Becoming Lady Darcy

by Sara Smallman

  “I’ve come in a more official capacity. I think I have something that could help us with the roof.”

  “Is it half a million pounds in used banknotes fresh from the vault?”

  Lizzy had never known how to approach this woman who had poked and prodded and challenged her in every aspect of her life over the past seventeen years. She eyed her caramel highlights, the soft creases around her eyes, the subtly expensive jacket; and then she spoke firmly.

  “I know that you don’t have the money to fix the roof, and I know we need to fix it. If water is coming in like that, then we need serious repairs…”

  “Lady Elizabeth,” Joyce started. “I don’t need you to tell me how to do my job. The amount of paperwork I had to fill in when your sister fell off the roof was ridiculous, that’s time I won’t get back.”

  “She fell a metre and broke her ankle, I’m pretty sure that the only thing really wounded was her pride. This isn’t about that though,” Lizzy countered, “you need me to help you.”

  She reached into her bag and pulled out a folder, then another folder inside that folder and then a plastic wallet. In it was a piece of old paper, it was a letter written in faded ink.

  “Are you suggesting a treasure hunt again, because last time Steve got sick of pulling kids out of the lake?”

  Joyce shot Lizzy a withering look, whilst she appreciated her attempts to help with Pemberley, Lizzy really had no idea what it was like to run a visitor attraction with all the red tape, ramifications and wrangling it entailed.

  “Joyce.”

  She pushed the letter towards her, the script was small, but tight; elegant cursive regimentally written across the page. There had always been rumour of the last letter that Darcy had written to his wife, despite the archivists from Austenation searching the house it had never been found. For once Joyce was silent eyeing the paper on the table, she looked up at Lizzy hesitantly.

  “It’s the last letter. You found it?”

  Lizzy nodded, as Joyce’s eyes scoured the letter, speed reading at first and then her eyes going back up the page, absorbing the words that he had written. She had found the letter hidden between the pages of a musty atlas, its seal had been opened but it was still intact.

  “Do you know how precious this is?”

  Joyce placed the letter down respectfully in the centre of the desk that belonged to the man himself; in all likelihood, this was the room where the letter was written.

  “I do know,” she nodded. “I have more letters.”

  “You do? How many?”

  “All of them.”

  “But why did you not tell me?”

  “I was saving them for myself,” she knew Joyce Hutchinson would never understand her reasons, “I wanted to keep Elizabeth and Darcy and Georgiana and Jane and Lydia all for myself.”

  “I can understand that,” Joyce did, with all of her heart.

  “You can?”

  “Of course, I can,” she passed her a cup of tea. “You’re a Darcy. Your family are part of one of the world’s most famous love stories. It’s completely understandable that you would want to keep some part of it just for yourselves.”

  Lizzy took a mouthful of the hot, sweet tea, it was exactly the way she liked it. So, Joyce did understand.

  “But don’t you think we owe it to people to tell them that even though Darcy was amazing, he was still flawed… that any man can be a Mr Darcy, if he’s the right man for you. Their love was hard and scary, and there are some parts that will break your heart. Love is like that, and I think people forget.”

  Joyce knew the history of Darcy and Elizabeth, knew the historical evidence, but she didn’t feel as if she knew them as people. It was very easy to think of Darcy as a perfect romantic hero, because that was the way he had been written, but there was always much more to him, and Elizabeth was always perfect on the page, but she knew that there had been tragedy too and she wondered how Austen’s heroine coped with it.

  “Well maybe you should tell people,” Joyce said, “show them that no love, no matter how great, is ever perfect. Love isn’t perfect, it’s about finding someone who sees your flaws and imperfections and loves you anyway.”

  Lizzy sat down on the chair and picked up Darcy’s letter, stared at it carefully for a moment.

  “Darcy loved Elizabeth for so many reasons, and he loved her through so much.”

