The Elizabeth Papers

by Jenetta James

  Charlie had been worried that she would never speak to him again after what he had said in the drawing room and that her brittle “thank you” meant that she would speak but only as little as possible. Strangely though, and for reasons that he could not identify, saying it straight out like that had not done them any harm. Far from being angry or cynical or any of the other things he had feared, she seemed relaxed and happy. As they climbed the hill behind the lake, the sun on their faces, they talked and laughed, and he dared to wonder what it meant. At lunchtime, they returned to the house and took sandwiches onto the terrace outside the parlour. Charlie had wondered whether he should suggest they drive into Lambton for a pub lunch, but Honoria had been adamant that they should not fend for themselves. In any case, the beauty and isolation of Pemberley seemed to have cast a spell over Evie, and he did not want to be the one to break it.

  She sat forward in her chair on the terrace, blinking into the pale gold of the sunshine and spoke without looking at him.

  “I’ve been thinking, and I’ve decided I don’t buy it.”

  Charlie looked up, completely confused.

  “Don’t buy what?”

  “About Elizabeth. I don’t believe she was having it away with someone else.”

  He closed his eyes and stretched before answering her.

  “Well, that’s a nice thought, Evie, but are you sure you aren’t being blinded by the romance of the thing or by family feeling? I mean, she was your fifth great grandmother. Of course, you don’t want her to be unfaithful to her seemingly doting husband. But the fact is that there was something fishy about Victoria. Darcy’s letters prove that there was a secret—a secret Darcy was desperate to keep under wraps. Elizabeth in her dying days asked her maid to destroy some incriminating thing for her. There must have been a reason for that. Victoria Darcy was the only one of the Darcy children not to be born here at Pemberley, and that is really weird too. Why would Darcy have taken his pregnant wife all the way to Ireland? It would have been treacherous. It was madness. A secret must lie behind it. There were rumours about Victoria and—well—come on; there’s no smoke without fire.”

  Her body straightened at that, and he feared he had angered her.

  “Oh you can’t fall back on that one. Just because people think a thing, it doesn’t make it true. You have seen that painting. You can say whatever you like, but I look at her standing there with her daughters around her, and I just know it isn’t true. Fitzwilliam commissioned it, Charlie, and he never let it be displayed to the public. Can you imagine keeping an object as wonderful as that private? The whole thing is a celebration of Elizabeth and her daughters. It’s an act of worship on canvas. It is not the action of a man whose wife has been giving him the runaround.”

  “Well, maybe he didn’t know. People can be blind to what is right in front of them. Maybe he did know, and he just really, really loved her. Maybe he was just a very rich guy who got a kick out of spending a fortune commissioning private works of art from the era’s foremost portraitist and then not letting anyone see them.”

  “But that doesn’t square with the trust. If he was like that, he never would have set up the trust because it devalued the overall Darcy estate. If he was that kind of guy, he would have been worried about preserving the wealth for his sons, not the fact that his granddaughters and great granddaughters might need protection one day.”

  “Evie…” He turned and looked at her face sparking with indignation. “You’re imagining a lot about these people. We can’t really know what was going on with them. It was too long ago. It’s lost. It’s gone. Time throws up a lot of dust, and you can’t expect to see through it all. We have to deal with the facts that remain, and you just can’t get away from the fact that there is a mystery surrounding Victoria Darcy—something that certainly Darcy and probably Elizabeth tried to conceal.”

  With this, she stood up jerkily and with such speed that he thought she might run away. She didn’t run, but she did look away from him as she spoke.

  “Well, we’ll have to see, won’t we? As far as I’m concerned, Elizabeth is innocent until proven guilty, so unless you find that smoking gun…speaking of which, don’t you think we should get on with it?”

  She was right of course, and Charlie didn’t need to be asked twice. He walked around to the front of the house to check that the Darcys’ mud splattered Land Rover had not returned unexpectedly. When he saw that it had not, he found Evie and nodded, knowing that they could put the task off no longer. Silently, they padded down the corridors to the mistress’s bedroom.

  “It’s this one,” he said as they approached the door.

  “Okay.” Evie folded her arms across her chest and sprang from foot to foot with nerves.

  “You just wait here and watch. You will see anyone coming up the stairs before they turn the corner. If anyone comes, knock twice on the door, and run to your own room. Don’t worry about me, I’ll get out somehow.”

  She forced a smile.

  “Sure. Be quick.” With that, he disappeared behind the great oak door.

  Inside the room, he found a vast, floral maze of pastel colours and soft furnishings. An old-fashioned perfume dispenser sat on the dressing table alongside an array of small picture frames with smiling children, wedding parties, and engagement portraits staring back. It was so redolent of age and love that it stopped him in his tracks for a moment. He saw the tweed skirt Honoria had worn to dinner the previous night draped over the end of the bed and felt a surge of guilt. With that, he recalled Evie outside and got on with the job at hand. He made quick work of checking the wooden panels on the walls and around the tall windows. He lifted each of the heavy framed oils, one of a young Honoria, painted—he would guess—at some time in the sixties, feeling the wall behind for a cupboard or compartment. The fireplace was obviously never used, and he wrestled with an oversized display of dried flowers to feel along the tiled surround, finding nothing. He stood in the centre of the room, despairing. If he could not find the damned thing with an opportunity like this, then he knew it was a lost cause. In desperation, he got down on the floor and surveyed the polished surface for kinks and irregularities. He knew almost before he did it that it would be fruitless, and so indeed, it was. Standing and thinking of her jittery body and frowning expression in the corridor, he moved towards the door.

