Becoming Lady Darcy Read online

  Darcy rose to his feet and pulled the bell for the nursemaid.

  “Do we have to entertain tonight, dearest?”

  “Yes, Mr Darcy, we absolutely must.”

  “What if I were sick?”

  “Fitzwilliam…”

  The nursemaid entered, silently removing the boy from his father’s arms. Elizabeth took a moment to kiss him gently on the head, inhaling the soft milky smell.

  “We are very fortunate, Mrs Darcy.”

  “We are, but you will be less fortunate if you keep my mother waiting for dinner. Now, go and get dressed.”

  It was later, when their guests has retired and the corridors were dark and dimly lit, that Elizabeth decided to walk the short distance to her husband’s chambers to wish him goodnight.

  “Good evening, Mr Darcy,” she whispered, perhaps a little more loudly than she thought given the amount of wine she had consumed with dinner.

  “Elizabeth, get in quickly, you must be freezing.”

  He threw back the covers, and she slid into between the cotton sheets. She held him tightly feeling the warmth of him through her nightgown. Outside she could hear the whipping wind gathering force as it invaded from over the Peaks and she pulled him closer.

  “This is a rather delightful garment,” he said, the hint of port on his breath, a look in his eyes that she recognised all too well. “I really appreciate the needlework of your seamstress… can I get a closer look?”

  “I think you may have had one too many glasses of port this evening, husband.”

  “I think you may have had too much wine, wife!” He pulled on the sleeve her nightgown, “but I’m not complaining if it means I get to wake up with you in the morning.”

  “I may have had more than a glass…”

  She leaned in; it had been a while since she had felt the softness of his lips on hers and she felt overwhelmed as he moved his attentions from her mouth to her neck.

  “Lizzy, we should have more babies…”

  “Would you like to start right now?”

  “I wouldn’t complain,” he ran his hand over her shoulder and down to her hip, “in fact we should have enough babies to fill every room at Pemberley!”

  “Fitzwilliam, that’s over twenty-five rooms!”

  But as he kissed her slowly, almost reverently, and passionately for the first time since the birth, she knew, submitting to his desire as well as her own, that she would happily have as many children as he wanted, and fill their home with laughter, love and life.

  2000

  Lizzy Darcy and Matthew Wickham had grown up together at Pemberley. Closer in age to each other than to the very sensible and bossy Maggie, they had made natural playmates and could often be found running up and down the halls or up the hill to the Cage, looking for conkers underneath the massive horse chestnut tree that stood next to it.

  Maggie and Matthew lived with their mum, Jean, who had acted as Winston’s secretary for years before she accidentally fell in love with the kindly steward John Wickham, and promptly married him. Unfortunately, he had dropped down dead two days before his fortieth birthday, and it fell upon his wife to raise her young daughter and baby son in the small apartment above the stable block that they had once shared.

  Matthew was always a little bit in awe of Lizzy; he wanted to tell her that she was squishy in all the right places, but he knew enough of women to know that squishy was not the right word to use. Her head was covered in a bird’s nest of curls, sometimes she straightened them, but she couldn’t be bothered with it for the most part, and they hung frizzy and unbrushed around her face. When she smiled, two dimples appeared on her cheeks, and she had a soft, pink mouth that curved upwards, even when she was angry. In fact, you could only tell she was angry when she frowned, because her eyes turned from a soft grey to a dark, melting lead and she metamorphosed from a calm summer day to an oncoming storm.

  The problem was that Lizzy didn’t really notice him like that until after they had left high school and gone to separate colleges – where he suddenly became cool, bringing back giggling girls to the house in his Ford Fiesta, parading them around the lawn right under her nose and whispering sweet nothings to them in the Orangery.

  Lizzy watched with green eyed envy, filled with something she thought was love for the boy who lived next door, powerless to do anything except watch and wave as he sauntered about with his baggy jeans and his Ben Sherman shirts, casually slouching with his beaten-up converse, music playing and an illicit cigarette hanging from his mouth.

  There was a burst of freckles that ran across his nose when it was summer, and they remained there until the last leaves fell from the trees. His eyes were brown, but she knew that really, they were a beautiful chocolate eclipse, surrounded by a circle of gold, like a Jaffa cake gone wrong. She tried to remember what he smelled like close up. His hair had grown out from his standard short back and sides, despite his mother’s protestations, and there was the heavy undergrowth of facial hair covering his chin. He still hadn’t got the chip on his tooth fixed, gained playing rugby in year ten, and he was still wearing the same coat.

  But on Sundays, he would still appear in the porch as the last visitors left for the day and they would sit in the long gallery, eating roast beef sandwiches and roast potatoes, old films whirring through Winston’s projector as he snored away on the armchair in the library, oblivious to their presence. Lizzy would snuggle into him, quite unaware that he would smell the subtly expensive perfume she wore and try to not think about kissing her. Even though she saw him with lots of girls, she never asked him if he had a girlfriend. She was always too scared to ask, just in case he said that he did.