  She laid the letters out on the table; short notes on pale paper written by Elizabeth, long winding epitaphs from Darcy, giddy ramblings from Lydia, graceful and restrained missives signed by Jane, the beautiful hand of Georgiana, the tight cursive of Mr Bennet. It was the untold story of Elizabeth and Darcy – more than a love story, but the story of a life together.

  “I am going to tell people their story – the real story. I’ve been editing the letters and putting them in some kind of order,” Lizzy said, suddenly embarrassed by it all. “Maggie has spoken to Astrid Mulhoon at Austenation, and they are really excited about it. They want to publish it.”

  Joyce smiled, this was a little ray of hope on a dismal day.

  “But what about now? It will take ages for any money from a book to reach us.”

  Lizzy had never understood why this woman disliked her so much, how she always rejected every suggestion, always dismissed her, possibly thinking that she was silly and frivolous.

  “There is this,” she took an envelope out of her folder. “It should help with any immediate costs.”

  Lizzy had never cared for the necklace that had been given to her mother on the birth of Charles, and she knew that whilst the Darcy family traditions and customs were special, Pemberley itself was far more valuable. She sold her Darcy Pearls pendant to a fanatical Austen fan in Utah, who had paid her a ridiculous amount of money for this unique piece of family history.

  Joyce opened the thick envelope with steady hands and pulled out a cheque, she looked at it incredulously before walking over to Lizzy and giving her the biggest hug.

  “I don’t know how you have managed this, Lizzy. How have you managed this??”

  “I’m a Darcy. It doesn’t matter who owns it, or who lives here, Pemberley runs through my veins.”

  “Pemberley is magic.”

  “Yes. It really is.”

  An understanding passed between them, for now they were on the same side, fighting the battle against rotting roofs and failing timbers and light damage to protect the place they both loved. “

  “Whatever you need us to do, we will do. We’re the Darcys of Pemberley, that doesn’t ever change.”

  Joyce spent the rest of the afternoon contacting the HHS Head Office and the engineer, started putting into action the plans that she had arranged in her head when she was praying for a miracle. Lizzy stayed in the office and started to arrange the precious letters on the large round table. Looking over at Joyce, efficient and passionate, she realised what her dad saw in her as she arranged and organised and planned.

  “You should call him, you know,” she said as nonchalantly as she could whilst making a pot of tea. Joyce turned around sharply from the whiteboard, where she was plotting her schedule.

  Joyce shook her head, pushed her glasses up her nose. Lizzy eyed the older woman out of the corner of her vision, as she poured the tea and walked over to hand her a cup. The teacup clinked in the saucer.

  “Do you love him?”

  “Lizzy, what I feel for your father is of no concern really. Nothing is going to happen from it, we are merely two old friends who spent some time together.”

  Lizzy sipped her tea, quietly observing the slight flush on Joyce’s face, the way she distractedly fiddled with the silver ring on her finger, the way she picked at the skin around her thumb trying to release nervous energy. She noticed it because it was exactly what she did, and she wondered if she had more in common with Joyce than she thought.

  “I think you could make each other very happy,” she put down her cup in the saucer and placed it on the table. “Don’t le
t your animosity towards me prevent you from having your own happily ever after.”

  Joyce glanced up quizzically at the younger woman.

  “Do you think I don’t like you?”

  “It’s obvious that you don’t like me. There’s no need to pretend.”

  Joyce recalled the occasions in the past where she had severely reprimanded Lizzy for her behaviour; the stern, official letters that she had written about her tenancy in the house; the rejection of her offers for help when they were busy, and she suddenly felt a tremendous wave of guilt pass over her.

  “I do like you, Lizzy, I admire you a great deal.”

  “Oh, come off it.”

  “Seriously, I remember when you first arrived here. You were so small, so scared and so alone.” She remembered preparing the room at the end of the corridor for the new resident, hoping that the Elizabethan tester bed with the badly embroidered curtains wouldn’t be too scary. “My heart cried out to run over and hug you, this little mass of curls with a sulky lip and a suitcase bigger than she was.”

  The room was softly lit now, the fire was crackling in the hearth, outside the first snowflakes of the year began to fall on the ground. There was comfortable silence and they took deep gulps of tea and warmed their toes by the fire.

