Chapter 51

Richard Fitzwilliam took the treasure hunt prize, having presented the answers to his riddles with the corresponding tokens to Lord and Lady Matlock a good half an hour before Elizabeth and Darcy reappeared in the drawing room.

She had not even cared.

Just a few weeks ago, the idea of winning fifty pounds had meant everything. Losing, because someone had entrapped her in the attic, would have infuriated and enraged her.

Possibly, had I not been kissing Darcy for far too long, I might have won anyway.

She would not count the cost. It simply did not matter. Her heart was filled with a resounding hope that put a smile on her own face and a sour look on Miss Bingley’s.

Was Miss Bingley the one to lock me in?She was certainly malicious enough to have done it. Was Miss de Bourgh her accomplice? If so, she had at least partially repented of it by giving Darcy a hint of her whereabouts. Elizabeth had asked Darcy to wait to try and discover the truth, for ultimately it had been a silly prank which caused little harm. Reluctantly, he had agreed.

Her hope rested upon her decision to write to her uncle and invite him and her aunt to Pemberley. She had told Darcy that she felt it best to speak with her uncle before agreeing to his marriage proposal. She meant to lay the thing out before Uncle Gardiner, who knew her so well, and ask his advice in person. If he thought she should confess all, she would; if he felt it best for Mr Pennywithers to retire quietly into anonymity without any admission…she might. She knew the decision must be her own, but she was hardly impartial. I want to marry Darcy; I do not wish to do or say anything which might ruin what we have.

In the meantime, Pemberley had rapidly become almost dangerously exciting. Darcy’s every look was thrilling. They did not precisely make assignations, but as the days went by, she never knew if strong arms would surround her in a darkened corridor, a heated kiss touching the nape of her neck, or whether his aunts would notice her mussed hair and flushed cheeks after a walk in one of the gardens. He did not press too far, but far enough to tantalise and intrigue her, to fill her dreams with restless wonderings.

In public, he maintained his usual air of aloofness; she had asked for his patience, and he was giving it to her. Evening meals had become less formal, now that the vicar and his elderly neighbours no longer joined them. The earl had made noises about leaving, although Lady Matlock always protested when he did, still plainly holding out hope for her own matchmaking. But the day came when Viscount Ridley and his wife and children departed, nearly a week after the treasure hunt, taking Miss Lushington with them.

The remainder of the house party saw them off.

“I think you are a fool for letting her leave without at least attempting to come to know her,” the earl grumbled to his nephew, in Elizabeth’s hearing, as the Ridley cavalcade of coaches disappeared down the drive. “Good breeding, excellent fortune, and none too difficult to look at.”

“Did it ever occur to you that she might not have wanted to know me?” Darcy asked him.

The earl had stared at him blankly. “No.”

No, Elizabeth thought, that would not occur to most people. Most would see his wealth, his looks, and his home, and decide he would be an excellent spouse. They might want matrimony for any one of those reasons. Miss Lushington, of course, had achieved a similar level of desirability—but such women must be rare in his life. How good he was, to not immediately assume himself a gift from the gods to anyone fortunate enough to capture his attention.

Jane interrupted her thoughts. “Lizzy, would you like to walk in the garden with me?”

“Are you certain you ought to remain outdoors, Miss Bennet?” Mr Bingley interjected. “There is a cool breeze. It might be too chilly.”

Jane smiled affectionately at him. “I am wearing my warmest pelisse, and I am quite well, I promise.”

“Mr Darcy, it is a lovely morning for a stroll. I hope you will join us?” Miss Bingley asked, fluttering her lashes, as if she had been invited to walk with Jane—whose company she usually avoided.

“Thank you. I regret that I am already late for a meeting with my steward.” Bowing to them, he added, “Georgiana, Mrs Reynolds requested your attention on a small matter, if you would see her when you have a moment.” Shortly after, he and Georgiana were gone, and Miss Bingley—no longer interested in walking—soon followed; the earl and his wife likewise excused themselves. Lady Catherine took her daughter off in one direction, and Sarah, arm in arm with Mr Fitzwilliam, went another. Mr Bingley chatted amiably with them for a few minutes, before leaving to visit Darcy’s new hunter in the stables.

“Shall we?” Jane offered, holding her arm out to Elizabeth.

Elizabeth and Jane strolled through the plantings together, neither speaking, although the silence was a comfortable one. Summer was fading; the days were shorter, the blooms slightly more scarce, although Pemberley’s gardens would always be a sight to behold.

