“I have had a great deal of time to make it. There is not much else to do at Rosings.” Anne’s hands were steady on the reins now, her posture improving with every stride. She had been well taught, Elizabeth could see; the skill was buried under years of disuse, not absent. “I used to ride with my father when I was small. He had a grey hunter called Atlas, and he would put me in front of him and we would go out before breakfast. I remember the smell of the horse and the cold air and his arm around my waist. Being entirely, perfectly happy.”
“How old were you when Sir Lewis died?”
“Six. Everything changed after that. Mother had always been, well, Mother, but Father balanced her. He could make her laugh, which nobody else has ever managed, and he could make her listen, which is harder still. After he died, there was nobody to balance anything, and she took charge of everything instead.”
They reached the ridge, stopped their horses, and looked out over the valley. Pemberley spread below them in the autumn light: the house, the grounds, the lake, the dark line of woods beyond. Anne was quiet for a long time, looking at the view.
“I came here as a child,” she said finally. “With my mother, before Aunt Anne died. She passed only a year after Papa, so I suppose I would have been seven then. I remember the lake, the gardens, Fitzwilliam trying to teach me to skip stones. Quite badly. And I remember Mrs Reynolds, who gave me gingerbread and called me Miss Annie.”
“Mrs Reynolds mentioned that,” Elizabeth said. “She was rather fond of you.”
“She was kind.” Anne looked at the view a moment longer, and when she spoke again her voice was different. Quieter. More careful. “Mother talked about Pemberley, you know. Constantly. About Aunt Anne, about Uncle George, about how things should have been managed.”
Elizabeth paused a moment, then asked delicately, “Did she ever say anything about your uncle’s death?”
Anne looked at her, and Elizabeth saw those eyes sharpen, the eyes George had said were his Annie’s. Not suspicion, but attention. The quiet, careful attention of a woman who had spenther life listening from the edges of rooms where nobody thought she mattered.
“She said he died because he would not listen,” Anne said. “I remember that quite clearly, because it struck me as a strange thing to say about a man who had died in his sleep. But Mother says strange things often enough, and I learned young not to ask what she meant by them.”
Kitty caught Elizabeth’s eye, and there was surprise in the glance. Elizabeth was becoming less surprised every time someone said they had the feeling something was not quite right about George Darcy’s death, but it was interesting to hear that Lady Catherine might have a more solid theory about it. Not that Elizabeth could exactly ask her.
“Shall we ride back?” Georgiana said. “The light is going.”
They turned their horses toward home. Anne rode beside Georgiana, the two of them talking about music, about London, about things that young women talk about when nobody is telling them to be quiet. Kitty fell back to ride beside Elizabeth.
“He died because he would not listen,” Kitty said, low.
“Lady Catherine meant he would not listen to her,” Elizabeth agreed. “About Wickham.”
“Yes. But it is a strange way to put it.”
“Everything Lady Catherine says is a strange way to put things. That doesn’t make it less true. Even if Lady Catherine has hersuspicions of Wickham, what then? I can’t ask her about it, and suspicions aren’t proof.”
Kitty grimaced, because she knew what Elizabeth was saying was the truth. Anne called to her then, and Kitty urged her horse forward, pasting a smile back on her face. Elizabeth was left to follow them back, musing on what Lady Catherine had meant byhe would not listen.
That evening, while the household was dressing for dinner, Nana found Elizabeth in her parlour.
“You need to take that girl to London,” Nana said, without preamble.
Elizabeth had been thinking the same thing since the ride, watching Anne come alive in the saddle, watching the colour return to her face, the stiffness leave her spine, watching her talk and laugh and be, for a few hours, something closer to the woman she might have become if Lady Catherine had let her.
“With Georgiana and Kitty, for the Season,” Elizabeth clarified.
“Yes. She needs it. She needs concerts, exhibitions, assemblies. She needs to discover that she has opinions of her own and that people will listen to them. And she needs,” Nana said, with the particular vehemence she reserved for matters she consideredurgent, “to be away from that woman long enough to remember who she is.”
“Lady Catherine will never agree.”
“Lady Catherine’s agreement is not required. Anne is a grown woman. She is three-and-twenty, which is older than you are, and she has a right to her own life. What is needed is someone brave enough to offer it to her.”
“And someone to stand between her and her mother when Catherine objects.”
“You have Darcy. Darcy has Lord Matlock. Between the two of them, Catherine can be managed. She will rage, she will threaten, she will make everyone’s life a misery for a fortnight. Then she will sulk. Then she will claim it was her idea all along. I have watched her do it a hundred times. It is her way.”
Elizabeth found Darcy after dinner, in the library. Lord Matlock was with him, and she decided that fate had done her a favour, because she could make the case to both of them at once.
“I would like to invite Anne to London for the Season,” she said. “With Georgiana and Kitty. All three of them, together.”
Lord Matlock set down his glass. Darcy looked at Elizabeth, and his face opened. Not surprise; recognition. As though he had been waiting for someone to say what he had been thinking for years.
