Sophia understood the risks that were being taken on behalf of her children, but she didn’t have to agree with them. She knew that any hint of conspiracy or intrigue could result in the children simply disappearing. These silly men were prattling on about their plans to raise armies, about their plans to smuggle the King into the country and march down to London to reclaim the throne, but it was all so foolish. If they were going to be successful then they would have to be a little be cleverer with their plotting, or all of them would end up in the Tower, with nothing but a swift, merciless death ahead of them. She sat in the corner, her mother’s Darcy Pearls pendant sparkling at her neck, her grey eyes incandescent with rage.
She coughed; loudly enough to be heard, but not loudly enough to command the room, and the chatter of twelve raucous gentlemen used to ignoring the voices of their wives continued to dominate the walls of the small parlour. Marching over to the fireplace, she banged on the floor three times with the heavy metal poker.
“Gentlemen, Gentlemen, Gentlemen! I beg your attention, please do not do the mother of the focus of your misguided endeavour such an injustice.”
The men in the room began to quieten until Percival Warner, the lord of the manor that abutted their own to the north, began to gripe about her even being included in the meeting.
“We are the Cheshire Gentlemen, not the Cheshire Gentlemen and the Errant Daughter of George Darcy! This is simply the point which I am trying to make, albeit not as eloquently as I would like.”
He leaned over to Henry Danvers, who was sitting next to him and began to laugh. The laughter began to spread around the room like wildfire until Sophia, furious and red-faced, screamed for them to be silent.
“How dare you have the presumption that you can use my children as figureheads for your futile exercise, whilst at the same time demeaning anything that I may have to say.” She spat out the sentence, the room falling silent as the assembly now attended to her every word. “I may not be a gentleman, but the King created me a Countess in my own right—”
“If I remember correctly, Lady Clarendon, most of your fellow courtiers were rightly indignant at your elevation, the furore at the palace caused you to flee to Ireland for a year,” Henry Danvers turned to his group of cronies, as they laughed with him.
“Sir Danvers,” she said, “do not be outraged because the King took a particular fancy to me and not your own daughter. If she had more wit and fewer lice maybe she would be standing here now. I outrank most of you here, and I am not flying under the flag of a flatulent and flaccid husband, for you all know that I do not have one, and do not wish for one either! I stand here as a woman alone, and I am warning you all that the arrogance of your sex will eventually be your downfall.”
“We are here to discuss the action we are going to take, Lady Clarendon, and not sentimentalise your love affair with the King,” quipped Robert Piers, a local landowner who would have been quite handsome, excepting the large scar on his right cheek which he had received in a less than honourable duel.
“As you know, Mr Piers, I was the accepted Mistress of the King at court, holding a position that you probably wouldn’t recognise if it slashed your other cheek!”
Men like Piers forgot that she could hold her own at court, that she wouldn’t be bullied and subjugated like their own wives.
“As far as I am aware, Lady Clarendon, we are all fully aware of the ‘position’ that you held in the palace and your ability to sire Royal bastards does not make your attendance here necessary.”
George Darcy, the most senior man in the room rose to his feet and walked over to his daughter.
“Madame, you need to leave this room now, you are doing none of us any good.”
He roughly grabbed his daughter’s arm and pulled her out of the room and into the narrow hallway; to the left she could hear the rumblings of the gentlemen, to the right the faint sound of a lyre being played; the gentle hum of gentlewoman behaving as they ought.
He was an old man now, but still fighting inside for what he believed to be right. George firmly believed that James was the rightful King of England, as he had believed that Charles was for all those years of fighting in the War or struggling in exile. There were risks in what he was doing, he was aware of that, but he did not contend with the idea that a god-anointed King could be usurped or replaced.
“Father, I know you,” she pleaded with his face, now cast in stone against her, “and you of all people understand that we cannot raise an army against the King without endangering Pemberley; if you must -”
“Sophia, you embarrass me,” he snarled. “You are a liability today, you have no idea of what you speak.”
“I speak the truth, Father, and you damn well know it! His Majesty will have your head, and my brother’s, and if you anger him, if you try and pin your banner of treason to my children, he will find them, he will murder them, and then he will destroy us.”
“You have a quite a favour for the dramatics, daughter,” he smirked, “no wonder James sought you out. He did always love an actress.”
“You pretend that you are above all of this, Your Grace,” she derided. “However, if I were a man you would be congratulating me on the titles and riches that have been the reward for my indiscretions.”
“If you were a man, there would be no such dishonour in you siring bastards, my child.”
“But here we are, and as a woman who has known King William, who has seen the cruel mistreatment that he bestows upon his own wife, then I am begging you. Please do not do this. It will see the ruin of us all.”
“Maybe, Lady Clarendon, but that is a risk and a gamble I am willing to take. We did not reach our current rank by always playing by the rules. I decide what course of action we take.”
“Father, you need to realise that the game you are playing is not one that you will win. There will be only one victor here, and it will not be you.”
“It will not be you either, my Lady.”
