Page 35 of Strange Happenings at Longbourn (Darcy and Elizabeth Variations #11)
At the loo table, Lydia lost half her counters in the first round but won them back when Mr. Denny, too busy watching her smile, discarded the wrong card. Kitty sipped punch and whispered to Maria Lucas about the ghost story, making it twice as dramatic in the retelling.
Between games, the company repaired to the dining room, where Mrs. Phillips’s famous syllabub stood in crystal dishes alongside a fine cold ham, pickled walnuts, and a dish of stewed apples.
The gentlemen poured themselves more punch, and the ladies stood in small knots discussing the latest from London and which local dressmaker was most adept at copying Town fashions .
Yet Elizabeth could not entirely shake her fascination—or her unease. The image of a man descending into fire, the cries of trapped servants, the awful collapse… It clung to her, making her shiver despite the room’s warmth.
When the Bennet ladies returned home, Lydia immediately began retelling the tale to their mother, embellishing it with every sentence until Mrs. Bennet was fanning herself.
“Oh! To think of such horror happening in my own home!” she cried. “It is a mercy the place was rebuilt, but I declare, I shall never again walk in the east wing without thinking of it! My girls, you must never go poking about looking for those rooms. It is quite unladylike and entirely unsafe.”
“I have no intention of crawling through paneling, Mama,” Elizabeth said mildly, though in truth her curiosity was stronger than ever.
Mrs. Bennet declared she should have bad dreams over it and sent them all off to bed.
Elizabeth turned onto her side and stared at the wavering line of candlelight that slipped around the edge of the bed curtains.
The flame guttered once in a faint draft and then steadied, a tiny, stubborn sun pressed into a cup of brass.
How many candles had Malcolm Bennet left burning—heedless, careless—on that terrible night?
The thought pricked at her until she drew the curtain back a hand’s breadth and snuffed the taper with a quick pinch of wetted fingers.
Darkness folded over the room, softer than fear; the embers in the grate were low and red, the kind of warmth that invited secrets.
Sleep did not come.
Her mind, traitorous in its industry, began to sort and arrange the evening’s revelations like counters upon a loo table.
There was the fact of the journals—Milton Moore’s careful hand, so steady in January, so shaken by February—and the shape of a friendship turned poison by indulgence.
Then there was the fact of Malcolm Bennet: the initials resolved, the man himself dragged from rumor into recognition, and with him the consequence of his choices.
There was, too, the practical mischief of the present: the missing silver, the wandering lights, the laugh she had heard in the dark, the candle laid at her door as though by a mocking hand.
It felt all at once as if the past had laid a long, cold palm upon Longbourn’s shoulder and pressed .
She tried to think rationally, to divide dread from logic.
If the servants’ quarters had been boarded and bricked, then some trace must remain: a half-forgotten door whose lintel did not match its neighbors, a run of paneling that rang hollow when rapped, or a corridor that turned at an odd angle to avoid a space no one used.
Her memory of the east wing whirled around—nursery rooms long put by, the linen press with its stiff-smelling shelves, a narrow passage that ended in a blank wall.
Had that wall always been there? She could not be certain.
When they were small, Jane had shepherded them away from that end of the hall because the floors there creaked, and Lydia, even then, delighted in shrieking for the pleasure of being consoled.
A glimmer of purpose awoke in her. Her grandfather had not wanted to walk the east wing.
That would be a place to begin. She would count steps, measure windows to rooms, mark where the wainscot seemed newer than its neighbors.
If she could not tell what lay behind the wall, perhaps Mr. Hill might; perhaps even her father would recollect a bit of lore he had never thought worth repeating.
And if there were indeed a sealed stair, a forgotten door—well.
Prudence must govern discovery. She would not pry up so much as a splinter without first telling Darcy.
The idea of his steady presence beside her— of his candle held level while she bent to read a seam in the paneling—calmed her more than prayer might have done.
Darcy. The name moved through her like a bell note.
She thought of him in profile, firelight picking out the strong seam of his cheekbone, his mouth arrested between gravity and humor.
She had told him that morning—so boldly—that her opinion of him had entirely changed; she felt that change again now, in the way her nerves quieted when she imagined telling him everything: the candle on her threshold, the footprints upon her rug, the chill that had knifed the room when she woke to find the window thrown.
Would he think her fanciful? No, he would listen, not with indulgence but with respect, and his first thought would be of remedy, not ridicule.
A month ago she would have called such confidence vanity on his part; tonight she called it character.
Darcy’s constancy made Malcolm Bennet’s selfishness seem more monstrous by contrast. How strange that both men belonged to the same England, the same sex—one using his will to protect, the other to gratify, and the result of each choice echoing outward like ripples in a pond.
Because of Malcolm, a roof had fallen, and an entail had been forged like a chain; because of Darcy, the chain of fear in her own breast loosened a link .
The embers sighed down to a duller red. Elizabeth turned onto her back and considered Mr. Collins with reluctant practicality.
If the entail’s origin lay in a grandfather’s terror of ruin, then Mr. Collins’s presence under her roof was not merely an annoyance sent by Providence to exercise her patience; it was the visible instrument of a decision made in smoke and grief seventy years before.
