“And what exactly are you asking, Mrs Darcy?”
“Whether you believe your brother-in-law’s death had anything to do with George Wickham.”
The silence that followed was long. Catherine looked at Elizabeth with an expression that was not anger, not quite. Itwas closer to appraisal. She was weighing Elizabeth, measuring her, deciding what she was worth.
Then the calculation gave way to a harder look, one that Elizabeth recognised a moment too late as the coldness of a woman who has decided to attack rather than answer.
“I think,” Lady Catherine said, “that you are remarkably skilled at asking questions and singularly poor at attending to what is happening under your own roof.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You ask me about George’s death. You ask about Wickham. You busy yourself with history, tenants, matters that are not, frankly, your concern, while your husband conducts his affairs beneath your nose and you do nothing about it.”
Elizabeth felt the ground shift under her feet. “I do not know what you mean.”
“I mean the Wilson family, Mrs Darcy. I mean the farm your husband gave them, the money he settled on the child, the visits he has been making to that household for six years. I mean the boy they named William, after him, because Fitzwilliam was too grand for a tenant farmer’s bastard.”
Elizabeth stared at her.
“My dear Mrs Darcy.” Catherine’s voice was soft now, soft and terrible, dripping with a sympathy so false it curdled in the air between them. “I feel it is my duty to tell you, since nobody else appears willing to do so. That child is your husband’s. Darcy hasbeen supporting him since birth, visiting the family, ensuring they want for nothing. He took you there yesterday, I am told. Introduced you to the child. You sat in that kitchen, drank their tea, and did not see what was right in front of you. The boy is fair-haired, I understand. As Darcy was, as a child.”
The fury came so fast it blinded her.
It was not the cold, controlled anger Elizabeth had felt before, the careful strategic fury she had used against Lady Catherine at Longbourn. This was something hotter, something that rose from her chest and flooded her face and made her hands shake. Not because she believed a word of it. Not because there was the smallest doubt in her mind about her husband, or who the real father of Sally Wilson’s child was, or the real reason that child had been named William. Her rage rose because this woman, this poisonous, spiteful, meddling woman, had taken Darcy’s kindness, his quiet, years-long care of a family who were his responsibility and a girl who had been wronged, and twisted it into something foul. Had taken the best thing about him and made it ugly.
“Howdareyou.”
Her voice did not sound like her own. It was low and shaking, and Lady Catherine blinked at it.
“How dare you speak of my husband in that way. You know nothing of what you are saying. Nothing.”
“I am trying to help you, Mrs Darcy. A wife ought to know...”
“You are not trying to help me. You are trying to wound me, because you have never forgiven Darcy for marrying me, and because you cannot bear that he is happy, and because you would rather believe your own nephew capable of fathering a child on a seventeen-year-old girl than admit that you do not know what you are talking about.”
Catherine’s face went white. “You are hysterical.”
“I am furious. There is a considerable difference.”
Elizabeth was on her feet. She did not remember standing. Nana was in the room too, she realised, standing beside the mantelpiece with an expression of such concentrated outrage that the air around her seemed to crackle.
“The viper,” Nana said. Her voice was low, almost a hiss. “The absolute viper. She dares...”
Elizabeth could not respond to Nana. She could not look at her. She kept her eyes on Lady Catherine, who was looking at Elizabeth with an expression of cold satisfaction. Catherine was not dismayed by Elizabeth’s anger. She was pleased by it. She had wanted a reaction, and she had received one, and she was filing it away.
Emotional. Unstable. Unable to govern herself.
Elizabeth saw it, saw exactly what Catherine was doing. She could not stop herself, because the anger was real, it was righteous, and she could not tamp it down without pretending that Catherine’s accusation did not matter, which it did, because it was a slander against the man she loved.
“I will not discuss this further,” Elizabeth said. Her voice was steadier now, though her hands were not. “You are wrong. You are profoundly, viciously wrong, and if you repeat this accusation to anyone, I will make certain that Darcy and Lord Matlock know exactly what you have said.”
She left the room before Catherine could reply. She walked quickly down the corridor, through the entrance hall, past a startled footman. She ran up the stairs, into her parlour, closed the door, pressed her back against it, stood there breathing until the shaking stopped.
Nana came through the bookcase. Her face was terrible.
“That woman,” Nana said. “That poisonous, conniving...”
“Nana.”
