Page 79 of The Longbourn Bloodline

I write to you as a widower and a fool, knowing I should have written years ago and knowing also that you may not welcome my words now. But I cannot let another decade pass in silence. I cannot let the rest of my life slip away without asking you once more: is there any hope?

I have loved you since we were children. I have loved you through my marriage, though I tried to be a good husband and I believe I was. I have loved you through the years of separation, when I told myself the distance was a mercy. But Catherine is gone now, and she gave me a son. I find myself thinking of you more than ever—of your laugh, your wit, and the fierce heart of the girl who declared herself ruler of the orchard and made me her loyal subject. Of a girl who walks faster than any creature I have ever known. But I was the one who walked away, and I always looked back, although our parents would not allow it.

Now that everyone is gone: my mother, my father, my older brother, and Catherine, who was to be my brother’s wife. I wonder, dear Alice, if there is any chance—any possibility—that you might feel as I do; please write to me. Send your letter through my sister Mathilda; she will see that it reaches me safely. I do not ask for promises or commitments. I ask only to know that you are well.

Yours, as I have always been,

George

Elizabeth pressed her palm to her eyes. This, then, was the letter Alice had carried through the remainder of her days. Yet if he loved her still, if his wife was gone, why had she not replied? Through Mathilda, it would have been proper—old family friends, after all. Would it not?

Hasty now, to look for the answers, she unfolded the three sheets, thicker with dense writing, the same hand as Alice’s history of the Bennets. Dated right before she died in 1775—addressed to no one, or to everyone, or perhaps to the girl who would one day stand in this cottage and read it.

I write this because I cannot speak it, and I cannot carry it to my grave without someone knowing the truth.

George Darcy, whom the world believes was born at Pemberley in 1694, was my brother. My true, full, legitimate brother—the son of Thomas and Philippa Bennet, born at Longbourn in the same year that the Darcy heir was born at Pemberley. They were infants together, and then the Darcy child died, and my parents—God forgive them, for I cannot—sold my brother to take his place.

The Darcys needed an heir. My parents needed money, and they had two sons when they needed only one. Thomas, my eldest brother, remained at Longbourn. George was taken to Derbyshire and raised as George Darcy, son of William and Anne Darcy, heir to Pemberley.

I was not born until 1696. I never knew my brother as a brother. I knew him only as the boy from the north who came to stay with us when I was twelve or thirteen—insurance, my parents said, against my brother Thomas’s uncertain health. I did not know then that George was their son. I did not know until I was fifteen, in love with him, and my mother, weeping, told me the truth.

A page torn from a family Bible was placed between the first and second sheet. The entry was written in a formal hand, the ink faded to brown:

George Bennet, son of Thomas and Philippa Bennet, born 14 March 1694.

Elizabeth held the torn page, her hands trembling, her heart pressed beneath the weight of revelation. George Darcy was a Bennet, a child bartered away, and a lie mortared into the very foundation of one of England’s proudest families.

And Darcy—her Darcy, the man she had promised herself to only a se’nnight past, whose name she would soon bear, whose children she had begun to imagine—was not a Darcy at all. He was the son of a Bennet boy, sold to fill the void left by a lost child, raised in the shadow of a name that was never truly his.

This would destroy him. Everything he believed about himself—his name, his lineage, his proud connection to generations of Darcys stretching back through history—was false.

And Elizabeth had to force herself to breathe and to keep reading.

I loved him before I knew, and I loved him after. But I could not marry my own brother. And I could not tell him the truth because it would destroy him. He was George Darcy, master of Pemberley, respected throughout Derbyshire. What would it have done to him to learn that his entire life was built on a purchased identity? That his parents—the parents he adored—had bought him from strangers and raised him as their own?

I chose silence. I let him believe I did not return his love. I walked as fast as I could away from him, and he left, married another. And then I let him write to me, once, after she died, asking if there was any hope. And I did not answer. I could not answer. There was no answer that would not have broken him.

He died last year, and I only heard of it from an acquaintance who read it in a paper. My George died believing I had never loved him. That was my gift to him—a lie of silence, to protect him from a truth that would have destroyed everything he was.

But this is the truth, the one my mother and father hid, that his mother and father hid. And I leave this here, in the cottage where he lived when he was a boy, in the wall where my mother hid the Bible page she could not bring herself to destroy. If you are reading this, you are a Bennet girl who imagines she would marry a Darcy. Perhaps you already have. Perhaps you are deciding whether to.

Know this: the Darcys of Pemberley are Bennets. They have been Bennets since 1695, when my parents sold their second son to a grieving family in Derbyshire. The bloodline is not what the world believes it to be. Whether that matters—whether it changes anything—is for you to decide.

I chose silence. I chose to let the lie continue, because I could see no path forward that did not end in ruin. Perhaps you will choose differently. Perhaps the world you live in will be kinder than mine. Perhaps by your time, he will not be a brother, but a distant cousin, and I hope you will find a way to love and be honest, both at once. I hope you are braver than I was.

Your servant in truth,

Alice Bennet

1775

Elizabeth could not recall leaving the cottage.

She did not remember crossing the fields, or ducking behind the stone wall when she heard hoofbeats on the lane, or pressing herself against the cold stone while Darcy and Charlotte rode past not twenty feet from where she crouched. She did not remember climbing the stile, or crossing the kitchen garden, or slipping through the servants’ entrance and up the back stairs to the room she shared with Jane.

She remembered only the packet in her pocket, pressing against her hip like a wound, and Alice’s words circling in her mind, relentless as carrion birds.

The Darcys of Pemberley are Bennets.