  He forced himself to look at her as he spoke.

  “I’m sorry, Evie. Nothing doing.”

  ***

  For Evie’s part, an unfamiliar fatalism overtook her. They had tried and failed, and now there was nothing for it than to let the future be the future. She could not fault his thoroughness, and there was no stone within her view that he had left unturned. She thought of Clemmie and Milena at home, the studio, and the fragile green shoot that was her career as an artist. She knew that the whole expensive, imperfect edifice may come crashing down at any point. He walked beside her in the corridor and tension poured off him. The weird thing was that, now that the game was lost, she didn’t blame him. The afternoon was slipping into evening, and they said little as they reached their rooms and parted. The Darcys would be home soon, and it had already been arranged that they would dine at eight with drinks at seven in the drawing room.

  It was to be her last hour in the presence of Mrs. Darcy and Her Daughters, and Evie did not intend to waste it. She closed the door of her enormous bedroom, took off every scrap of clothing without thinking, and walked to the en suite bathroom. The bath was so enormous that she had been shy of using it, but now she surveyed its creamy vastness and thought, “Why not?” There was a tiny, probably ancient bottle of lavender oil on the windowsill, and she dripped some into the steaming water as it thundered out of the taps. She looked at her reflection in the mirror until it clouded in the heat, and then she plunged into the water.

  Sometime later, when she got out and padded arou
nd the room, pink-footed and wrapped in a slightly too small towel, she willed herself to force away the worry. She leaned against the window and looked out onto the luscious, living green of the estate. Defiance welled inside her, and she dressed in clean, cold clothes for dinner. She had planned poorly, and the only unworn clothes she had left were jeans and a blue T-shirt she had originally envisaged wearing on the journey home. She put them on, and when she looked in the mirror, she thought she looked quite reasonable. Her appearance didn’t worry her as it did other girls.

  As it was, Evie actually regretted not having dressed up more. Honoria was wearing a dress and a different colour lipstick, and even James looked to be wearing a fresh shirt. Honoria handed out glasses of gin and tonic and stood under the painting, beaming.

  “Well, cheers! We shall miss you both. It has been lovely having guests, hasn’t it, James?”

  “Err, yes…”

  “And you must send us a copy of your project, Miss Jones. It shall be most interesting to see what you have made of our little painting here. I’m always telling my son that it is really special.”

  Charlie caught Evie’s eye and moved closer. She got the feeling that he knew she was in no mood to discuss her fictitious PhD.

  “It is really special, Mrs. Darcy, and the sketches were a real insight into how Clerkenman built it up into what we see today. It looks as though he had each of the girls sitting separately with their mother. We speculated that they were probably too young to reliably sit all together for a long period, so maybe that is why there are so many separate sketches. Some of them are so good and so detailed; I’m surprised you don’t display them.”

  “I had never thought of that, Mr. Haywood. What a good idea. James, what do you think to that darling?”

  “Err, well, yes…”

  “Yes, I can imagine it. What a good idea! To be honest, I didn’t realise we had so many sketches until I dug them out for you. There is stuff everywhere in this house. You never really know what you’ve got if you know what I mean. Some of those sketches I found in the old library, some of them in the archive boxes in my husband’s study, and then there were some others in a little room at the back of the house that has all sorts of odds and ends. I even found a wedding dress in there! Don’t know whose it was. The trouble with a house like this is that nobody has ever really gone through things and put them into any sort of order. It just gets passed on generation to generation, and I’m afraid it doesn’t come with an inventory.”

  “Do you know very much about the Mrs. Darcy in the painting?” asked Evie.

  “Not much, I’m afraid, Miss Jones. Only that her name was Elizabeth and she was very good at having daughters!” She laughed and lifted her eyes to the painting. “She is rather lovely, isn’t she?”

  “She is. Her eyes are wonderful. What a gift Clerkenman had. You can feel them looking at you and laughing. Well, even if you don’t know all that much about her, you get a sense of her just by looking at her picture and being in the place she lived. I mean, she sat in this room and walked in that garden and ate in your dining room. That’s amazing to think of, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose it is, Miss Jones. I’ve never thought of it, but you are right.” She gave Evie an appraising look and took a sip of her gin and tonic before continuing. “Of course, the place has changed over the years, probably more than you would think. People imagine that grand houses like this are fixed in aspic, but they’re not, you know. This Mrs. Darcy lived in a Pemberley with no electricity, no telephone line, no plumbing system, and far more servants than you can imagine because it was before they all went to the towns to work in the factories. I suspect that we would be shocked if we could go back and spend a night in her shoes, don’t you?”