That thought had the odd effect of softening her irritation.
Mr. Collins was ridiculous, but he was also a consequence; to be angry at him alone was to be angry at a weather vane when the wind was the thing that moved it.
Still, the vane could squeak abominably, and she smiled in the dark at the memory of Mary’s measured rebuke at supper.
Dear Mary—capable of sense when she was coaxed away from sermonizing.
Perhaps the courtship would do her good; perhaps it would teach Mr. Collins to admire quiet virtues rather than broadcast his own.
A small thump sounded somewhere along the corridor—a shutter, perhaps, or a careless hand to a latch—and Elizabeth’s skin prickled before she could master herself.
She drew a deep breath and counted slowly.
The house settled again into stillness. Another sound rose, gentler: the faintest thread of sound from the hedgerow outside—a night bird skimming.
She felt foolish for her trembling and laughed once under her breath.
“You are not a child,” she told herself softly.
“You are Elizabeth Bennet, who reads old journals and does not swoon.”
Her mind, soothed by humor, returned to the puzzle she preferred.
Malcolm Bennet. Could she find him in parish registers?
A christening perhaps, or a burial in London before his father’s death.
The name would be there as a mark upon a page, bald and unashamed: Malcolm Bennet, son of— he tried to fit the blank.
Son of whom? Her great-grandfather’s name would be recorded somewhere, in her father’s papers perhaps, in the vicar’s book, in some drawer that stuck and had to be coaxed with a butter knife.
She imagined Darcy’s neat hand copying a list of names while she read aloud from a dusty ledger, and the picture was so pleasant that she smiled into the darkness.
Another line of thought stole in, half practical, half longing: somewhere far away from this odd situation.
Perhaps Pemberley in summer—the water he had described, glassy at dawn; the lake’s beech walk he favored; the library he spoke of with a care that was almost reverence.
She had teased him about swimming still, and he had leaned nearer, his voice lowered in playful secrecy: I shall never admit it.
Heat swam through her at the memory of his nearness, at the simple, scandalous fact that she had wanted him to admit it not because it mattered, but because it would have been a gift shared only with her.
The thought of such small confidences multiplied into something large and luminous: mornings with him when they spoke of plans as if plans were promises; evenings when silence was not emptiness but ease.
She pressed the heel of one hand lightly to her eyes.
“Foolish,” she whispered, but the word held no censure.
Hope properly tended was not folly; it was a beacon.
She imagined holding it into the dim corners of Longbourn’s past and present—the boarded rooms, the missing things, the laughing intruder—and felt less afraid.
If the sealed quarters did exist, they could be mapped; if someone crept through the house at night, he could be discovered.
The world had terrors, but it also had men like Alfred Moore, who ran into fire, and men like Fitzwilliam Darcy, who would hold a door for her while she stepped over the threshold of uncertainty and into knowledge.
She shifted and tucked the quilt more closely under her chin.
Plans, then. At some time, under some pretext of seeking a lost ribbon—was it even a pretext?
She had bought a spool of silver and blue for her gown and could quite easily mislay it—she would make a slow reconnaissance of the east wing.
Elizabeth would speak to Sarah, whose mother’s cousin had once sewn for a carpenter; servants often knew what houses would not tell their masters.
She would enlist Jane to walk with her, for her elder sister’s presence steadied every endeavor, and her bright, believing eyes noticed things Elizabeth’s speculating mind sometimes skipped.
And—if fortune smiled—she would find a way to speak to Darcy alone.
Not to embroider fear, but to set before him the facts as she had them: the footprints on the rug, the opened window, the candle in the corridor, and the old story that had knitted itself to the new.
A drowsiness at last began to lap at the edges of her thinking, gentler than she had hoped.
She let herself drift a little, not quite asleep, revisiting in the pliant darkness a conversation they had shared in the drawing room.
He had said very simply that he found ease with her he had not felt in years.
Ease! The word was sincere, yet it had landed within her like a vow.
Ease was not a ballad’s rapture; it did not parade itself, nor swagger, nor beg to be admired.
It sat down beside a woman when she was tired and asked nothing but truth.
She had not known until that moment how much she wanted such a companion—and how much she meant to be one in return.
A pale brightness touched the underside of the curtains—the moon shouldering up above the orchard—and the faintest frost-gleam gathered on the lower pane.
Elizabeth’s breathing evened. On the last small island of wakefulness, a single thought rose up clear and quiet; remember.
Remember the names, the dates, the doors that did not open; remember the sound of a man’s laugh in a hallway where no one stood; remember the past not to be ruled by it, but to rob it of the power to frighten.
Remember, too, the living—Jane’s blush, her father’s dry smile, Mary’s earnest courage, Kitty and Lydia’s heedless affection—and Darcy’s hand, steady as steady as the beat of the tall clock in the hallway.
Sleep came softly then, like a shawl laid over her shoulders by a tender friend.
The wind thinned to a murmur in the elms; the embers fell into a deeper dullness; somewhere in the kitchen perhaps a mouse scratched, and maybe somewhere else a cat turned in its nest and dreamed of hunting.
Elizabeth’s last conscious breath left her on a whisper that was almost a prayer, though she would have laughed to call it that.
Tomorrow .