Page 1 of Shadows Of Rosings Park: Part 2

CHAPTER 1

ELIZABETH

The carriage hit a rut and Elizabeth's forehead struck the glass.

She sat back, pressing her fingers to the spot. A small pain. Nothing compared to what she carried. The Hertfordshire countryside unrolled beyond the window, hedgerows and ploughed fields and a church spire she recognised from childhood, and none of it looked as it had when she'd left. The same view, seen by different eyes.

Three weeks since Hunsford.

She tested the thought the way you test a loose tooth with your tongue, pushing at it, measuring the pain. Three weeks since Collins had hit her. Three weeks since Elizabeth had seized the paperweight to make Collins release Charlotte, only for him to turn on her and wrench her arm down, and Charlotte had caught the falling marble before it struck the floor. Three weeks since Darcy had walked in from the hall and found Collins dead on the parlour floor. His face had gone blank. Then he had told them exactly what to do in a voice so controlled it sounded like a man reciting directions from a ledger.

She had obeyed. She had been obeying ever since.

The carriage swayed. She adjusted the brim of her bonnet, a habitual gesture now, though there was almost nothing left to hide. Three weeks was enough for skin to forget what hands had done to it. The bruise on her cheek was the last to go, a faint greenish shadow along the bone that only she could find in the mirror, and even that needed barely a dusting of rice powder. Her body was healing. The rest of her was not.

Darcy's salve sat in her valise. A small ceramic pot from the apothecary, sealed with wax, delivered with the same briskness he brought to concealments, proposals, and the management of women who had witnessed murder. Apply it twice daily. I will not have my future wife bearing another man's marks. As though the marks were the problem. As though bruises were what needed erasing.

His letter was in her pocket. She had read it once in her chamber at Rosings before dawn, standing at the window in the grey light with Charlotte asleep on the other side of the connecting door and the yew trees standing in the garden like mourners.

Your family must believe our attachment genuine... Charlotte's safety depends upon the story holding firm... trust my judgment, if not yet my character.

She did hate him. She thought she did. Hatred ought to have been clean and bright, like the edge of a blade. What she felt for Darcy was fouled by the memory of his fingers on her bruised cheek, feather-light, trembling. By his voice breaking on the word Elizabeth in the dark of her Rosings bedroom. By the sight of him alone at the end of the garden path after he found the body, motionless until he mastered himself. That glimpse of shaken control lodged beneath her ribs and would not be dislodged.

The carriage turned down the lane to Longbourn. Elizabeth drew a breath, adjusted her bonnet to shadow her face, and assembled her smile.

Her mother was already on the gravel. Naturally. Mrs. Bennet had the predatory instinct of a woman who could sense an advantageous match from three counties away, and news of Elizabeth's engagement to a man worth ten thousand a year had reached her by express. She stood in the drive with her arms half-raised and her face alight with the purest joy Elizabeth had ever seen on it, and the sight was so grotesque in context, joy, when everything was ashes, that Elizabeth had to look away before her expression cracked.

"Lizzy! Oh, my dear girl! Mr. Darcy! Ten thousand a year! And to think how you used to speak of him!"

"Good morning, Mamma."

Kitty and Lydia appeared, trailing questions and excited noise. Mary stood in the doorway with her hymnal, looking disapproving, which was her contribution to most family occasions. But it was Jane whom Elizabeth found, standing on the front step, motionless, composed, her gentle face already registering what no one else in the family had seen. The pallor. The tension around Elizabeth's mouth. How she held herself as though something inside her might spill if she moved too quickly.

"Lizzy." Jane took her hands. Her fingers were warm. Elizabeth's were ice. "You look altered."

Jane had chosen the precise word. Altered. Not tired, thin, or pale. Jane saw what Charlotte had seen, what Darcy saw every time he looked at her: the woman who had walked into Kent had returned harder, warier, and less free.

"The journey was fatiguing," Elizabeth said, and withdrew her hands.

Inside, Longbourn was the same. Faded curtains. Worn carpet. The hall table cluttered with her mother's correspondence, a note from Mrs. Hill about household accounts, and a vase of flowers that had been fresh a week ago and now drooped over the rim like drunks at a railing. Elizabeth moved through the familiar rooms and felt nothing. Or felt everything, but at a distance, like watching a play you have already seen.

Mr. Bennet emerged from his library. His eyes found his daughter immediately, and the sharp concern in them made Elizabeth's stomach tighten. He never claimed to read people; he merely noticed what others preferred to overlook.

"So my Lizzy returns to us engaged to a gentleman she once professed to dislike above all others." His irony was intact, but beneath it she heard something else, a note of concern pitched too low for Mrs. Bennet's ears. "How remarkably adaptable you are, my dear."

"Circumstances altered my understanding of him, Papa."

"Indeed? I confess it is an interesting reversal." He lowered his voice. "I suppose a man may change his opinion as readily as a woman may change hers. Though I wonder what made Kent so persuasive."

Elizabeth's heart slammed. Her father was guessing, casting lines, testing which one snagged. He did not know. He couldn't know. But he sensed the wrongness of it as a man senses a change in weather: not through evidence but through pressure.

"Mr. Bennet!" Her mother swept between them. "You mustn't tease Lizzy so! She has made a brilliant match, and that's all that matters. Oh, Lizzy, you must tell us everything! How did he propose? Was he very much in love?"

Elizabeth was rescued by Hill announcing refreshments. They moved to the parlour. Jane slipped her arm through Elizabeth's, the pressure of it gentle, insistent, a question that could not be spoken here.

"Later," Elizabeth whispered.

She would share nothing. Jane was goodness, real, uncomplicated goodness, and Elizabeth would not bring the darkness of Hunsford into her sister's clean rooms.