“Winter is coming,” Jane murmured, after several quiet minutes. “If Uncle Gardiner accepts Mr Darcy’s invitation for the fishing, will you be happy to extend our visit? Are you relieved, not to be returning so soon to town?”

Elizabeth smiled. “I have wanted to ask you the same questions. I will be honest. I would mourn leaving Pemberley, and not simply because it is so lovely. Mr Darcy could own a cottage in Wales, and I would probably find that the new best place in the world.”

“I knew it!” Jane exulted. “Mr Bingley told me that he was certain Mr Darcy’s feelings for you were beyond anything he had ever before witnessed, but he was unsure as to whether his friend’s feelings were returned. I have been observing you carefully, and I told him I was certain that you are quite in love. I am not wrong, am I?”

It was all Elizabeth could do not to laugh. “You are not wrong. And will you be surprised to hear that Mr Darcy asked me the same question of you? Even before your illness, before you told me your feelings—I was certain of your fondness for Mr Bingley. We have been...estranged, a little, and yet I could still tell. You are my dearest friend in the world, Jane. I hope you know that.”

“Yes,” Jane replied quickly. “I have been wishing it was still true. I, too, made errors, that I hope you will, in time, forget. I have seen something else, my sister, because I know you too well. You are troubled. It is why I wished to speak to you privately today.”

Elizabeth smiled, then sighed. “Mr Darcy has asked me to marry him.”

Jane considered her words carefully before she spoke them. “I notice you do not say that you have accepted his proposal. Surely you no longer believe any of the nonsense published in London’s gossip sheets, if you ever did? I know you have been adamantly opposed to marriage, ever since that reprehensible Mr Simpson treated you so ill. Mr Darcy is no Mr Simpson.”

“I know. Mr Darcy is the best of men.”

Jane peered around carefully, as if to ensure they could be overheard by no one. They were quite alone in this garden, but even so, her next words were only a murmur. “Is it Pennywithers? Do you not want to give him up?”

“I enjoy writing,” Elizabeth said. “I suppose I might miss it occasionally. However, I do not feel that writing for the papers is the only writing that matters. Perhaps my reading audience might only be my family, or myself.” She shrugged.

“Then what is the matter?”

“I think you must already know. Jane, look at all this.” With one hand she gestured to the vast garden they walked within, and the house beyond it. “Mr Darcy could have anyone.”

“He does not want anyone. He wants you. And the Elizabeth Bennet I knew at Longbourn would have told him he was lucky to get her.”

“Jane…I am no longer of Longbourn, but I am also Mr Pennywithers. I should tell him?—”

“You must not!” Jane interrupted, her pace quickening in obvious distress over the very idea. “Mr Bowen can publish an announcement that Pennywithers has retired. Or better still, died. No one need ever know.”

Elizabeth sighed. “I think you may be correct. Yet, saying nothing seems dishonest to me. I determined to talk to Uncle Gardiner before giving Mr Darcy my answer, and deciding whether he must know all. If Uncle agrees with you…I suppose I must as well.”

Jane gave a relieved breath. “I am certain he will.”

Elizabeth nodded, then managed to turn the conversation to Mr Bingley and Jane and their future. Mr Darcy, Jane revealed, had spoken to him frankly, sharing his approval of Jane as his worthy bride—while giving his opinion that Mr Bingley was very young to assume the obligations of marriage.

Elizabeth started to object, but Jane interrupted. “This conclusion, he said, was evidenced by the fact that Mr Bingley has made no effort, as yet, to buy or lease the estate which his father hoped for.”

“What is your opinion of Mr Darcy’s advice?”

“He is young. Half a year younger than I,” she replied. “I am glad he has such a wise counsellor to advise him. But Mr Bingley is very willing to do whatever is needed to start our family. We will not marry until he has established a property. We wish to live near Mr Darcy—and, I hope, you—and we shall begin considering estates, hopefully within thirty miles of here. If Uncle Gardiner comes, Mr Bingley shall ask his permission. If our uncle cannot come here, he shall go to town and see him there. Mr Darcy has pledged his full approval to the plan.”

“Jane, you are practically betrothed! I sensed there was a strong feeling between you, but never did I suspect it had gone this far.”

“I think I needed to accomplish this romance on my own,” Jane said, and laughed. After a moment, Elizabeth joined in, and they walked on in a more contented mood than had been between them since before their father’s death.