  “That day was so scary; I had only ever spent Christmas and Easter here. Winston was so angry-looking, that first night,” she glanced at Joyce quickly, before looking away, “I don’t even remember going to sleep, I just remember wanting to go home.”

  “Mrs Reynolds sent me to Lambton the next day to buy some fairy lights to wrap around your bed, and then spent the next three months complaining about them.”

  They both remembered the very firm and not very fair housekeeper who had worked there since the sixties. Her name wasn’t Mrs Reynolds, of course; her real name was Janet Lewis and as far as anyone could imagine she had been born fully formed as an angry, short woman with beady eyes and yielding bosom. She had a heart of gold, tightly hidden in musty layers of starched linen, tied up tightly with cooking string. Her death a few years earlier had left a gaping hole in the heart of the Pemberley family.

  “I think I was jealous a little bit. I spent my childhood coming here, and then when I was older, I spent ages cleaning out the plaster in the dining room with a paintbrush at the top of a scaffold or hoovering the tapestries.”

  “I can remember you doing that. I always thought you were so brave.”

  “You ran riot throughout the place. Winston always used to say that you shook us all up in a paper bag…and you did, I guess. You’re still doing that.”

  Joyce remembered the ten-year-old running through the halls, barging through the doors, slamming up the stairs – loud, noisy, incorrigible Lizzy. She took her hand, noticing that her normally polished nails were bitten and chipped, and gave it a reassuring squeeze.

  “If I was ever mean, or horrible to you, I want you to know that I didn’t mean it. Not in the way you think, anyway. You Darcys have a stiff upper lip and when you shout at someone, you mean it. When I shout or scold it’s my way of showing affection, ask my boys! I was always trying to protect you; you never really had a mum, not really, and I always wondered what it would be like to have a girl.”

  Lizzy realised that maybe she had misjudged Joyce Hutchinson and her rules and her guidance and her disapproving glances; that everything she had seen as an affront was actually just kindness and care. Joyce loved Pemberley as much as Lizzy did, they were on the same side.

  “Please phone my dad,” she said. “He might be Mr Darcy, but I am fairly convinced that he will have no objections to your family or your social standing, despite what you might think. I also think he can look a lot like Colin Firth if he combs his hair the right way...”

  Joyce looked hesitant, she had been scared to contact Hugh, everything had started to move so fast and so furiously, but then Imogen had been ill, and it all felt too awkward and she had left it too long.

  “Do you think I should?”

  “I do.”

  She studied Lizzy’s face; she was tired, saddened by the events of the last few months, exhausted by the drama. She didn’t know all the particulars, but there was something do with receipts and expenses claims, Lizzy had been asked to leave the job at the solicitors’ firm in Lambton. There has been visits from the Geordie woman who had been tearful, and Lizzy had comforted and hugged; it had been alright in the end, but it had taken a while for it to get there.

  And then there had been Benn Williams.

  Joyce had got on well with ‘Mr Darcy’ and he often popped into her office in between takes, stealing Kit-Kats and being friendly and casually flirtatious in a way that would have made her blush if she had been twenty years younger. She had seen the friendship between Benn and Lizzy develop into something she couldn’t quite pinpoint, but for a while now there had been nothing and she wondered why.

  “What about you,” Joyce asked, trying to change the subject.

  Lizzy wasn’t sure if she was ready to talk to anyone about Benn Williams. Because that feeling… that feeling hadn’t gone away. When she thought about the way he looked at her, it sent shivers up and down her spine; remembering the gentle rub of his stubble against her chin, the gentleness of his kiss, the way his body felt when he was laughing and she was holding him close; then there was the way he had comforted her over the phone when she was convinced that her sister wasn’t going to make it, how he had stayed up all night listening to her sob never once faltering in his steadfastness, but she had been the one who had ended it and she had done it to protect herself, without thinking that maybe she was the one who needed to save Benn Williams from himself.

  “Oh, I’m fine.”

