Darcy held Elizabeth’s warm small hand as the carriage turned onto the broad tree-lined boulevard that led to the grand entrance of Ironwood Hall.
Anything more was impossible because the new Lord Rochester watched them with a grin, and because Elizabeth was far too curious to see what the house she had been born in looked like to permit distraction.
“This avenue is a fine line of trees,” Darcy said, “but I have found the whole effect of the estate to be a little too carefully planned. Too many French gardens.”
“No, no, no.” Rochester waved his finger in Darcy’s face. “You shall not bias Lizzy against Ironwood merely because it was designed to a different plan than Pemberley.”
“Oh, my!” Elizabeth exclaimed as the carriage pulled out of the avenue of trees, and onto the broad carriageway that let them see the facade of the manor house. “That is quite big,” she said. Then she added, “And those are a great many French gardens.”
Rochester stuck his noble tongue out at Elizabeth.
“No, no, no,” Elizabeth replied laughing. “I hardly know what my taste in great buildings should be…I was never allowed to run about in the gardens for fear that I would trample the flowers?”
This reminded Rochester of his father, and his face fell.
The present Lord Rochester was dressed all in black, as befitted the noble lord of the manor returning home with the late Lord Rochester’s coffin.
Elizabeth wore a black silk armband on a not particularly bright blue dress. Kindness to her brother brought her that far, but she refused any further symbol of mourning. Elizabeth’s silver locket gleamed on her neck, and Darcy wished to kiss her throat, just above it.
“At least you remember something of home.” Rochester sighed.
“Lovely gardens,” Elizabeth replied. “Not every park needs to have been designed by Capability Brown to be worth looking at.”
“I think,” Darcy said, “that my father also insisted quite strictly that I not trample the flowers in the conservatory.”
“And did you rebel to prove that you were not always subject to his will?” Elizabeth asked winsomely.
“I am afraid not. No Satan I. I think I was quite sad and sobbed on my mother’s shoulder about how Papa would not let me wreck her flowers. She was very sympathetic.”
This made Elizabeth laugh, and Rochester sigh.
“A father is an awful tyrant,” Rochester said, “because there are things he prohibits. It is all in the manner.”
Rochester clenched his fist tightly in the purple velvet of the seat cushions.
Elizabeth placed a comforting arm on his shoulder.
He wiped at his tears. “I am doing it again. I try to be firmer now, more like an earl but—”
“Earls can cry,” Elizabeth said. “There shall be points upon which you ought to be firm. But that will not harm the dignity of your name at all. He was wrong in that . Not in all, but in that.”
Rochester nodded, sniffled, blew his nose.
He splashed a little cold water over his face and rubbed it softly with a towel that he’d decided to bring in the carriage for the purpose of not looking so much like he had just cried when he presented himself to the servants.
When Rochester stepped out of the carriage he looked painfully like a memory of Lord Rochester from when Darcy was very young, and the previous Lord Rochester still had much of his hair. Before he greeted the long line of servants, all dressed in black, Rochester looked back at the formal cart which carried the decayed body of the previous earl, covered in black and plastered with the coat of arms of the estate.
He inclined his head to the body of his father and then stepped forward to the butler and the housekeeper first, shaking their hands firmly, thanking them for their service, and saying all that was appropriate on such an occasion.
Elizabeth was then introduced.
The servants were not so well trained that they did not evince considerable curiosity about the returned daughter of the house, but if any of them looked askance at her refusal to wear bombazine in honor of her father, not yet dead three days, Darcy could not tell.
Given the tale, perhaps the surprise was that she made any gesture of mourning at all.
That was solely for her brother’s sake. But Elizabeth had privately told Darcy that she would wear the black armband and somber clothes until the morning when their first banns were said when they returned to Longbourn, and no longer .
While her clothes did not have the lace or grandeur that might be expected from the daughter of an earl, Elizabeth’s manner managed to be exactly what the servants would like to see on meeting a close relation of the master for the first time—a mix of distance, kindness, and a promise to appreciate their excellent work.
The housekeeper, Mrs. Rose, had a teary look when introduced to Elizabeth, and she said, “My Lady, I do remember when you were just a small child. It is good that the Lord has brought you back to us. I remember you running about always with your mother.”
Elizabeth smiled authentically in reply. “We shall meet afterwards to talk about the past. I dearly wish to hear any stories you might remember of either me or my mother.”
As soon as they had proceeded into the house, Elizabeth clapped a hand over her mouth. “So strange,” she said staring about and turning around and around.
“My Lady,” Mrs. Rose said, clearly believing that Elizabeth’s request for stories had given her leave to say so much, “You liked to climb down those stairs, holding onto the banister.”
“I remember. And that portrait.” She studied the huge image of her grandfather, the second Earl of Rochester. “He rather terrified me—but the tour, show me all about.”
