“Anne has never had a Season,” Lord Matlock said. “Catherine would not permit it. She said Anne’s health would not standit, which was nonsense then and is nonsense now. The girl is not robust, but she is not dying, whatever Catherine may have convinced herself.”
“She rode this afternoon,” Elizabeth said. “For the first time in years. She was magnificent.”
“Was she?” Lord Matlock looked pleased. “She was a good little rider as a child. Lewis taught her. He would have been glad to hear it.”
“Then you support the idea?”
“Wholeheartedly. Darcy?”
“I think it an excellent idea. Anne is not a child, and she has been kept in that house long enough.”
“Catherine will rage,” Lord Matlock observed, without particular concern.
“Aunt Catherine will rage,” Darcy agreed. “But Anne deserves a life, Uncle. She has waited long enough for one. Elizabeth and I have the opportunity to give her this; if she agrees, we must not let Aunt Catherine stop her.”
They told Anne the following morning, before breakfast, in the small parlour where the early sun came through the east windows and made the room bright. Elizabeth had asked Georgiana and Kitty to be there too, because she wanted Anne to see the welcome waiting for her, and because Georgiana had rehearsed a small speech about how much she wantedher cousin’s company that Elizabeth did not have the heart to prevent.
Georgiana did not get through the speech. She managed, “Anne, we would like you to come to London with us for the Season, if you would...” before Anne put her hand over her mouth and her eyes filled, and the speech became unnecessary.
“Yes,” Anne said. “Yes. If you are sure. If it is truly...”
“It is truly,” Kitty said, taking Anne’s hand, which was clearly far too inadequate a gesture, because Anne threw her arms around Kitty instead, then turned to Georgiana and repeated the embrace.
“Mother will not allow it,” Anne said, after a moment, when she could speak again.
“Your mother’s permission will be obtained,” Elizabeth said. “Darcy and Lord Matlock have already agreed to manage her.”
Anne looked at Elizabeth with an expression that was gratitude, terror, hope, all mixed together, and Elizabeth thought of what Nana had said:she needs to remember who she is.Perhaps this was the beginning of that remembering.
From the doorway, unseen by anyone but Elizabeth, Nana watched the scene with her arms folded and her chin lifted and an expression that was, for once, entirely without complaint.
“Good,” she said. “That is one thing done properly in this house.”
And from the far corner of the room, George Darcy stood motionless, watching his niece cry for joy over a thing her namesake would have taken for granted, and said nothing at all. He did not need to. His face said everything.
Elizabeth looked away before her own expression could betray her, and said, briskly, “Now then. Breakfast. And we had better eat quickly, because Lady Catherine will be down by nine, and I should like to enjoy the morning while it lasts.”
Chapter Seventeen
Itwasthenamethat kept coming back to her mind, niggling at the edges of her thoughts. As though it was important somehow, a thread she had not yet pulled on.
Sally Wilson. George Darcy had spoken of her, the night he told Elizabeth about the confrontation with Wickham. The girl Wickham had got with child. The girl whose father had come to George in desperation. George had believed him, confronted Wickham that same evening. By morning George was dead. That was where the story ended, for George. He had died not knowingwhat became of Sally Wilson, or her child, or whether Wickham had ever faced any consequence at all.
Elizabeth had asked Nana. Nana had heard the name, yes, she remembered the Wilsons, a respectable tenant family who had been at Pemberley as long as she had, but she had no way of knowing what had happened after George died. She was bound to the house and the close gardens. The lives of tenants beyond Pemberley’s walls were beyond her reach. “You will have to ask the living,” Nana had said, and left it at that, as though the living were a resource Elizabeth had not thought to consult.
The living.
Elizabeth did not want to ask her husband. But there was one other person who might have the information she needed; might have more than Darcy, in fact, because she had been here when George Darcy died.
Mrs Reynolds.
Mrs Reynolds knew the tenants. If Sally Wilson had been helped, Mrs Reynolds would know. She might know when exactly Mr Wilson had spoken to George Darcy too. And if she did, it was evidence. Real evidence, from a living witness, that did not depend on ghosts, and that Elizabeth might finally be able to take to her husband. But asking meant drawing Mrs Reynolds further in, and Mrs Reynolds was already closer to the truth than anyone except Kitty and Georgiana. Elizabeth was running out of patience for doing nothing, but she was not yet out of reasons to be careful.
She was thinking about this in her parlour, late in the afternoon, while the rest of the household was occupied. Lady Catherine had commandeered the yellow drawing room for a lecture on the management of servants that Lady Matlock was silently suffering through. Lord Matlock had retreated to the library. Darcy was out with his steward. Kitty had taken Georgiana and Anne to the music room, and the three of them were working through a piece that required two players at a time, which meant the third needed to turn pages for them, which lot fell to Anne since she could not play, though Georgiana had begun to teach her a little, without letting Lady Catherine know about it.
Elizabeth’s parlour was the one place in Pemberley where she could think without performance. It was a small room, warm and private, with a writing desk, a chair by the fire, bookshelves lining the far wall. The bookshelves had been there for as long as anyone could remember, but did not have many books on them, more trinkets and knick-knacks. Elizabeth had added more books and was slowly removing the less aesthetically pleasing trinkets, though each change was criticised by Nana.
Nana appeared beside the writing desk, drifting through the bookcase as she always did, as though the wall behind it were no more substantial than air.