  Exams came and went; university applications were completed and offers accepted. Lizzy, under the guidance of her grandfather, was off to Manchester to study Law, and Matthew was off to London to study Film. Whilst Winston didn’t think it a valid enough subject to warrant a bachelor’s degree, he offered to support John Wickham’s son through university out of kindness to the man’s widow. It was only four weeks into the new semester when Matthew Wickham met a wonderfully rich, bohemian girl called Cara Dalhousie, who smelled like patchouli and had read the Bhagavad Gita. He promptly moved into her squat in Bermondsey and grew out his hair.

  Lizzy moved to Manchester, assisted by Winston who insisted on helping pack boxes of things into the little yellow Mini that he had bought her for passing her A-Levels. She made fast friends with the group of girls in her halls of residence and they were frequent visitors back to the house in Derbyshire. Occasionally she would look for the red Fiesta outside the stables, her heart twitchy with anticipation until she noticed its absence.

  DAD: 12 Missed Calls

  DAD: Lizzy, please phone.

  DAD: Call me when you get this.

  CHARLIE: Have you spoken to Dad?

  She stood outside the lecture hall, Emily and Josh waiting for her. The phone took ages to connect, but she knew. She knew because her dad never called her.

  “Lizzy!”

  “Dad, what’s wrong?”

  Then silence.

  “Dad?”

  “It’s Winston…”

  “Is he gone?”

  “You need to come home.”

  “Dad. Please. Tell me.”

  That silence again, the one that lasts for an age, the one that can swallow you whole.

  “Yes, he’s gone.”

  Josh saw her legs buckle and grabbed for her before she fell, Emily held her as she sobbed on the pavement; curious passers-by stared, wondering what on earth was going on. She drove Lizzy the thirty-eight miles back to Pemberley, not knowing what to say as she watched her friend stare out of the window.

  Hugh was there already, teary and sad, but stoic in the way that he was expected to be. He pulled his eldest daughter into a tight embrace, kissing the top of her head and commenting on how skinny she had become. His wife, Carol, was sitting on the shabby drawing room couch holding tightly onto Imogen, whose p
odgy toddler limbs poked out from her expensive red woollen coat.

  She could feel the heat of the fire burning against the cold of her face, see the angry face of James II glaring at her from his portrait, she stumbled backwards. It was too much to take, too much all at once; she couldn’t breathe, the fire was stifling, the smell of the wood. She took quick, short breaths trying to stop this feeling, but it washed over her like a tidal wave, and she felt herself falling.

  The last thing she heard was the booming voice of her brother, and the clatter of the tea tray before everything went dark and she landed on the threadbare Victorian chenille rug with a thud. Her great-grandmother’s teacups shattered. Slivers of porcelain slipping between the cracks, falling into the gaps, disappearing between the heavy floorboards. Vanishing forever.

  BREAKING NEWS: The Duke of Derbyshire dies at 84

  The Duke of Derbyshire has died at his country estate at the age of 84. A spokesman at Pemberley said the Duke died on Tuesday morning with his companion, Mrs Winifred Wharton, by his side. In accordance with the Duke’s wishes, Pemberley – the country seat made famous by Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice – has been bequeathed to the Historical House Society who will fully open the house to the public in a five-year plan. The Duke, Winston Fitzwilliam Darcy, served as an Officer in the RAF during WWII and earned the George Cross for bravery after completing a record number of bombing raids over occupied Europe. The illegitimate son of suffragette Millicent Darcy, the Duke was legitimised by an act of Parliament after the death of his uncles during WWI, inheriting the title at the age of seventeen. He was the longest holder of the Derbyshire Dukedom, which was restored to Fitzwilliam Darcy in 1838 by Queen Victoria. Married in 1953 to renowned comedy actress, Sylvia Pratchett, the couple had three children before divorcing in 1966. The Duke also leaves seven grandchildren. His eldest son, Hugh, will inherit the title. Jemima Marshall of the HHS said, “we have been working with the Duke for a number of years now to ensure the legacy of Pemberley and the Darcy family. As one of the most famous country houses in the world, we are dedicated to preserving the house in the memory of Winston Darcy, who has given such a precious gift.”

  Lizzy finally packed up all her belongings from the room that the new guidebook referred to as ‘The Knights Bedroom’. She wasn’t sure what the new custodians would think of the blu-tac marks on the 17th century wooden panelling near her bed, where posters of Liam Gallagher and his sneering brother had once hung, and she was fairly confident that the distinctly modern splodge on the floor near the fireplace was nail glue from a manicure set she had bought from Superdrug. Good luck removing that, she thought.

  She glanced her fingers over the familiar nooks and crannies of the figures on her four-poster bed, it had been placed in nearly every position in the room and she did not know how much damage she might have done to the delicate frame as she shoved it back and forth over the misaligned floorboards. She remembered how Winston had tucked her into bed every night when she was younger, the fairylights twinkling around the headboard; how when she was older, he had always popped his head around the doorframe as he shuffled off to his room down the hall.

