“That isn’t what I’ve heard. I’ve heard that Fitzwilliam’s wife was no better than she ought to be, and one of the daughters was the offspring of God knows who—”
“Cressida, my dear, would you mind turning and looking at the wall behind you?”
Cressida blinked and clanked her cup clumsily against her saucer, but she did as he asked. When she looked upon the painting on the wall, it surprised her that she hadn’t noticed it when she walked into the room. It was a huge group portrait of Regency-era women, several of them children, framed in gold. Cressida wasn’t much of a one for art, but it was pretty.
“These ladies are the wife and daughters of Fitzwilliam Darcy. The painting was done here at Pemberley at eye-watering expense by an artist named Alfred Clerkenman who was extremely eminent. It is rather momentous, isn’t it? I am told that it has some significance for the history of art as well. There are scholars around the world who would like very much to see this for various academic reasons, with which I shall not detain you. However, since its creation, it has been—to some extent rather selfishly—kept here. I have grown up with these ladies looking down on me just as you have grown up with Granny Letitia’s stories. Now, in my old age, I am considering loaning the painting to the National Portrait Gallery for a short time in order that people outside of our family circle may see it. But when I look at the painting and think of the trust that was created for these girls, which endures to this day, I am inclined to conclude that Fitzwilliam Darcy had an ardent loyalty to the women in his life.”
Cressida’s gaze danced over their faces, and she gripped her teacup tightly to stop a shake.
“But what if there were evidence that one of them wasn’t his?”
“Oh, but I can’t imagine there would be, can you, Cressida? It is very hard to imagine that there is any truth in the rumour that you have heard or that, even if there were, there would be any sort of proof of the same.”
“Well…”
“It also occurs to me, that there are some avenues of investigation from which we should all shrink. I believe that there have been certain enquiries made about this subject, and please be clear, I do not intend to tolerate it. Some things in life are for questioning and some are for accepting. I, for example, accept that, over the years, I ought to have made greater efforts to stay in touch with remote relations. I have signed cheques every year, but until now, I have not paid personal attention to the beneficiaries of that money. I hope you understand that I am willing to be a friend to you now, Cressida, but I must ask you to accept that the family in this portrait was, in every sense, a family and say no more about it. After all, you are a Darcy, are you not? I am sure that you are more than able to live up to the examples of generosity and magnanimity that our shared ancestors set us.”
She looked from James’s face to the light cotton dresses and ringlet-framed faces on the wall and began to feel queasy. This was not how she had imagined things. A clock chimed in another room, and she heard a telephone ring briefly in the distance. The room was closing in around her like a vice.
James leaned forward in his chair. “Are we agreed?”
“Yes, we are agreed.”
“Good. Now, let’s find Honoria. She will show you around the house if you like, and then I believe that lunch will be about ready.”
Cressida swallowed. “Sounds lovely.”
Chapter 28
London, the same day,
a little later in the afternoon
Isobel Langley-Jones had been trying to type one of Mr. Samuelson’s tapes for the last hour, and she was beginning to wish that she had not given up smoking. He had a habit of bounding about his office while he was dictating and holding the ageing Dictaphone too close to his lips. Each burbled sentence was punctuated by the sound of his cursing as he knocked over a stack of papers or text messages buzzed away on his mobile. One of the other secretaries said you needed a PhD to decipher the babble, and Issy was inclined to agree. She was about to get another biscuit by way of comfort when his light lit up on her phone.
“Yes, Mr. Samuelson.”
“Issy, would you mind popping in here a sec?”
He sounded distracted, and she could imagine him already, poised between standing and sitting, sinking behind a mountain of papers. She wandered from the secretaries’ bay to his office where she found him exactly thus.
“Ah, Issy, super. Take a seat.”
She removed three files and a book about taxes from the chair opposite his desk and gingerly sat, pen poised above notepad.
“I’ve had a call from James Darcy up in Derbyshire about this bloody Darcy Trust. You might remember that we send out the cheques on the same day each year to a number of beneficiaries. For legal reasons, the dratted thing has to be re-settled every eighty years, but due to my youth”—he laughed at his own joke—“I have never had to deal with that. Apart from the cheques, there is precious little to do on it.”
The words “Darcy Trust” rang through Issy’s mind like a siren, and she felt suddenly cold. She had hardly thought of Charlie since seeing him in the summer, but suddenly their meeting in Temple Gardens seemed like it was yesterday. She recalled taking the file and copying it before sending it to him and shuddered with guilt and regret. Issy took a deep breath, determined to appear calm even if she didn’t feel it. In her panic, she had missed some of Mr. Samuelson’s instruction and desperately strained to catch up with him.
“…bit of a strange one. He wants me to draft a slight amendment to the trust document. I’ve had a look at it, and he is the sole trustee, so there’s nothing stopping him, although I can’t for the life of me see why.”
He leaned over the side of his desk and momentarily disappeared behind a pile of correspondence files, his voice muffled by the sheer volume of paper.