Suddenly a question that had been deeply worrying Elizabeth came tumbling out. “What if Mr Darcy asks later, after our marriage, wanting to know which of his new relations is actually Pennywithers? What then would I say?”

“Tell him that you are sworn to secrecy. His sister told Mr Bingley, of course, what she had overheard about our supposed ‘kinship’. He simply refused to discuss it with her. Frankly, I cannot imagine him ever asking. He does not wish to know. It does not matter. Believe me, Mr Darcy will not ask.”

Elizabeth could well imagine Mr Bingley ignoring that which he could not change. But Darcy was a different man; he would want to prepare for any possible issue. She did not think he would even wait for them to speak their vows before he did.

“I believe if he does ask about him, however, and I refuse to say, it will seem as though I do not trust him with the truth.”

Jane’s pretty face appeared troubled. “I am certain our uncle would pose as Pennywithers, especially a retired Pennywithers, if need be.”

“Blatantly lie?”

A long silence followed.

“Lizzy,” Jane finally said, her words imbued with determination, “Only someone who has experienced what you did would understand how you felt at the time when Pennywithers, in a manner of speaking, fell into your lap. You had lost your bridegroom, your papa and your home, all in the same week. You required a means of coping with the shock, the pain, the grief, and Mr Pennywithers was that means. You are not Pennywithers. He is not you. Let him die.”

Mr Gardiner’s letter,along with a large packet of mail from Mr Bowen, arrived the next day. In it, he expressed his deep surprise at the invitation, and said that he was arranging his affairs so that he and Aunt Gardiner could come to Pemberley and stay for a couple of weeks. He was not stupid; he suspected that at least one of his nieces must have discovered more at Pemberley than lovely views of the Derbyshire countryside. They should expect him, he said, the very next week.

Elizabeth picked up the parcel of mail from Mr Bowen, weighing it in her hand. There was a letter from the publisher himself at the top.

In his letter was a list of complaints about Mr Pennywithers’s recent inactivity. His readers, he said, expected more. If Pennywithers would not produce, Mr Bowen would be forced to find a writer who could. In almost the next paragraph, he offered quadruple the rate he had been paying for more columns.

It was, once, what she had dreamt of. If she wrote enough, she would be able to support herself, and much sooner than she had supposed. She traced the words on the page, looking within, trying to find excitement or anticipation or regret.

There was nothing. She no longer wanted this life. Whether or not she married Darcy, a life alone—dependent upon no one because she loved no one—sounded dismal. The idea of taking up the work again of interviewing dressmakers and servants to find sources for her opinions upon the lives of others, people who were doing more than simply existing, seemed an empty waste. The writing itself still interested her, but no longer did she wish to pen gossip—even the elevated sort, justified by wit and a bit of wisdom.

I think I would like to try my hand at poetry, she thought. Then, she laughed aloud. Poetry!

Jane was right—Mr Pennywithers had been a guise she had adopted, a means of coping. The Pennywithers project had consumed her, filling up the hours of her days and preventing her from having to think too much. To grieve too much. She had done it because she had not liked herself. She had rejected the idea of intimate love, not merely out of fear—although there was plenty of that—but as some sort of a punishment.

Suddenly she recalled a conversation the evening of her aborted wedding, forgotten until this moment. Her father sat in his book-room, soaking his hand in some sort of remedy Mrs Hill had concocted to treat his bruised knuckles. Amidst her mother’s ravings and Lydia’s inappropriate giggles over the affair, she had crept in to apologise to her papa.

He had given her one of his sardonic looks under bushy eyebrows. “I would be happy to accept your apology, Lizzy, if I could find anything of which to disapprove in your behaviour. An apparently eligible gentleman made you an offer. It was your father’s responsibility to investigate his worthiness. Your father made a muck of it, and were he a better man, would already be begging your forgiveness. Perhaps by Wednesday of next week, you may expect your apology.”

Most of that time was still a blur of mortification and misery, but Papa had already begun to laugh, mostly at himself. Neither would he have accepted her apology for the accident which cost him his life, much less assented to the ruin of hers in some sort of abysmal exchange. She had been dwelling upon all the wrong things, she realised. The worst things. The hardest things.

Well, no more. She was not formed for unhappiness, and she would not spend her life deliberately courting it.

She untied the twine from the packet of letters sent by Mr Bowen, and began to read the missives. By the time she read the last of them, she knew Jane had also been wrong. Mr Pennywithers could not simply die; Elizabeth was Mr Pennywithers, and regardless of reasons and regrets, nothing would change it.