Rochester and Mrs. Rose led them up the stairs, and then along the great gallery with its line of many windows. They turned to look out the windows at the French gardens below, and out to the avenue and the woods beyond it. Darcy whispered to Elizabeth, “You are deeply affected. I can see that.”
“I thought I played the role so well!”
“You play the role very well, but I hope that we are on such intimate terms that I can tell the difference between you and the role you have chosen.”
“It is very much,” Elizabeth said. But then she looked up at him with that arch amused smile he had always loved. “I had not expected to need any comfort on this visit.”
Darcy smiled into her lovely eyes.
“Cease, cease. No.” Rochester came up to them. He wiped at his eyes but forced good humor. “I see that look between you. I know where it leads. Only when you are both married!”
Elizabeth rolled her eyes, and stepped over to Rochester, taking his arm. “What next shall we visit?”
After this the tour went easier than Darcy had expected, until such time as Mrs. Rose showed them a sitting room which was promised to have been the favorite of Elizabeth’s mother.
Upon entering the room Darcy did not immediately perceive anything to be wrong. There were many windows, and Darcy had turned to study the prospect that had once charmed Lady Rochester.
This room looked out over the opposite side of the house from the one they came up on, and below were more geometric gardens, but with a ha-ha and a grassy park in the English style behind it. A majestic deer strolled about on the lawn. A half-ruined faux temple stood dramatically atop a hill, and at this time of year all the trees were leafy and green.
Elizabeth did not look at the prospect. She stared at the middle of the floor, between a small table and a fine sofa in an older style.
“It was here.” Her finger shook. Her other hand gripped her locket.
“Jove,” Rochester exclaimed. “I’d forgotten. Lizzy, I swear I had not remembered.”
Darcy put his arm around Elizabeth. “Elizabeth, let us go.”
Elizabeth did not say anything, she just stared. Darcy pulled her towards the door, but she stayed stiff and staring.
“Oh.” Mrs. Rose clapped a hand over her mouth. “This was where the master beat you and the mistress. I remember the screams echoing down the halls. Half the staff left because they believed him to be a murderer.”
“Right there.” Elizabeth pointed. “There had been a fire screen set up, a Chinese mountain painting. And when he’d kicked Mama and I heard the crack, she’d knocked the screen over as she fell.”
“Papa had brought me here,” Rochester said quietly, now remembering himself. “He wanted me to watch. He said it would…it would give me more stomach. I sat in that very seat, sobbing. Papa slapped me for the tears before he left. Oh, God.”
Elizabeth wrenched her arm from Darcy’s grasp so that she could tear the mourning band from around her arm. She threw it to the floor, stomped on it, and then with her head stiffly held high, she hurried out of the room, then back down the gallery, down the stairs, and out into the gardens.
Darcy followed.
Elizabeth climbed into the first planter section and stomped around crushing a small section of the flowers with the fine leather travelling boots that she still wore.
“Elizabeth,” Darcy said after watching her for half a minute.
She seemed startled, as though she’d forgotten that he was there. Then she looked down at her feet. “Poor flowers.”
“Come here, Elizabeth.” Darcy held out his hand to her and taking it, she jumped over the foot high brick wall of the flower bed.
She looked back mournfully. “Poor, poor flowers. They didn’t deserve that.” And then she sobbed.
Darcy put his arms around her and held her as she cried.
“I don’t even know why I’m crying. It’s not for him. It’s not for the flowers. It’s not for myself. I am well.”
“Dear, dear Lizzy.”
“Lord! And poor Robert!”
Darcy held her. His hand made long slow rubs on her back. After a while she let out a long breath. Then another. She smiled at him through her tears. “Thank you for being here.”
“Of course.”
“I must look a sight.”
“You look beautiful.”
She rolled her eyes. She took her handkerchief out and thoroughly wiped the tears away from her face. “ You always think that. I did my simple best to look as poorly as I could—and still you could not take your eyes off me. I wondered sometimes if you meant to criticize. Did you notice the ink stains? I put at least one on every piece of clothing I owned.”
“I confess to not having been so focused upon your beauty as to fail to notice the presence of the ink stains.”
Darcy took Elizabeth’s arm and led her along the path through the geometrically arranged flower planters, and around the side of the mansion to where he’d noticed the hill with the temple. When they crossed around the bit of the path that allowed them over the ha-ha, the deer with its majestic antlers was still there. But he looked at the couple and then wandered off into the trees.
“Good,” Elizabeth replied with a pert smile. “I put a great deal of thought into the arrangement of the ink stains—did you note that some of them were in places where it would be quite implausible for them to have arrived via accident? I always was proudest of those.”
Darcy laughed. “It was part of what confused me about you.”
“Oh, and do say what you thought then. I shall never be able to account for you having fallen in love with me. Will I need to wear a servant’s cast-off rags to keep your affection? Lady Elizabeth is known to be an eccentric, so I think she might carry that off.”
