He rose, crossed to her chair, and kissed the top of her head, and left the library. Elizabeth sat listening to his footsteps retreat down the corridor. She pressed her hands over her face. She didnot cry, because crying would not help and Mrs Reynolds might come in.
She sat there for a long time. The fire shifted and settled. Miss Pardoe turned a page of her eternal book and did not look up.
Eventually Elizabeth took her hands from her face, straightened her back, and reached for the notebook she had begun keeping, the one disguised as household observations. She wrote:
Mrs R confirms: late Mr GD well before death. W present in the house, unexpected visit, summoned? Mr GD unsettled in days prior. Physician attributed death to heart. Mrs R has always felt something was wrong. House itself unsettled since. Mrs R sensitive; more so than she knows.
She looked at what she had written. Circumstantial. All of it circumstantial. A sudden death, a house guest, a housekeeper’s unease. Nothing a magistrate would consider for a moment.
But it was a beginning. Tomorrow she would ask more questions, gently, carefully, wearing the mask of a bride who simply wanted to understand the family she had joined. Kitty would be beside her, watching, covering. Between them they would somehow build a case out of whispers, memories, the unshakeable testimony of a dead man who could not rest.
Through the library window, the late afternoon sun broke through the clouds for the first time that day. The grounds of Pemberley spread out in their autumn beauty. Elizabeth looked at them, thought of Darcy’s face as he had left the room, patient, hurt, trusting, and added one more line to her notebook:
I must find a way. I must find it soon.
She closed the notebook and put it in the drawer of her writing desk, beneath the household accounts, where nobody would think to look.
Chapter Eleven
Thephysicgardenwasbehind the kitchen wing, tucked into a south-facing corner where the old stone walls held the warmth of the sun even in late October. Elizabeth found it by accident, or rather the way one does when looking for something without knowing what it is.
She had been walking the grounds with Kitty, ostensibly to learn the paths and outbuildings that a mistress ought to know. In truth she was restless, her mind turning over Mrs Reynolds’s words from the day before, the unsettled feeling in the house,the housekeeper’s conviction that something was wrong. She needed to move, and she needed to think, and she found she could do both better outside than in, where every room held either a ghost or a husband or both.
They had passed the kitchen garden, where the last of the autumn cabbages sat in stolid rows, and the herb beds, where the lavender had gone grey, woody, the rosemary putting out its final pale flowers. Beyond these, half hidden by a yew hedge, was a smaller garden Elizabeth had not seen before.
“What is this?” she asked Kitty, stepping through the narrow gap in the hedge.
It was a proper physic garden, the kind that great houses had maintained for centuries before physicians became fashionable and apothecaries took over the business of healing. The beds were laid out in the old formal style, each one bordered with low box hedging, and though the plantings had gone wild in places, Elizabeth could see the logic of the original design: herbs grouped by use, medicinal plants separated from culinary ones, the dangerous specimens given their own bed near the far wall.
She knew what she was looking at before her mind caught up with her eyes. The tall spires, their flowers long since faded to brown seed heads, standing in a dense clump against the south wall where they would have caught the best of the summer sun. Foxglove.Digitalis purpurea.She had grown up in the country and knew every hedgerow plant by name, and her father’s library had contained Withering’s treatise on the foxglove, which she had read at fourteen with the same indiscriminate appetite she applied to every book in the house.
Foxglove, which in careful doses could steady a failing heart. Which in larger doses could stop one entirely.
Which produced symptoms, in excess, that would look to any physician like a sudden and natural failure of that organ.
Elizabeth stood and stared. The autumn sun was warm on her shoulders. A blackbird sang from the top of the yew hedge. The kitchen garden was full of ordinary sounds, a door opening, a maid’s voice calling to someone about turnips, the scrape of a wheelbarrow on gravel. Everything was normal. Everything was exactly as it should be, except that Elizabeth was standing in front of the plant that had killed her husband’s father, and it was growing twenty yards from the kitchen door.
Kitty had come through the hedge behind her. She looked at the garden, then at Elizabeth, then at the foxglove.
“Oh,” she said. Quietly.
Kitty had read Withering too. Or if she had not read the whole of it, she had read enough, because Elizabeth had told her about it at fourteen, breathless with the thrill of a new discovery and desperate to share it with someone. That was the year they had walked every hedgerow around Meryton identifying plants, Elizabeth reciting their properties while Kitty collected specimens and pressed them in a book they kept hidden from their mother, who would have found the whole enterprise unwholesome.
“It has been here for years,” Kitty said, looking at the established roots, the self-seeded plants that had spread beyond their original bed. “Long before Mr Darcy died.”
“Anyone in the household could have picked it. Anyone who knew what it was.”
“And Wickham was educated here. Alongside Darcy. He would have known this garden.”
They stood together in the autumn sunshine. The blackbird went on singing. The foxglove stood in its bed against the wall, tall, brown, entirely innocent, entirely damning.
George Darcy was in the parlour when Elizabeth returned.
She had not summoned him; she did not know how to, or where he spent his time usually. He simply appeared, the way he had the first time, filling the doorway with his too-solid presence, and the temperature of the room dropped several degrees in the time it took Elizabeth to close the door behind her. Kitty, who could not see him but could feel the sudden chill and see from the expression on Elizabeth’s face that they were not alone, wrapped her arms around herself and sat in the chair nearest the fire.
“I need to ask you something difficult,” Elizabeth said, without preamble.
George Darcy sat. The chair did not creak, but the cushion compressed. “Ask.”
