The Elizabeth Papers (18 page)

Chapter 27

Pemberley, 14 December 2014

Cressida’s eyes widened as she turned her car off the main road and slowly advanced down the gravelly drive. A blanket of bone-chilling cold hung in the air, and there before her was a sight, all at once familiar and completely new: Pemberley. How strange to see it in reality with her own eyes, part of her own story. Her mind flicked to one of many Sunday evenings past, and she recalled Granny getting out her big book of great British houses after supper. The book always fell open to the same page. And there the stories always started, of course: the terribly grand relations just out of reach, the glories of the past remembered. Cressida reflected that the house looked rather different in the bitter December air, framed by leafless trees, than it had in the picture in Granny’s book, taken no doubt in the height of summer who knows how many years previously. The memory of it slightly caught her off-guard, and she shook herself to snap out of it. The vast, cold stone of Pemberley was before her, and she was invited, anticipated. She had written, and they had responded. At the edge of the turning circle were parked a mucky, Land Rover and a red sports car. Cressida thought of her battered Golf and parked it a bit to the side. The notion of the Darcys coming out and seeing her sad jalopy next to their terribly smart wheels made her draw in her breath. As if for reassurance, she reached into her open handbag on the passenger seat and felt inside for Honoria’s note. It was there. It was real. This was a thing. She was expected for tea.

Soon her reverie was broken by the appearance at the great door of a small and well-presented lady of advancing years, muffled up in a too-large wax jacket, shivering against the season. She hurried down the stone stairs and met Cressida as she was locking up the Golf.

“Miss Carter?”

“Yes.” She held out her slim hand and the woman’s rings clinked against hers as they greeted one another. Their breath danced in the chill air, and Cressida, who had been warm inside the car, fought the urge to shake with cold.

“I’m Honoria Darcy. Come in. It’s perishing out here.”

They bundled in through the enormous door, and Honoria thrust it shut with a forbidding sort of clank. Cressida’s eyes drifted over the richness and wonder within: the painted faces on the walls, the warm acres of historic luxury. She realised with a start that she had missed what Mrs. Darcy had said to her.

“Sorry? Come again?”

“May I take your coat, Miss Carter?”

“Erm, yes, thank you.” She slipped it off and slightly wondered at the lack of home help. Surely, people like the Darcys had somebody to assist with this sort of thing. Who ever imagined Mrs. Darcy hanging up the coats of her guests herself? That was certainly not the sort of life that Granny had said they lived at Pemberley—quite the reverse.

“It’s awfully kind of you to have me so close to Christmas, Mrs. Darcy.”

Her eye was caught by the half-decorated Christmas tree at the foot of the staircase; a box of tinsel and baubles sat open on the floor.

“You are welcome. And you must call me Honoria. As you can see, I’m afraid we are rather behind with Christmas! But never mind that. I say, ‘well done, you’ for battling the weather. Our housekeeper, who is attending her granddaughter’s Christmas play at the school in the village, says the roads are treacherous with ice. I say you’ve done awfully well to get here at all. Now, let us warm you up with some tea. Come along.”

Cressida nodded and followed Honoria as she clipped across the uneven tiles of the hall floor, past the piercing eyes of her ancestors, and into a drawing room with a blazing fire. This, Cressida thought, as her gaze fell on the flame-brightened walls laden with gilt-framed portraits, was where she belonged. She noticed—a moment too late to be really polite—that an elderly man stood up from a chair by the fire and held out his hand.

“Miss Carter? Welcome to Pemberley. I am James Darcy. I am sorry not to greet you at the door, but as you see, my legs fail me somewhat.” In his left hand, he held on to a stick that glistened slightly in the orange light.

“Cressida, please. It’s wonderful to be here, Mr. Darcy. I have heard so much about Pemberley over the years—stories and what not. My granny came here once before the war.”

“Did she?”

“Yes. Her name was Letitia Blackburn. She was one of the Shropshire Blackburns, not the London lot. She could never abide Town, but she loved it here. She said that I would love it too, and I can see that she was right.” Her voice faded in volume, and her eyes took in the room. James smiled, and she felt suddenly light.

“Well, I’m pleased to hear it, although I suspect that I was only a boy when your grandmother came here. Now, we are cousins, aren’t we? So firstly, you must stop this ‘Mr. Darcy’ business and call me James, and secondly, you must sit down and have some tea after such a long journey.”