“That may be so, but I do not intend to lose anything, especially not my head,” her voice dropped, “if you proceed, you will lose, and you will lose everything.”
“I never lose, Sophia,” he sneered. “Now, go and sit with the ladies and talk of fripperies and fancy. There is nothing to concern you in here.”
She curtseyed before stomping through to the drawing room where the rest of the ladies were in attendance. She could feel the flush of her cheek, the rage building up inside of her. Taking a seat by the window, looking out onto the north front range of Pemberley, the beacons were lit, illuminating the circular driveway and the men below, who were busily preparing the coaches for departure.
A year later she would watch helplessly from the same spot as four messengers and twenty-one Dutch troopers marched into the house to arrest her father for High Treason.
George Darcy was escorted to the Tower of London where he would await trial; as he was taken over London Bridge, he could see the spiked heads of Henry Danvers, Robert Piers and Percival Warner looking down on him with ominous, grisly faces.
“I’m leaving tonight,” she told him in hushed tones, “it’s not safe here anymore.”
“I’ll come with you.”
They had been lovers for a while now, but they both knew that it had grown into something more than that.
“Silas, you would never be able to return to Pemberley.”
“If you run, I run.”
They packed what they needed, and they ran.
Twenty-One
Imogen was discharged back to the house in Upper Grosvenor Street a few days later, but it had been decided that she should travel to Pemberley to stay with Lizzy for a few weeks. She never quite remembered the journey to Derbyshire taking as long as it did today. They were in her father’s Range Rover and not the hideous little yellow car that Lizzy always drove, and she struggled to keep her eyes open as they skirted off the M25 towards the north.
When they stopped at the services at Newport Pagnell, she reques
ted a hot chocolate, but it remained untouched and resting in the cupholder. Her sister was sitting in the front, talking to their dad in quietened tones, occasionally leaning over her shoulder and looking at her with a look of concern that she found slightly comforting. She was being taken to Derbyshire to recover – well, that was what they said, but it felt like she was being exiled to the countryside to pay penance for her sins.
Out of the window of the car, the world got hillier and she only woke again when they juddered over the cattle grid and crossed the bridge over the railway line that Fitzwilliam Darcy paid for. As they pulled up to the north front gate, she was bundled out of the car and up the backstairs to the small flat at the top of the house, where she would live with her sister and her niece until she was better.
‘Better’ – what a strange concept, she thought, lying on the bed in Lizzy’s spare room, which had been hastily made up for her. She couldn’t explain to anyone why she had done what she did, didn’t even want to talk about it in case it brought back those feelings of loneliness and despair. Imogen was not quite twenty-two, but she felt as if she had led so many lives now that she wasn’t sure who she was anymore, but she knew that it had been the voice of her sister that had reminded her that life wasn’t quite done with her yet and she was curious to see what fate had in store.
For the first few days she had felt self-conscious in the flat with her niece, who was not much younger than she was, who eyed her with awkward suspicion one minute and a strange pitying look the next. They had bonded over a teen-based foreign language series on Netflix that they found one night when neither could sleep, and now infuriated Lizzy by swearing at each other in Norwegian and leaving foundation all over the bathroom sink.
Bundled up in hats and gloves, and with cups of hot chocolate from the café, they were walking around the grounds – blowing off the winter cobwebs, as Lizzy called it – and getting to know each other properly. Imogen had had never realised that actual things of importance had happened at Pemberley, apart from Fitzwilliam and Elizabeth, obviously.
“So, what happened to Sophia Darcy?” Imogen asked as they walked down into the Killtime Ravine, “I have never heard about her before.”
“No-one really talks about her because of what happens next…” Harriet paused for dramatic effect, pleased to have the attention of a captive audience.
“What happens next?”
“George gets arrested, goes to the Tower, and they don’t let anyone visit him, even though Lady Scargill stands under his window singing to him until they nearly arrest her too, but then… they simply let him go.”
“Just like that? I thought you were going to say that they cut his head off or something.”
She pulled a funny face and then laughed. Harriet thought it was nice to hear her laugh.
“It was much worse than that, at least if they had done that, he would have been a martyr for the cause.”
“Why? What did they do?”
Imogen was genuinely interested in what Harriet was telling her and, secretly, she couldn’t wait until the house was open, so she could look at all these rooms that she kept mentioning, could immerse herself in the history, could stand where Sophia stood.
“Sophia was like a sister to Princess Mary and Princess Anne, they wrote to each other all the time and loved each other a lot. When Mary became Queen –
“Mary was married to,” she tried to remember, “William?”
“Yes, but when William and Mary became King and Queen, they kinda fall out with Anne and send her to her own court out of town, where they let her get on with it. Mary died young with no children, so when William got ill, he recognised Anne as his heir, and it all went tits. For Sophia and her children, anyway.”
“What has this got to do with Sophia?”