Darcy kissed her hand. “I fear I love your essentials, and I saw through everything to that good core of your character, and that is what I loved.”
She showed him that pleased pink look and then quickly kissed him, but thoroughly.
They started up the path again. Elizabeth said, “But you must account for it to me. Tell me honestly, when did you first come to love me?”
“I think I began when I stepped out to the balcony to apologize to Lydia, and I heard you say, ‘I think Mr. Darcy is a much more interesting man than Mr. Bingley.’”
Elizabeth laughed. “You remember it so precisely. But is that really all it is? Gratitude for perceiving my interest.”
“That made me pay attention to you, but my affections could never have become solid if you were not a far more interesting person than any who I had ever met before. It was quite a puzzle to me, for a long time.”
They now reached the top of the eminence and stepped amongst the little Grecian temple, with a fallen marble column artfully arranged against one of the standing ones, and then carefully cemented into place to make it impossible to dangerously make it roll.
“I have behaved in such contrary manners at times,” Elizabeth said. “I always had a sense of playing a role, and so it was easy to change to a different role. Except with Papa. Maybe it is still a role then, but it is the role of being who I wished to be and liked to be. I think you are the first person besides him who I ever felt safe to be my truer self with.”
Now it was Darcy who turned to kiss her soundly.
“I see you both!”
Lord Rochester hurried up the hill, and he laughingly shouted, “Now unhand my sister you rogue!”
“Shall you insist we marry if I do not?” Darcy replied, glad to see that Rochester also was in a better mood.
“No, no. Only if my sister wants me to.” He stepped up next to them. “Well Lizzy?”
“He does kiss very well,” Elizabeth replied with that familiar mischievous glint to her eyes.
Rochester theatrically groaned. “No, no. Do not tell me, your brother, about how you flitter about with your gentlemen admirer. I hoped to think you were as chaste as a Vestal Virgin.”
“A great many of them ,” Elizabeth replied laughing, “were executed for failing to live up to the ‘virgin’ portion of the title.”
“Oh, really?” Rochester replied in a tone that made it clear that this thought had been in his mind as well when he made the metaphor.
“Yes, buried alive after Hannibal’s victory at Cannae, as I recall,” Elizabeth replied.
“Well then, maybe not one of those pagan holy women. As chaste as a good Catholic nun.”
“I believe,” Darcy said, “that tales about the moral failings of nuns have also been, on occasion, bandied about.”
“A good Catholic nun,” Elizabeth replied for her brother. “The ‘good’ is what excludes those nuns.”
All of them laughed.
They looked back at the house, and Darcy’s eyes, and perhaps Elizabeth’s and Rochester’s as well, were drawn to the window of that sitting room.
Rochester said, “Lizzy, I did not mean. I…I wanted to forget what he really was.” He pressed his hand against his mouth. “There was happiness and good mixed in. In some quantity. I remember when he taught me to shoot. It was over there, in that clearing. And he was so proud of me that day, because I hit my bird. And when the tutors praised my work, he was always happy, and he would order a special dinner served. And there was a time after you were born when we were all happy. Or maybe only I was happy, but he in fact barely paid attention to any of us.”
Rochester’s easy tears fell again, and Elizabeth embraced him.
“I suppose I’ll need another black ribbon,” she said. “I don’t know that I want to wear that one again.”
“You don’t need to pretend to mourn his death,” Rochester said. “You do not say it, but the way you carefully do not mention certain things is clear enough. You are like Bennet. You chiefly think of him as the murderer of your mother.”
“Robert.” She wiped at her own tears. “I have something to mourn as well. I think—We do not share all of those childhood recollections that ought to tie a brother and a sister together. And I mourn…I mourn the good that was in our father. No man is wholly bad. I see things of him in myself. So odd—we were not raised together at all, but part of me wishes to live up to the image he had of me, to be someone with ‘stomach’.”
“You are such a person,” Rochester said.
“No, I am just myself. He saw me at my most dramatic moment, and he judged based on that. And when I met him again before he died, I played the role he wanted to see me play. Lord, is that not so odd? That I did him that kindness, to bring the gun and make a show of hating him, despite every reason I had to hate him?”
Both Darcy and Rochester chuckled at the way Elizabeth said that.
“You know what I mean.” She smiled at them both. “But I cry easily enough. And I am often frightened. Lord! I spent half my childhood terrified that Mrs. Bennet would transform into our father, even though I knew she could not.”
Two servants had entered the sitting room. They were pulling the curtains down and then switching each light chintz curtain with heavy black curtains.
The three of them watched.
Rochester said, “Let’s go back. Let’s sit in the drawing room, call for tea and a luncheon, and let’s all share those stories of our childhoods. Happy ones.”