“The night you died. I need you to tell me exactly what happened. Not the confrontation with Wickham, not what led to it. The evening itself. What you ate, what you drank, when you began to feel unwell. Everything you can remember.”
He had told her the broad truth of it, the poisoning, the brandy, the morning when he did not wake. But she was asking for the details now, the specific, granular memory of his own death, and she could see what it cost him to go back to it.
“We dined at seven,” he said. “The household dined together that evening. Wickham was there. He was, he was very easy. Very pleasant. As though the conversation that afternoon, the confrontation about Sally Wilson, had not happened at all. I remember thinking that either he had taken it better than I expected, or he was playing a deeper game than I had credited him with.”
He paused, shaking his head slowly. Elizabeth could clearly see the regret on his face, the self-blame.
“After dinner, I went to my study. Wickham came to me there. He poured brandy. I have thought back on this a hundred thousand times. I remember that he stood at the sideboard with his back to me while he poured it, then brought over two glasses and put one into my hand. He said he wished to apologise properly, man to man, and to discuss the arrangements for the marriage. He was, I cannot describe it. He was the boy I remembered. The boy I had loved. Open, earnest, sorry for his mistakes. I wanted to believe it. God help me, after everything, I still wanted to believe it.”
Kitty, who could hear only Elizabeth’s half of the conversation, sat with her hands folded in her lap and her face turned toward the fire and did not move.
“I drank the brandy,” George Darcy said. “He stayed for perhaps half an hour. We talked. He agreed to everything I asked, the marriage to Sally, the terms, the living at Kympton still agreed upon when its current incumbent passed, and a smaller degree of support in the meantime while he completed his studies and made his living as a curate. He was reasonable. He was contrite. He was everything I wanted him to be, and I was a fool, because I had spent twenty years believing in a version of George Wickham that never existed, and I could not stop believing it even when my own son told me the truth.”
His voice had dropped. The room was bitterly cold now. Elizabeth could see her breath, and Kitty’s, hanging in the air between them.
“I retired at ten. My heart began to trouble me on the stairs. A flutter, nothing more, the kind of thing one notices and dismisses. By the time I reached my bedroom, it had become something else. Not a flutter. A stutter. My heart was stuttering, slowing, beating in a rhythm that was wrong, that I could feel was wrong, though I had never in my life had cause to think about the beating of my own heart.”
He looked at Elizabeth, and the rawness in his face was terrible.
“I called for no one. I thought it would pass. I lay down on my bed. I waited. The stuttering grew worse. The room grew cold, or I grew cold; I could not tell which. The last thing I remember is the ceiling above my bed, then nothing, then waking to find thatI was still in the room but the body on the bed was no longer mine.”
The silence that followed was absolute. Even the fire seemed to have stopped moving.
“Foxglove,” Elizabeth said.
George Darcy looked at her.
“Digitalis,” she said. “Derived from foxglove. In small doses it is used to treat conditions of the heart. In large doses it causes exactly what you have described: an irregular heartbeat, a slowing, a failure that looks entirely natural. Any physician examining you afterward would have concluded that your heart simply stopped. Because it did. It was made to stop.”
“You know this how?”
“I grew up in a country house, where there was an old physic garden. Not on the scale of Pemberley’s, of course, but I recognise every plant in it and know what they are used for. And I read a great deal,” Elizabeth said. “There is a bed of foxglove in the physic garden, not twenty yards from the kitchen door.”
George Darcy was silent. Then he said, in a voice that was barely a voice at all, “I showed him every corner of Pemberley, inside and out. Every garden, every path, every room. I showed him the physic garden when he was a boy. I do not recall telling him exactly what each plant was for, but I do remember warning him that while they could be of great medicinal benefit, some of the plants were dangerous in the wrong quantities, or given for the wrong reasons. And certainly, there are books in the librarywhich could have given him the information that foxglove is one of them, and why.”
“You could not have known.”
“No. But I showed him the weapon he used to kill me, and that is something I must live with. Or not live with. Whichever term you prefer.” The ghost’s attempt at dark humour was so like something Darcy would have said that Elizabeth felt her chest tighten.
Nana arrived ten minutes later, which was ten minutes longer than Elizabeth had expected her to wait.
She came in briskly; she had been listening at the door, if ghosts could be said to listen at doors. She looked at George Darcy with fierce love and exasperation in equal measure.
“You told her about the brandy,” Nana said.
“She asked.”
“She would have. She is thorough.” Nana turned to Elizabeth. “You found the foxglove.”
“I did. And I have a question for you, Nana. You said you saw him die. You said you screamed at him not to drink. Did you see Wickham prepare the brandy?”
Nana’s face changed. The usual briskness fell away. What was left was old, tired, furious.
“I saw him put something in the glass as he poured. I watched him hand the glass to George. I watched his face as George drank. I have seen many faces in a hundred and thirty years, Mrs Darcy. I know what a man looks like when he is watching something he has planned come to pass. He was not anxious. He was not hopeful. He was satisfied. He looked like a man watching a trap close. I screamed and I tried everything I could to make George spill his glass, but I could not.”
“Unfortunately,” Elizabeth said gently, “your testimony is not the kind anyone living would accept.”
“No,” Nana agreed. “It is not.”