“Sophia had two children by Anne’s dad,” Harriet pulled a face. “Firstly, her best friend’s kids are her half-brothers – which is pretty gross – but secondly, they are boys and they can inherit the throne, regardless of how illegitimate they are. Worst still, lots of people think that they are the rightful heirs, along with their other brother, and not Anne.”
“No wonder she got pissed off.”
“Anne summoned Sophia to Court and took her children into her own protective custody.”
“She took her children? You can’t do that!”
“They can and they did. Have you ever wondered why Mr Darcy in ‘Pride and Prejudice’ is just Mr Darcy and not the Duke of Derbyshire like Grandad is?”
“No. Should I have?”
The air was cold around Pemberley today, with slippery patches of ice underfoot, and Imogen was freezing despite the expensive and fashionable coat. They were walking back up the ravine now, heading towards the gardens and their elegant symmetry.
“Anne didn’t punish the family by having George executed or doing anything so obvious, but she did take away the title from them. No more Dukes of Derbyshire, merely plain old Mr George Darcy.”
“Poor George!”
“They also had an attainder to pay, a huge amount of money - the estate was virtually bankrupt, and we nearly lost Pemberley. It took ages before it was secure again.”
“But what happened to Sophia?” Imogen had a face of genuine concern for this once lost but now found relative that she felt oddly akin to.
“Nobody knows,” Harriet said with a grand finality. “She vanished.”
“Vanished? Just like that?”
“Yes, no-one heard of her again.”
“But then, she turned up?”
“Erm… I don’t know, no-one does.”
“Oh, well that’s a shit ending,” Imogen said indignantly. “Can you tell me a story with a better one next time?”
“You can find them out for yourself! You can’t walk into a room without stepping into some kind of historical drama.”
They walked under the garden arches and into the courtyard, where the cloisters gave them the merest hint of protection from the cold.
“Dad never really shares stories from here. I never knew half of this stuff even happened.”
“They leave you to discover it yourself – it’s much more fun that way. My mum is a bit obsessed with Mabel Darcy, but I love Sophia. She’s my favourite, because we all know what happened to Mabel, but Sophia is a real mystery. ”
Harriet wrapped her arm around Imogen’s shoulder, she noticed that she was still painfully thin under the goose feather coat, and whilst she had a superficial appearance of being ‘okay’ if you saw her from a distance, it was only when you were close that you could see the dry patches on her skin, the bags under her eyes and the scars on her arms that she tried to hide with bracelets.
“Who was Mabel Darcy again?”
“You’ll have to go and find out!”
“All of these women, all of these lives… I didn’t realise that being Lady Darcy meant there were big shoes to fill.”
“We come from a very long line of amazing women – visitors always want to know about Elizabeth and Darcy, but that’s just where they start their story. If you look closely, you will see that Darcy women are all made of much stronger stuff.”
“If you say so.”
“I know so,” she said. “See if Paul is working today, he’s really good with all of the history stuff. He would love to help you.”
“Are you leaving now?”
“Yeah,” she said with curl of the lip, “two hours of A-Level Sociology.”
“Could I come with you?”
“To college?”
“To Lambton? I could drive…?”
Imogen looked up at her with hopeful eyes, she was bored at Pemberley. Her life had gone from being at eleven to constantly being at two, and she needed something to fill up the days.
She gave her aunt a meaningful hug, “not today, but college might be a good idea. You should speak to my mum.”
“I might do.”
“You should. See you later.”
Harriet walke
d off in the direction of the north stairs, leaving Imogen alone in the courtyard. It was eleven o’clock and the house was opening for the day, the large doors at the top of the stone steps being pushed open as the sound of the centuries old bolts clanged around the walls. Imogen tentatively walked up the stairs, feeling in so many ways like she was walking in the footsteps of history. Was it these steps that Sophia Darcy had run down in her crackling satin gown, chasing the soldiers as they took her father away? Did Elizabeth Bennet-Darcy, with her fine eyes and rich husband, ever walk up these steps with her head in a book?
She didn’t know right now, but she was determined to find out.
Graeme opened the door for her, ushering her in. It was always a privilege to see one of the London Darcys.
“Lady Imogen! Welcome home.”
“Home?”
“Darcys always come home to Pemberley, m’lady.”
She was sure she remembered his lovely warm voice and friendly face somewhere deep in her memory, but as Imogen walked through the door of the house, she immediately knew that she was where she belonged.
“Yes, I suppose we do.”
Benn Williams held the small velvet pouch in his hand, tucked inside the pocket of his shorts. It was something that he had bought that afternoon from a small artisan store on the boardwalk at Venice Beach. November in California was something altogether different, he stood out like a sore thumb in his summer sandals and board shorts whilst the natives were wrapped up in sweaters and Uggs.
There had been a few paparazzo hanging about trying to get pictures, but they got bored once they realised that he wasn’t playing their game. He walked up to the small beach house, just off the main drag, which they had rented for the ‘views’ and which turned out to be small glimpse of the ‘Hollywood’ sign if you leaned to side and squinted.
Becoming Lady Darcy Page 32
