Page 47 of The Longbourn Bloodline

Elizabeth touched the edge of the blot, feeling the slight stickiness, and something ached in her chest that she could not name.

She looked around the room. The chair was pushed back, not tucked in—the habit of a man who rose in haste.

“Lizzy.” Jane stood in the doorway, her face soft with understanding. “We must return. It will be full dark soon.”

“Yes.” Elizabeth pulled her hand away from the desk. “Yes, we should go.”

But she lingered a moment longer, looking around the empty room: at the cold hearth, at the frosted windows and the desk where his hand had rested just hours ago. She could feel his presence here still, like a warmth that had not quite faded, like an echo of a voice she had not realized she was straining to hear.

Know my character, and you will understand.

She was beginning to understand, and that was the trouble. She was starting to see what she had refused to see, to feel what she had refused to feel, and he was gone, riding north toward Matlock, toward his sister and a life that did not include her.

“Come, Lizzy.” Jane’s urged gently. “Mamma will worry.”

Elizabeth took the ledger and closed the door behind her, latching it. She did not look back. “There is nothing for him to return to.”

Jane pinched her arm like she did when they were young, and Elizabeth was being especially obstinate. “Come. He will return as he does not like leaving things undone.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

FOUND IN THE ATTIC

Elizabeth supposed her father trusted her entirely, or there were no family secrets worth hiding, because he gave her the key to the attic rather than answer a few simple questions about his great-aunt Alice. Granted, no questions Elizabeth presented at the breakfast room were simple, and her father had a volume of Plutarch he was assiduously marking up.

So, Elizabeth climbed the narrow, creaking staircase, skeleton key in hand, and pushed her way into the narrow crawlspace. She shuddered at the thought of spiderwebs, but she had brought a hefty tallow candle and any live spiders would wisely flee from the open flame.

Setting the candleholder away from the dusty dropcloths, she knelt before an ancient trunk and lifted the lid. Mr. Bennet had not given her any indication where his great-aunt’s belongings would have been stored, because he had not been able to fit into the narrow passageway since the girls were born.

None of her sisters had wished to join her because the masters had arrived despite Darcy’s departure. Mary pounded out another sonatina by Pleyel, while the art master, Mr. Cecil, had both Kitty and Jane sitting at the large bow window overlooking a bleak wintry landscape to develop their eye for shadows and shapes. Mrs. Bennet, meanwhile, mispronounced every French greeting, and when prompted to correct, she merely increased her volume, without any improvement. Somewhere closer, Mrs. Beaumont’s measured voice drifted up the servants’ staircase: “The fan is a language, Miss Lydia. One does not wave it about like a flag of surrender.”

Elizabeth perused the contents: old linens, yellowed and musty; a child’s christening gown, impossibly small; a stack of letters tied with ribbon so faded it had lost all color. She reached for the letters and was untying the ribbon when footsteps sounded on the attic stairs.

“Lizzy?” The light of a second candle preceded Charlotte’s voice, and then she appeared, her face flushed from the climb and her mourning dress grey with dust.

“Charlotte!” Elizabeth rose too quickly, banging her head on a low beam. “Ow. What are you doing up here?”

“Your father sent me.” Charlotte picked her way carefully between a broken spinning wheel and a stack of mildewed books. “He helpfully informed me that you had taken up residence among the dead Bennets and would I be so kind as to verify you had not joined their number.”

“He is very droll.”

“Yes, and that you are digging up ghosts and might use some company.” She settled onto a trunk that groaned ominously beneath her. “What exactly are you excavating?”

“I am looking for Papa’s great-aunt Alice, well, not her shade, but any letters or journals she might have left behind.”

Charlotte tilted her head. “Your sisters are downstairs with the improvement masters, and you are looking for an obscure aunt? Would this have anything to do with how the entail changed with female heirs? That this aunt might have inherited?”

“No, she was bypassed entirely.” Elizabeth opened the letters one by one, finding none dated in the correct time period. “There was a boy, a second son borrowed from the Darcy family.”

“Ah…” Charlotte said, as if it explained everything. “So you are up here looking for a Darcy while the real one has ridden away on a bleak winter morning after signing away his inheritance.”

Elizabeth ignored Charlotte’s knowing insinuation. “Alice’s journals might shed light on this George Darcy who was made a Bennet heir and why he left so abruptly and never returned to Longbourn.”

“Many reasons. He had his duties at Pemberley. The roads were unreliable a hundred years ago, and he was not needed as your family line continued down through your direct ancestors.”

“Yes, but the tenants say he was in love with Alice, and if the families were friends, why were they never wed? She resided here at Longbourn unwed until the close of her days.”

“So, you are chasing a long-dead love story while neglecting one that might still have life?” Charlotte tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.