Mrs Reynolds was already up, because Mrs Reynolds was always up. She met Elizabeth with a look that asked several questions at once.
“How is Mrs Wickham?” Elizabeth asked a question of her own before Mrs Reynolds could begin.
“Sleeping, ma’am. Miss Bennet and Mrs Bingley are with her. She woke twice in the night and was distressed, but Miss Bennet settled her both times.”
Kitty, who had spent her childhood being dismissed as the silly sister, the one who followed Lydia, the one nobody expected anything of. Kitty, sitting up all night with the sister she had quietly outgrown, holding her through a grief that was real even if the man Lydia was grieving for did not deserve it. Elizabeth’s throat tightened.
“And the physician’s report?”
“Dr Grieve attended and confirmed the death. He has recorded the cause as a fall, exacerbated by the consumption of alcohol. He noted the steepness of the staircase and the polish on the wood.” Mrs Reynolds paused. “He did not indicate that he found anything unusual.”
“Thank you, Mrs Reynolds.”
Elizabeth went to the morning room, where she sat in the cold November light, drank the tea Mrs Reynolds brought her personally, tried to feel something other than exhausted. She had slept, a little, but not until Darcy finally came to bed. He had put his arms around her, held her in the dark. She had pressedher face against his chest and slept the way a person sleeps after a battle: deeply, dreamlessly, not nearly long enough.
Lady Catherine left Pemberley at ten o’clock.
Her carriage was brought to the front door. Her trunks were loaded. Mrs Jenkinson fluttered in attendance. Catherine descended the staircase in her black bombazine, her face a mask, her back rigid, and she spoke to no one on the way down except Lord Matlock, who was waiting in the entrance hall with the expression he always wore when dealing with his sister: patience stretched to its thinnest point.
“I shall write,” Catherine said.
“I do not doubt it,” Lord Matlock replied.
Anne stood at the foot of the stairs. She was pale. She had been crying, Elizabeth thought, though she had cleaned her face carefully and her composure was intact. She looked at her mother. Catherine looked at her daughter. The silence between them held years of love, of damage, a chasm that might or might not be bridgeable.
“Goodbye, Mother,” Anne said.
Catherine opened her mouth. Closed it. She reached out, touched Anne’s cheek briefly with the tips of her gloved fingers.Then she turned, walked out the front door, got into her carriage. She did not look back.
The carriage pulled away down the drive. Anne watched it go until it rounded the bend, disappeared behind the trees. Then she turned, walked past Elizabeth without a word, went up to her room. Elizabeth let her go. Some griefs required company. Others required solitude. Anne would know the difference for herself.
Caroline Bingley departed an hour later, subdued. Louisa Hurst accompanied her, and Mr Hurst followed, having been roused from a comfortable chair in the card room where he had apparently slept through Wickham’s death, the evacuation of the ballroom, and the arrival of the physician. He looked bewildered. Nobody explained anything to him. He got in the carriage and went, destined for the inn at Lambton for a few days, because Pemberley did not need guests who required entertaining at this time.
Bingley stayed. Jane stayed. The Matlocks stayed. And Lydia slept, because Kitty had persuaded her to take laudanum in the small hours of the morning, and she would sleep until the afternoon.
Georgiana found Elizabeth in the parlour after luncheon. Elizabeth was at her writing desk, composing a letter to her father that she would have to write three times before it said what it needed to say without saying what it could not. She set down her pen when Georgiana came in and closed the door.
Georgiana sat in the chair by the fire. She looked composed, but her hands were folded in her lap the way they always were when she was controlling herself.
“I need to ask you something,” she said. “About last night.”
“It was not a natural fall,” Elizabeth admitted, knowing what Georgiana meant.
“Was it my father?”
Elizabeth met her eyes. “No. Your father was on the ballroom floor the whole time. He was standing beside me. He watched, Georgiana, but he did not act.”
Georgiana’s breath came out in a rush. She had been holding it, Elizabeth realised. She had been carrying that question since last night, afraid of the answer, afraid that her father’s ghost had killed a man in front of three hundred people and that the closure he had wanted for six years had come in a form that was vengeance rather than justice.
“Then who?”
“Sir Roderick Darcy. A distant ancestor of yours. He has been asleep in the yellow drawing room for as long as anyone can remember. Nana warned me that if he ever woke, she did not know what he would do. He woke. He did what he did. And then he went back to his chair and went back to sleep.”
Georgiana stared at her. “He is asleep? After that?”
“He is asleep. I checked this morning. He is in his chair, exactly as he has always been, as though nothing happened.”
“Can we... should we... is there anything to be done about him?”
