“A common enough story,” Elizabeth said, her voice echoing slightly against the barrel vault. “Half the great estates in England stand upon such stolen foundations.”
“Yes, but this…” Prue turned slowly, taking in the arches, the faded saints, and the piscina still set into the wall as thoughwaiting for a priest who would never return. “This is precisely as Lady Renwick described it. The blackened ceiling. The altar cloth.” She crossed to the wood, running her fingers along its edge. “In chapter fourteen, Lady Cecelia descends to the chapel seeking refuge, and she discovers the altar conceals a hidden compartment—a relic chamber where the monks secreted their treasures from the Crown’s commissioners.”
Elizabeth’s throat constricted, and her usual skepticism faltered. If this place were truly the inspiration for Renwick’s work, then it could not have been discovered by accident. Her mind unspooled a painful, unwanted thread: Darcy, bringing Amelia here in the golden, intoxicating days of their secret romance, showing this hidden place to win her favor, maybe even kissing her passionately around the reliquary, no doubt playing the grand, brooding lord, revealing the secrets of his estate to a lover who would turn them into scandalous prose.
“Lady Renwick was a woman of considerable imagination,” Elizabeth said, though the words lacked conviction. “Resemblances between her fiction and reality are often quite coincidental.”
“The angle of the light through that window is no coincidence.” Prue pointed to the lancet, where the afternoon sun fell at precisely the slant the novel described. “Nor is the path worn into the stones from door to altar. She knew this place, Elizabeth. She stood exactly where we are standing.”
The inevitable truth settled into her bones, heavy as the surrounding stone. The air was cold, carrying the mineral smell of ancient, damp walls. Sound behaved strangely here—their voices seemed to echo and be swallowed at once, as though the chapel remembered prayers it had not heard in three hundred years.
Lady Renwick had known Pemberley. Had known it intimately enough to render its hidden chapel in prose so accurate that a reader might find it with a map and a candle.
So Lady Renwick was Lady Amelia’snom de plume. And this was the additional detail Darcy wished to confess. That he had known all along that the characters, Lord Laycock, Lady Cecelia, Lady Venetia, and the monks and the brothers, and more, were all drawn from his life or of those Lady Amelia knew. And Elizabeth, wandering these halls, was following the ghost of a woman who had once held the keys to Darcy’s heart, standing in a room Amelia had made immortal, and holding keys Amelia had never possessed—perhaps never even wished for.
“You have gone rather pale,” Prue observed.
“The air is close,” Elizabeth managed, gesturing toward the stairs. “We should return to the house.”
But Prue did not stir. Her eyes narrowed with the shrewdness Elizabeth had learned to expect, and her posture became that of a hunter who has finally cornered her prey. “You know something of Lady Renwick, and why she possessed such intimate knowledge of these grounds.”
Elizabeth turned away, feigning an interest in the fading paint of a saint’s robe, but her silence was a confession in itself. She could neither confirm the suspicion nor summon the energy to weave a further deception. They regarded one another across the dim, echoing space, candles smoking, the stillness broken only by the rhythmic drip of water deep within the masonry. Prue was far too perceptive to be brushed aside, and Elizabeth realized, with a weary heart, that the truth was already an open secret between them.
“Since you have already deduced, let us spare the theatrics.” Elizabeth regarded the ferrety-eyed Miss Duntze. “Lady Renwick has toured Pemberley, much like Miss Entwhistleproclaimed, and Lady Amelia was at Kympton for Thomas’s christening. Therefore..”
“I knew it.” Prue raised her candlestick in triumph, the flame spluttering. “Lady Amelia wrote as Lady Renwick. Being a woman of scandalous reputation and radical opinions, she published under a pen name because no respectable house would associate with her otherwise.”
Elizabeth said nothing. Her silence was admission enough.
Prue’s nose twitched, and she headed toward the staircase. “I wonder, do you also hold the key to the locked cabinet in the library?”
“I do.”
“Oh, Lizzy, do you not see? The cabinet contains her hidden manuscripts, and now that we know Lady Amelia is Lady Renwick, we absolutely need to find the unfinished one.”
When Elizabeth did not respond, still too shocked to grasp what Prue was suggesting, the rector’s daughter shook her, as if out of a stupor.
“You have read them. You are holding back from me, but I understand.” She sniffed prudishly. “You have literary aspirations yourself.”
“I most certainly do not.” Elizabeth reeled at the accusation that she would be so mercenary. “I have not opened the locked cabinet, and I have not read her papers, if they are as scandalous as you say.”
“But surely we must examine them.” Prue’s voice echoed as they ascended the narrow staircase. “At the very least, to see what is there.”
Elizabeth felt the key to that cabinet pressing against her hip, hidden in her pocket beside the other keys she had been entrusted to carry. Having the key did not mean she should use it, and Prue had no business rifling through papers that Darcy kept in trust for his son. She had only demanded the key fromDarcy as a test—whether he would relinquish his lover’s secrets to her. And he had.
“Will you open the cabinet?” Prue asked as they emerged above ground and the sounds of ordinary household activity replaced the oppressive quiet of the undercroft. Elizabeth drew a deep breath, grateful for air that did not taste of centuries.
“Miss Entwhistle says there are unfinished chapters,” Prue ventured when Elizabeth did not answer. “A sequel toThe Monk’s Confessionthat Lady Renwick was working on when she died. The fans are desperate for resolution—Lord Laycock had just discovered Lady Cecelia hiding underground, and she could be with child, either from the monk or his brother, the charming scoundrel. We are all desperate for the resolution.”
“I cannot speak to what the cabinet contains.”
“But if those chapters exist—if the sequel could be completed—there are readers who would pay handsomely for it. Publishers who would bid against each other.” Prue hesitated, then pressed on. “If someone were to assist in the completion, someone who had read every word Lady Renwick ever published and understood her voice…”
“You are proposing that we finish a dead woman’s novel.”
“I am proposing that we consider the possibility.”
“No.”