  They both knew that she wasn’t.

  1832

  Thanks to years of practice, Mabel Anne Darcy was accomplished in a great deal of things deemed suitable for a girl of her rank and age. Her singing was delectable, her drawing and painting refined; she could play both the pianoforte and the harp, spoke French and Italian to a high degree of fluency, but she could never quite perfect needlework or anything to do with hats. It was more lack of interest, rather than lack of skill. Ribbons were a curse, and she was happy to leave trimming bonnets to her plump, jovial Bingley cousins, who were frequent visitors to the house in Derbyshire; each visit engineered by Aunt Jane to encourage her in some of the more delicate pursuits.

  On the days when the house was packed with giggling girls, Mabel loved to hide away; hidden from view behind the pile of trunks that would loiter at the bottom of the grand staircase as servants hurried about fetching refreshment for the visiting guests. It was here that she would sit with a pile of books – the special kidskin bound tomes of Shakespeare that had come from her grandfather’s library at Longbourn, or the smooth leather hardbacks filled with history and science. Later when the house was silent, she would carry the sensually gothic novels of Mrs Radcliffe up to her rooms and read in secret during the dark, deep hours of the night.

  She ran her finger up and down the lines of regimented books in the library, each ordered by size and then alphabetically, each book rebound to her father’s exacting standards, each manuscript stamped with a tiny golden bull on the spine before it was admitted entry. She picked up a thin, tightly bound novel and flicked through its pages quickly before tucking it into her pocket; with the red leather-bound book carefully stowed away, Mabel danced up the grand staircase, lightly stepping on each of the wide, shallow steps, twirling past the aspidistra that dangled over the edge of the bannisters and saluting General George as she had always done. The deep bellowing tones of Mr Staughton were already echoing around the courtyard as he directed the hordes of servants that were scuttling about the corridors and staircases, and she did her best to keep out of his way and avoid being nuisance.

  Pemberley was busy with people – it was the week of preparation before Lady Anne’s Ball, and everywhere there was hustle and bustle and noise. Her father had alr
eady ridden out early this morning, pretending that he had urgent business to attend to, when really, he was hiding up in the woods until the cacophony had abated, and her brothers were all away at school leaving Mabel to entertain herself for the most part. It was always so lonely when they were away, and she missed them a great deal.

  Fitzwilliam had an easy-going nature and reminded her of their mother. He delighted in anything fun, and loved balls, dancing and the company of ladies. He was in his last year at Cambridge, although everyone knew that his real education would come from papa as he learned to run the Darcy estates in their entirety once his formal education was completed.

  Francis had been sent to Eton for Michaelmas Half and then returned at least six inches taller than he went. He had always been serious, but school had made him more so, and he stomped around the house with a frown on his face – only deigning to speak to her through gritted teeth, as though her very presence grieved him a great deal. She was grateful when the carriage carried him back from whence he came, and she did not have to avoid his foul moods which settled over Pemberley like a storm cloud.

  James had gone to sea as soon as he was old enough and sent her letters from all four corners of the world. She was always thrilled by each missive that she received from him and devoured them immediately, absorbing the tales of faraway lands, lost cities, new cultures and strange foods. He had left Oxford after only a year of study, and her father had purchased him a commission in the Navy, where he was under the command of a Captain Jenkins from Lyme Regis. Her brother was currently in the East Indies and for her last birthday she had received from him a sparkling hair clip dotted with flowers made from tiny rubies, wrapped up in a thin muslin cloth that smelled deeply of exotic spices and adventure.

  Mabel eventually stowed away in her favourite place at the far end of the long gallery, where she could see the smoky haze of Manchester in the distance – the gargantuan Stratton-Darcy cotton mills of Ancoats pumping soot and steam into the atmosphere. Taking out the half-inch wide book, she didn’t have to read too far into it to realise that this story was something very close to home. It had begun with the names – Elizabeth, Jane, Kitty – common names, aye, but Bennet? And then the places – Meryton, Rosings, Pemberley… how odd.