  “When you put it like that, maybe we would.”

  “And of course, speaking of spending the night…this Mrs. Darcy was well before my husband’s American grandmother completely relocated and redesigned the family quarters.”

  “Really?” Charlie’s interest perked up like the ears on a dog.

  “Oh, yes. It was James’s grandfather—married a tea heiress from Boston, didn’t he, darling? She got an association with an old family and a rolling estate, and he got a thumping great dowry to shore up the family finances. She was quite a lady as well—I’m given to believe. These days she would be called “high maintenance,” but I don’t think people were so cheeky then. Had the whole place stripped and redecorated as soon as she arrived. Installed all manner of mod cons. Took one look at the mistress’s chamber and wasn’t having any of it. According to James’s mother, she didn’t like the lack of light in the afternoons, and so that was when the family quarters were moved to the other side of the house.”

  “So the family quarters were moved from where they would have been during Elizabeth Darcy’s lifetime?”

  “Oh, yes. Goodness me, Miss Jones, did I not say before? They were moved from the current guest wing. Indeed, my dear, the room that you are sleeping in was the mistress’s chamber then.”

  An odd, comforting feeling stole over Evie. She recalled how she had wandered around the room only an hour earlier, naked and warm from the bath. She knew on instinct that Elizabeth had done the same. Somewhere on the edge of her consciousness, Honoria continued.

  “It is our best guest room because it used to be the mistress’s chamber. That is why it is so big and has such a super view. The next room was her sitting room and the one on the other side, which is not actually as nice, was the master’s chamber. For myself, I have always thought that set of rooms enchanting, but I am not my husband’s grandmother, and the thought of rearranging things again—well—I can’t be doing with it.”

  Charlie began to speak to Honoria about which rooms had been changed over the years, and it sounded as though the mistress’s chamber had not been the only victim of the American Mrs. Darcy’s idea of a well-planned house. When Evie looked at him, his eyes were alive with suppressed excitement. To see him in the warm light of the Pemberley evening, chatting to Honoria and strangely enervated, moved her. She thought that, when his eyes glanced her way, he might be trying to speak. But since there was no way they could have a private discussion with James and Honoria present, she could hardly ask him what he was trying to say.

  Honoria had promised them that they would be spoiled on the last night, and so indeed they were. Dinner was delicious, and the four of them chatted happily until the sky was black with night and a chill crept over Evie’s bare arms. The soft light from the chandelier above the table fell on their faces, and by the time the plates were cleared away, even James was telling jokes and suggesting that they move on to port in the drawing room. Evie was about to say, “Yes please” when Charlie surprised her.

  “That is kind, Mr. Darcy, thank you. But I think I might turn in. We have to get away rather early in the morning…”

  He met her eyes, and she somehow understood that she should follow suit. The Darcys looked crestfallen, but she trusted Charlie, and if he didn’t want to stay up with them, then there must be a reason. It occurred to her that he might want to search her room now that he knew it used to be Elizabeth’s. And so it was that they drank the last of their wine, thanked their hosts, and began to meander their way up the great staircase towards the guest corridor. As they rounded the corner, Charlie turned and, with a quiet, gentle “shh,” placed his hands on her goose-pimpled arms.

  “What are you doing?”

  He lowered his face to hers.

  “We need to go back, Evie.”

  “What? Go back? But there’s nothing down there. I thought you might want to search my room—”

  “Shh,” he commanded swiftly and gently as he pulled them both into the recess at the top of the stairs. Silently, and with Evie’s heart thumping in her chest, they watched James and Honoria potter past on the other side of the landing towards
their own bedrooms, James muttering about some weeds in the turning circle. After a moment of pulse-quickening quiet, Charlie leaned in to her and spoke again.

  “I don’t think there is anything in your room. We can look, but I don’t think it’s there. We need to go back downstairs.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’ve had an idea. Do you remember we said that Hannah would have put it somewhere where it would not be disturbed?”

  “Yes…”

  “Well, think about it. Where in this house is there a place that is completely safe? A place that is going to stay the same over time? A place that isn’t going to be changed around and turned upside down on someone’s whim?”

  She looked at him blankly. She had drunk more wine than she was used to, and the scent of him was stealing around her.

  “Where?”

  He looked over her shoulder, seemingly distracted, and in a moment had taken her hand in his and was guiding her back down the stairs and into the darkness beneath. Before long, they were moving through the house without light or sound and at a speed that did not seem real. Together they whipped past the drawing room and the dining room into more Spartan corridors with doors on all sides and unprepossessing portraits, not interesting enough for the main rooms, glaring down at them. Although they had been there before, when they reached the great mahogany door, it took her a moment to process where they were.

  “The chapel?”

  “Yes, the chapel,” he whispered, opening the door and ushering her in. He wrestled with the dusty curtains and flicked on the lights.

  “I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before. It is the only sacred space in the house. It is quiet. It is mostly unoccupied. It is not kept locked, and I don’t imagine it ever was. You could put something in here, and if you were careful and hid it properly, it might go completely undetected.”