Cressida smiled at this and blushed slightly. “Thank you, James.” She moved towards an incidental table on which Honoria had placed a tea tray before leaving the room. Cressida clattered the saucers slightly as she separated them and placed the small teacups ready to pour. She had slightly expected to spend time with Mrs. Darcy as well as her husband, but no matter. After a short interlude, they were each settled with their tea and regarding one another through the wisps of steam that rose from their cups.

“Now, Cressida, I haven’t thanked you for your letter, but I ought to do so. I’m sorry that it has taken us so long to arrange this meeting, but I was very glad to hear from you. I’m afraid that we have just had rather a lot on. We had some guests here in the late summer, and there were a lot of matters arising from that visit that took up my time. And then our younger son and his wife came to stay. So it has been, as my wife would say, ‘like Piccadilly circus’ here. I hope that you don’t think we were putting you off.”

He tilted his head and fixed her with a flash of his hazel eyes. Taking a sip from her cup, she looked away slightly although she could not say why it was that she felt discomforted.

“No, of course not.”

“Good. I also hope that the next time you visit shall be in a more clement season.”

Cressida sat up straighter and beamed. She hadn’t expected that and didn’t quite know how to respond. Of course, she was family, and so, really, it was only right that she be invited back.

“That would be wonderful. It was summer when Granny visited here—1936.”

“Well, in that case, she will have seen the gardens at their best although it was, of course, rather an inauspicious year. Tell me a bit about your grandmother, Cressida.”

“Well, you know, she was just a county lady really. Married, lived in the country, had children, kept dogs, that sort of thing. Family history was her bag, and she made a great study of the Darcys and Pemberley. When I was growing up, she was full of it, terribly proud to be a member of the family—very well up on things too. She knew all about the Victorian Darcys and the turn of the century and the roaring twenties and all that. I wonder that she should have been a historian. Her mother had married a chap—”

“Was that her father?”

“Yes. But he wasn’t quite out of the top drawer if you know what I mean, and I think she felt it rather.”

“I see. That is rather a shame, isn’t it? I wonder whether she was aware of the fact that we are all of us descended from a remarkably happy but unequal marriage.” Cressida held in her breath and looked confused. They peered at one another for a moment before he waved his hand almost imperceptibly and continued. “Go on.”

“Well, there isn’t much else to say really. She was a passable pianist. Made a good pastry, that sort of thing. I suppose it is hard in this day and age, when one has so many relations, to keep a hold of them.”

“We do have rather a lot of cousins drifting about, it has to be said. Having said that, I do recall the name Letitia from my involvement in the Darcy Trust, of which I believe you are also a beneficiary.”

“Yes, I am.” Cressida almost barked in response.

“I am the trustee.”

“I thought that was the solicitors—those people in Fleet Street.”

“Well, they act for me, Cressida. Ultimately, the responsibility is mine. So, if one year you get less than you should or you think that there is anything amiss, it is me whom you should approach. I hope, now that we have met, that you will feel confident doing that.”

Cressida’s mind bolted. In the heady excitement of her invitation, she had nearly lost sight of why she had written to the Darcys in the first place. Her schemes to ransack the house in pursuit of Elizabeth Darcy’s lost document had receded, and her imagination had been given over to images of strolling in the gardens and swooping down the staircase in her best dress. Now that she was here, the idea of searching the house for the secret papers seemed an impossibility. It was suddenly ludicrous. The drawing room alone was a cavernous, great place, and heaven knew how many rooms there were altogether. She fiddled with her watch, shifted on the chaise, and considered that her best chance had just presented itself to her of its own volition.

“Goodness. Well, as it happens, I do have a few questions about the trust.”

“Go on.”

“Well, how can you be sure that all the women who get money from the trust are real Darcys? I mean, if someone was illegitimate or anything like that.”

“It wouldn’t actually matter whether someone was illegitimate. When Fitzwilliam Darcy settled the trust in 1860, the words he used were ‘all of my female descendants.’ Now, as far as I am aware, the only children Fitzwilliam Darcy had were the children of his marriage, which I am given to understand was a famously happy one. However, if, for the sake of argument, any of his descendants were born out of wedlock, it wouldn’t actually make any difference.”

“But it would if they weren’t really his.”

“Well, yes, but I think that most unlikely.”

She felt the familiar stirrings of agitation rising up in her. People were so credulous, so complacent. She had to make him listen to her. When she spoke, the words came out more aggressively than she had intended.

“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.