amiss?”
Elizabeth tucked the letter back into the envelope and forced a smile. “Nothing of consequence. The wind has made my eyes water, that’s all.”
He did not appear convinced but was gentleman enough not to press the matter directly. Instead, he gestured to the stone beside her. “May I join you for a moment? The view is indeed spectacular.”
She hesitated, torn between the desire for solitude and the social obligation to be courteous. In the end, politeness prevailed. “Of course.”
Wickham settled beside her, careful to maintain a respectable distance. They sat in silence, gazing out at the panorama before them. She felt raw, exposed. Her very identity had been stripped away, leaving her vulnerable.
“I had hoped to call at Longbourn today,” Wickham said. “But Iencountered Mr. Collins in town, who informed me that Mr. Bennet is refusing all visitors save himself. May I ask why?”
