Page 7 of The Secret Diary of Anne de Bourgh

Indeed, a commotion could be heard outside the outer door. I heard my mother’s voice, demanding shrilly to be let in.

“Open the door, Sanderson,” Darcy said wearily. “Let’s get it over with.”

“What is the meaning of this?” My mother was shouting. “Where is Anne – what have you done with her – the doctor is here, he must see her immediately!”

I moved closer to the gap in the door. I couldn’t see my mother, but I could see Richard’s back, and Dr Spears by him – and Dr Thornely following my mother into the room.

“You!” It was Dr Barnes who exclaimed it, walking into my field of view. “What are you doing here?”

“You know this man, Barnes?” Darcy asked.

“Sir, this is Dr Bruce Thornely. The Royal College of Physicians withdrew his licence years ago. I was just a student then, assisting one of the College’s physicians. Dr Thornely was accused of serious malpractice. He had enough wealthy, influential patrons that he was allowed to retire to the country, though he promised never to practice medicine again!”

“Darcy, silence your man! This is my personal physician...”

“Lady Catherine, YOU will be silent.” It was Darcy at his coldest and most authoritarian. “Dr Barnes is a most respected physician from the Royal College, and Dr Spears trained under him and has spent years as an army doctor. Both of them have examined Anne and they are of the opinion that she has been tortured by this quack.”

“Tortured!” That word brought my mother up short.

“Lady Catherine, your daughter’s arms are covered with scars from wrist to elbow. She is seriously anaemic and the last thing any doctor should have been doing is bleeding her. It is a miracle that she yet lives,” Dr Barnes said firmly.

My mother rallied, as always certain that she was correct. “She lives only because of the years of careful doctoring by Dr Thornely...”

“She lives in spite of those years!” Richard interjected fiercely. “And has it occurred to you yet, Aunt, that this is the doctor who failed to save your husband? Sir Lewis was a strong, fit man, who from all accounts was recovering well from the scarlatina he contracted in London! He came home to Rosings and died under this man’s care!”

Darcy gripped the back of a chair. “My mother died after falling ill while at Rosings,” he said in a strangled voice, “and so did my father...”

My mother stepped forward at last, and I saw her face. “Yes, they both did,” she said, “and I made sure of it.”

For a moment nobody answered her.

“I’ve known all along what Dr Thornely is. I invited him here, gave him a cottage in Hunsford, as long as he did what I ordered. I made damned sure Lewis died. Anne was supposed to die first but the little bitch wouldn’t die. If she’d died first I would have had Rosings: it was owed to me for what I had to do! I had to lie there under that rutting pig while he pretended I was your sainted mother!”

No one interrupted her. “I was supposed to marry George Darcy but he took one look at Anne and no one else existed; Lewis was just the same but she wouldn’t even look at him. He married me as a consolation prize and carried on rutting around London when I refused his bed, after the first time he called me Anne in the dark!”

“And is Anne of de Bourgh blood, if you refused Sir Lewis?” Darcy asked.

“Of course she is!” Her smile was malicious. “But not of Fitzwilliam blood. Lewis found himself a mistress who looked a good deal like my sister and got a child on her. The woman died in childbed and the first I knew of it was when he turned up with the brat and told me that I must either raise her as my own or give him an heir. I chose the lesser of two evils and kept the child. No one ever knew – I’d been kept from society for months and we falsified her birth date – but I wanted her gone from here from the very first minute! Darcy fit the bill, and I thought it would serve them all right! And I’d have Pemberley too...”

I gripped the doorframe to steady myself.

“You should not be hearing this,” Elizabeth whispered to me, troubled, but I shook my head. I could not look away.

“What did you do to my mother?” Darcy asked at last.

“I poisoned her! She was with child again, and so damned happy with her perfect life, her perfect son and daughter and her perfect husband and Pemberley... I made Dr Thornely give me a potion to cause her to miscarry, and I added some slow poison. George came and took her away to Pemberley but I knew she’d not live out the month.” Lady Catherine – I could no longer bear to think of her as my mother – smiled. “Oh, I made sure my sister got hers, and since she was so ill here I was able to tell everyone it was her last wish that you marry Anne. But George! He wouldn’t hear of it, and in the end I had to kill him too, to make sure that he didn’t tell you never to marry her. Several doses of aconite and his heart began to trouble him, didn’t it, Dr Thornely?”

The doctor had been trying to edge out of the room ever since Lady Catherine began her rant, but Sanderson was blocking the door, one hand on a pistol in his belt. In the end he gave up.

“Lady Catherine, you will get us both hanged!”

“You, perhaps.” It was Dr Spears who seemed to recover first from the shock afflicting everyone in the room, “but I would say that Lady Catherine belongs in Bedlam.”

She laughed. Elizabeth opened the door, crossed the room and struck her across the face.

“Lizzy!” Darcy exclaimed.

“Oh, tell me that you weren’t longing to do it! Sanderson, isn’t it? You’d better take that man into custody until we can summon the magistrate. Lady Catherine, you come with me. Charlotte, we’ll borrow a couple of the Colonel’s men as guards, but will you sit with her until we have decided what to do?”