Elizabeth held perfectly still. This was the moment she had been steering toward for weeks, the conclusion she had wanted him to reach on his own, from the evidence, from the living world. He had reached it. She had to decide what to say.
“I believe you are right to wonder,” she said. “But how could anything be proved, after six years?”
He sat down. He sat in his father’s chair, behind his father’s desk, and said nothing. The fire shifted. Nana opened her mouth; George shook his head, once. She closed it again.
“And even if we could,” Darcy said at last. “Then what? Wickham is married to your sister.”
The impossibility of it filled the room. Lydia, sixteen years old, married to a man who may have murdered his own benefactor. Lydia, whose reputation and future were bound to a man whose exposure would destroy her along with him.
“I know,” Elizabeth said.
Darcy looked at her across the desk. “You have known this was coming. You have been leading me here, carefully, one piece at a time, because you knew that once I saw it I could not unsee it. You wanted me to be ready.”
“Yes.”
“Lydia is why you hesitated. Why you did not simply tell me what you suspected, weeks ago.”
“Yes.”
He was quiet again. Then he said, “Thank you. For not telling me. For letting me find it myself. I would not have believed it, Elizabeth, if you had simply said it. I would have thought you were letting your dislike of Wickham colour your judgement, because even though I despise him myself, I did not think him capable of this. But the evidence...” He stopped. “The evidence does not lie.”
“No,” Elizabeth said. “It does not.”
George Darcy turned from the window and walked through the wall without a word. Nana watched him go. For the first time in Elizabeth’s memory, she looked uncertain. She glanced at Elizabeth with an expression that was almost a question. Then she too faded, leaving Elizabeth and Darcy alone in the study, the fire burning low, the weight of what they now both knew pressing down on them.
“What do we do?” Elizabeth asked.
Darcy considered. She could see him turning it over, examining it from every angle, the way he always did. The fire crackled. Outside, the November wind pressed against the windows.
“If we pursue this,” he said, “and if we find proof, then Wickham hangs. Lydia is a murderer’s widow at sixteen. Your family will be ruined. Kitty and Mary will never make good marriages. The scandal will touch Bingley, Jane, Georgiana, ourselves. All of it, ruined.”
“I know.”
“If we do nothing, then we live with it. We live knowing that my father was murdered, that the man who did it is married to your sister and walking free.”
“I know that too.”
He looked at her. Elizabeth’s heart ached, because she had wanted to relieve his burdens, to help him carry the weight he had been carrying alone for six years. She could see in his face that he had now realised the weight was twice what he thought it was.
“We will not do nothing,” he said. “But we must be exceedingly careful about what we do, how we proceed, who knows. Lord Matlock and I will continue the enquiry into my father’s death. Quietly. If there is evidence to be found, we will find it. When we know what we are dealing with, we will decide together what comes next.”
“Together,” Elizabeth said.
“Together. I am done carrying things alone.”
He held out his hand across the desk. She took it. They sat together in the quiet while the November dark came down around Pemberley, the ghosts keeping their own counsel in the corridors beyond.
Chapter Twenty-One
AletterarrivedfromLongbourn the next morning. Mrs Bennet wrote with her usual breathless urgency to say that she was prostrate with a cold, that Mr Bennet refused to travel anywhere in November, that Mary had no interest in balls and would not be persuaded, and that they would all three stay at home, though Mrs Bennet wished it known that her nerves were greatly affected by missing the event and she hoped Elizabeth would write her a full account of every gown, every dance, and every eligible young man in attendance who might potentially show interest in Kitty.
Mr Bennet had added a postscript in his own hand:Your mother’s cold is a sniffle. My refusal to travel in the winter is genuine. Enjoy your ball, Lizzy; we shall perhaps come in the summer, for I am truly eager to see Pemberley’s library.
Elizabeth read this in her parlour and felt a complicated mixture of disappointment and relief. She missed her father. She did not, at this particular moment, need her mother in the house, and the guilt of that thought sat uncomfortably alongside the truth of it.
“One fewer problem,” Kitty said, reading the letter over her shoulder. “Mama in the same house as Lady Catherine would have been a disaster.”
“Mama in the same house as Lady Catherine would have been entertaining,” Elizabeth corrected. “For about ten minutes. After which it would have been a disaster.”