“Ah, here it is. It’s very peculiar…” He stood up and handed her a large blue folder. “You will find the trust document here, and the latest version will be on the system. What I need you to do, Issy, is change the wording slightly. It currently reads ‘female descendants of Fitzwilliam Darcy.’ You need to change it to ‘female descendants of Anne Bellamy, nee Darcy; Emma Warburton, nee Darcy; Frances Cathcart, nee Darcy; Beatrice Hopkins, nee Darcy; Victoria Montague, nee Darcy; and Bennet Darcy.’ Have you got that?”
He paused just long enough for her to nod, her pencil dancing the shorthand across the paper in front of her. She exhaled—no mention of Charlie or the old file that she had taken from storage and copied and sent to him, no mention of the records, and no mention of the Elizabeth Darcy business that had been spoken of in those old letters. It seemed—she dared herself to conclude—to be about something completely different.
“…got no idea why he wants this. It seems to me that it makes no difference because those women were the daughters of Fitzwilliam Darcy, and Bennet Darcy was his son. I’ve got the family tree here, and it’s as plain as the nose on your face. But anyway, there it is; the client is king and all that. You have a go at drafting it and print it out. I’ll have a look at it, okay?”
“Yes, Mr. Samuelson. Do you need it today?”
“If you have time, or tomorrow would be fine. It can’t be urgent; that bloody trust has been going since 1860.”
“I will get on to it as soon as I finish your tape, if that is all right?”
“Yes, that’s fine, Issy.”
She stood up to leave.
“Here is James Darcy’s letter. Can you pop it in the file for me? Oh, and that’s the other thing. He makes rather a strange comment. He says that if this firm receives any correspondence from a Miss Cressida Carter, who is one of the beneficiaries, we are to notify him straight away and not communicate with her without his approval. Seems to think that she is a bit of a troublemaker. So it might be worth writing that on the inside cover of the file in case somebody other than you
or I need to pick it up. Very strange, but there it is. Ours is not to reason why, that’s what I say…”
“Right-o, Mr. Samuelson. Will do.”
With that and with a gushing sense of relief, Issy returned to her desk and to the impenetrable tape. She got herself a sweet tea in quiet celebration that she had been called into a partner’s office to discuss the Darcy Trust and it had not involved her being handed her P45. The afternoon pushed on in frustration and an excess of caffeine until, at last, the clock above the secretary pool ticked to five thirty and Issy got up to leave. She had managed to finish the tape, she hoped with a reasonable degree of accuracy, and had made a start on amending the Darcy Trust document. The strange coincidence of Charlie’s request all those months ago and this change to the trust played around in her head, but she could not explain it. Like much of her work, she understood the edges of it rather than the whole thing, but even so, like Mr. Samuelson, she could not quite see the point in the amendment James Darcy had suggested. She wrapped her pashmina loosely around her neck, fastened her winter coat, said goodbye to Mr. Samuelson’s trainee, whom she guessed would be working late, and wandered out.
Darkness had already fallen on the icy street. The walk to the Tube station took its usual four minutes, and on the way, she thought about what she would make for dinner and recalled that she had promised to call her mum that evening. The magazine stall outside the station entrance was teeming with people, muffled up against the pre-Christmas winter, trying to buy a magazine or a newspaper to read for their journey. She picked up a copy of the Evening Standard from the stack and, tucking it under her arm, glanced across the road to a sight for which she was quite unprepared. On the other side of the road—silhouetted against the purple pitch of the city at night, the bright lights of the South Bank flickering on the Thames—was Charlie Hayward, walking along with his arm around a girl, laughing.
Finis.
Q&A with the Author
Q: Why would Fitzwilliam Darcy be so worried for future generations of Darcy women if his own daughters were so well taken care of?
I think Fitzwilliam looks at the example of Lydia and worries about the fate of a woman who doesn’t have a protector in a world in which women had no resources of their own. He knows that his own daughters are wealthy women and that they have married men whom he trusts. He is not worrying about them but future generations. His frame of reference is one in which women have very limited rights and may easily lose the benefit of their family’s wealth over time. Darcy is relentlessly honourable. His fans would call him a patrician (amongst other things…); his detractors might say he is something of a control freak. I think both of those elements are present in the Fitzwilliam in this story. He is trying to protect future generations of women in a patriarchal world. At the same time, rather than giving resources directly, he is doing so by way of trust in order that his male descendants can retain a level of supervision. His gamble is that they shall remain steadfast to his purpose, which, of course, they do.
Q: Why do you think Charlie, a worldly man, is so flustered by Evie?
I think that Evie speaks to a need for honesty and integrity in Charlie’s life. He is successful, but success is not enough for him in ways that he cannot acknowledge until he meets her. She manages to challenge and engage him directly and on her own terms. It works the other way around as well. Evie is quite a naive girl, but although she has a few weak-kneed moments, she is not especially flustered by Charlie. She is more composed than a lot of other women would be in her position. She does not appear to be too interested in him, and that is what he finds surprisingly alluring.
Q: Why did you choose Elizabeth and Darcy’s story from Elizabeth’s point of view, and yet Charlie and Evie’s story from both?
