Page 112

"He might," the Earl agreed. "We shall examine every record we can lawfully obtain."

Albrecht turned abruptly. "He says Minna was to die?"

"He says the accident was arranged deliberately."

For a long moment Albrecht could not speak. Then he sat down as though he had forgotten where the chair stood. The Earl moved toward him but waited when Albrecht lifted a hand.

"I held my sister's mourning service," he said. "There was no body. I was told the river had taken her. I accepted it because there was nothing else for me to do. I let myself be persuaded that she was gone."

"You had been given every reason to believe it," Lord Matlock said.

"I remember Adelheid coming to me with Minna's shawl. She said it had been found upon the bank. I wept upon it. She sat beside me all night."

The Earl said nothing. There was no answer that would make such a memory less cruel.

Albrecht remained in the chair after the others had gone. The Earl did not demand that he find words for his grief. He sat across from him, opened a book, and turned a page without reading a sentence. Time passed. Somewhere below stairs a footman shut a door and the familiar house went on with its ordinary business.

"When Minna was lost," Albrecht said at last, "I was the elder brother left alive. I told myself I should have known where she went. That if I had asked one more question, stopped one more carriage, sent men to the coast a day earlier, she might have come home."

The Earl closed the book. He had spent years reproaching himself for allowing Elizabeth to leave Longbourn after every visit without knowing how lonely she was there. The reproach was smaller in consequence than Albrecht's, but he recognized its shape.

"We judge our former selves by knowledge they did not possess," he said. "It is a cruel advantage to give ourselves."

Albrecht stared at the hearth. "You have not lost her."

"No," Matlock answered. "And I am grateful every day that she survived to find us. I cannot offer you a way to make the past otherwise. But if you wish to sit here until the lamps are lit, you need not sit alone."

Albrecht looked at the untouched book in the Earl's hands. He nodded once. Neither man opened the subject again before dinner.

Elizabeth was waiting in the adjoining drawing room when Albrecht came to her. He tried to smile and failed. She rose carefully, despite her sore shoulder.

"Uncle?"

He took her good hand and held it between both of his. "My little sister was not abandoned by God. She was abandoned by the people who ought to have guarded her," he said in German.

"You did not know," Elizabeth answered in the same language.

"I should have," he whispered.

"Then you must permit me to say what I should have told her if she could hear us now," Elizabeth said. "She found love, Uncle. She had a home and a husband who adored her. I remember her laughter. Whatever was done to her before my father found her, it did not take all her happiness away."

Albrecht bowed his head. He had spent more than twenty years imagining his sister's last moments upon a dark road. He had never permitted himself to imagine that she had afterwards sung to a child, read by a fire, and laughed in a garden. Elizabeth had given him those years back, not in their entirety, but enough that grief could no longer claim to know the whole story.

There remained a question nobody wished to ask aloud in her hearing. Why had Adelheid wanted Minna dead?

Until it was answered, the family could not yet guess how much worse the truth might become.

CHAPTER 28

What Minna Remembered

Elizabeth had not expected her mother's memories to be so stubbornly small. When she tried to summon the past, she could recall the sweetness of a pear cut into quarters, the scent of the soap Minna kept near her basin, the sound of German words spoken from the far side of a bedroom door. She could remember being lifted into her father's arms after a tumble in the garden, and her mother's smile when Henry declared that a daughter who climbed trees would one day command the Royal Navy.

She could not remember Minna saying, clearly and unmistakably, that someone had murdered Friedrich.

This failure troubled her more than she cared to admit. She had spent the morning in the library with her mother's green book open before her, reading the childhood notes in its margins as though each phrase might conceal a confession. The letters were familiar now: Friedrich had advised caution, Albrecht had urged mischief, and Minna had chosen the apple tree. The page was proof that her mother had once been loved by two brothers. It offered no explanation of the brother whose life had ended on a terrace.

Darcy found Elizabeth staring at the same passage he had seen her examine an hour earlier.