Those who have read Suddenly Mrs. Darcy know that I love writing in the first person. Although it has its disadvantages and pitfalls, it affords a closeness between the reader and the subject that really pulls me in. In this particular case, the experiences that Elizabeth has in The Elizabeth Papers are so intense and personal that I judged it right to speak them from her point of view. Also, writing as Elizabeth herself fits the plot of The Elizabeth Papers because, for the story to work, she has to leave some evidence of her secret behind to be discovered later. Between Suddenly Mrs. Darcy and The Elizabeth Papers, I am conscious that, although I have included some of his personal correspondence, I have neglected Mr. Darcy, and so maybe there is an idea for a future novel somewhere in there…
As to Charlie and Evie, I felt their story was more effectively told in a traditional third person narrative. They are equal partners in that they each develop as people and in relation to each other—so I tried to treat them even-handedly.
Q: Why does Elizabeth not tell her beloved husband of her fears about not giving him a son?
There are secrets and unspoken fears in the closest and most loving relationships. One of the problems here is that Elizabeth perceives the “problem” of her not producing a son as an open secret, which everybody knows but does not speak of. English history is full of the aching problem of the absent male heir, as Anne Boleyn could testify! There would have been a great deal of pressure on Elizabeth to produce an heir to Pemberley, and Fitzwilliam himself acknowledges this in chapter 1. At first, she takes the view that the issue will resolve itself and, therefore, she does not need to say anything. Jane Austen tells us that Elizabeth is not given to melancholy nor do I think her prone to unnecessary self-analysis. As time goes on, however, she becomes troubled—and then desperate. She thinks of her own Bennet family where a lack of a son has had enormous ramifications. She is torn between the fear that it is her fault and her outrage at being blamed (as she perceives it) for something plainly beyond her control. This, together with pride and her innate English reserve, leads to a policy of non-communication with her husband.
Q: How do you think the rumour about Victoria came about—and stayed around—but never was pursued until the present day?
My idea is that there must have been significant suspicion at the time amongst family and friends and amongst the staff at Pemberley. For Elizabeth to have travelled with Darcy to Ireland, not known to be expecting, and to have returned five months later with a baby would have appeared odd. At least one member of staff knows that they departed with Lydia and returned without her, and maybe he was not as discreet as he intended to be. Elizabeth tells us that she feared Mrs. Reynolds and Kitty suspected her. Rumours likely started—as most rumours do—when independent parties start joining up the dots. So, behind the scenes of the story, I imagine James the footman keeps the secret about Lydia for many years until he lets on to a maid whom he is sweet on. She is called to Mrs. Reynolds’s office about something and, for some reason, imparts what she knows. That strikes a note in Mrs. Reynolds’s mind because, of course, she has always had her questions about Victoria. Mrs. Reynolds and the maid are overheard speaking by another servant, and the matter becomes a well-known trope below stairs. Many years later, it is imparted to the ladies’ maid of a member of the family, and so it spreads wider and deeper. Over time, the suspicion that Victoria is not Elizabeth’s child becomes the suspicion that she is not Fitzwilliam’s child. I think it most unlikely that, in Elizabeth’s lifetime or during the lifetime of her children, anyone would question her fidelity. But as time moves on and memories cloud, the more salacious explanation appears to be the most satisfactory, and somewhere along the line, it takes hold. Or something like…
Q: This is two stories woven to tell one. How did the change in eras affect how you thought of writing each story?
The Regency chapters alternate with the modern chapters, with Fitzwilliam’s letters dotted around. I forced myself to write the chapters in the order that they appear now rather than to write one story, then the other, and then interlace them. I wanted the discipline of relating the stories to each other, but there were times when I was so mentall
y enmeshed in each story that, in my heart, I just wanted to focus on one and not the other. The fact that the two halves of the narrative are in completely different periods, one of which is my own time and place, had a huge impact on how I thought about them. When I was writing about the Regency, I made a conscious effort to push my mind back to that period, and I found writing the modern story somewhat more relaxed. I try to think about the variances in dress and comforts such as heat and electricity and how this would have made the world “feel” different—I hope that those differences are reflected in the two halves of the story. Since this was my first attempt at writing a contemporary love story, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed slipping in things that are exclusively of our own time like email and text messages.
Q: I held my breath the entire time Charlie and Evie were searching Pemberley. Why do you think Evie did not explain the circumstances to the Darcys after their discovery? And what made you give Evie a change of heart, especially after all the trouble and stress they put themselves through?
It would be Evie’s natural inclination to tell the truth, but she is wrong-footed by the plot. They make their discovery at night when the Darcys have gone to bed. Evie then discovered a truth that she was unprepared for, and she found herself unexpectedly emotionally moved by Elizabeth’s words. She is emboldened by the discovery to act on her feelings for Charlie, and so that is her initial response to it. The decision not to remove the papers from Pemberley is another consequence of her reaction to reading them. Evie respects Elizabeth too much to effectively steal her story from its hiding place within her home. Why does Evie not suggest that they take the story to the Darcys and explain? The answer to this also lies in her response to Elizabeth’s words. Evie feels that the most respectful treatment of Elizabeth’s diary is to put it back where it had been hidden for nearly two centuries rather than invite further prying eyes (albeit they are family eyes).
The Elizabeth Papers Page 23