  “Night, lie down, sweet dreams, sleep tight…”

  “…don’t let the bed bugs bite your toes tonight.”

  He would always blow her a kiss and she would always catch it and throw it back. They had done this every night since she had been five; scared and lonely in a strange place, she remembered the salty tears falling into the stiff cotton pillowcases, and the warm, bracing hug of Winston, who had felt scratchy but who had stroked her chin until she fell into sleep.

  ‘Everything will be alright’, he had said, ‘everything will always be alright in the end.’

  She couldn’t bear to stay in the house when the stocktakers had gone through every room cataloguing each item, however small, and had thrown herself out into the grounds, walking for miles around the estate, taking herself to the very edge of Darcy land at all four corners before standing in the Lantern and waiting for the rain, watching the house – somehow no longer her home – until night fell.

  After the inventory had been taken, she had been allowed to walk around the house and choose items that had been tagged NHI – No Historical Importance – and she had picked a few pieces of furniture that she loved, including the drawing room couch and Winston’s old chair. She also pillaged boxes of battered old books from the library that were destined for the skip, piling them up at the top of the grand staircase before shuffling them along the landing and through the generously proportioned door, which would now always remain locked.

  All over the estate there was a feeling of loss, as if Pemberley itself was mourning the passing of its master. Winston had been the Duke of Derbyshire since he was seventeen years old – his tenure had seen massive changes in the house - and now his final goodbye meant that even though a Darcy would still live here, she would be the lady of the manor in name only, all the decisions and choices now made by nameless managers in the London head offices of the HHS.

  As she grabbed the last of her belongings, Lizzy realised that she would never again wake up in this bedroom or look out of this window first thing in the morning or last thing at night. She stood still for a moment, noticing how ornate the mouldings were, ran her finger along the tall stone fireplace that still stood taller that she was; she was trying to remember it all, embroider each little aspect into her memory, because she knew that from today things would never be the same again.

  She was no-longer Elizabeth Darcy, student. Now she was ‘Lady Elizabeth’, living at Pemberley as the Darcy in residence playing a role she never auditioned for.

  Matthew wasn’t looking for Lizzy, hadn’t expected to see her sitting in the window of the Lantern, her legs swinging, a Marlboro Light balancing off her lip as she drank beer from a plastic pint glass. They talked and reminisced and drank, falling back into their childhood friendship as if it was the easiest thing in the world. Eventually, overwhelmed with grief and remembering, they made mad, frantic love in the folly at the far end of the garden.

  “What about your girlfriend…” she asked, as he pulled her t-shirt over her head and kissed her neck.

  “I don’t have a girlfriend...” he assured her, failing to add that he now had a fiancée.

  The days passed by in a hazy reality, nothing felt normal anymore. Before she even realised, Winston had been gone for six months, and she was throwing up her breakfast with alarming regularity.

  “Have you thought that you might be…”

  “Please don’t say it.”

  It was the end, and everything was not alright.

  Six

  Joyce Hutchinson had taken the job of Senior Curator at Pemberley shortly after the Historical House Society had acquired it, and she could say with absolute certainty that she loved her job. Growing up reading Jane Austen novels she always got a tingle of excitement reading the paragraphs where her home town was mentioned and when the big house on the hill was described in detail and she longed for a chance to walk where Elizabeth Bennet had walked or sit where Mr Darcy had sat.

  She was twelve when the Duke of Derbyshire, encouraged by his mother, started opening the house for public visits on a more formal basis, which basically meant that he was now charging fifty pence for entry and there was a small tea-room and a little shop. She would never forget the smell of the house – history, tradition and scones all mixed into one, along with the merest hint of tobacco and a sprinkling of laughter and hyacinths – she would never be able to describe it accurately, it was as if it was less of a smell and more like a feeling.

  Marjorie watched as her daughter, surely the most serious twelve-year-old in existence, took a seat at the small writing desk by the window, watched as she touched the inlay, carefully read the sign that said this desk had belonged to Elizabeth Bennet-Darcy and had been brought from the house at Longbourn after the death of her father. They shared a scone and pot of tea before walking around the gar
dens, taking pictures with the instamatic camera that Joyce had received for her birthday the week before.

  On the way out, she bought herself a thin, papery guidebook written by Lady Sybil Darcy with the last of her birthday money. That night she devoured it page by page in one sitting; pouring over the information about each room, each former resident. By midnight, Joyce was fully in love with Pemberley. She had visited at least once a week after that, riding the trolley bus from the entrance gates after walking from her home above the grocers in the centre of Lambton.

  “How old are you now, Miss Hutchinson,” Winston Darcy asked her one Saturday afternoon as he took her ticket.

  “Sixteen now, Your Grace,” she said primly, dipping a little curtsey like her mother had shown her.

  “No need for all that nonsense, Joyce,” he handed back her clipped ticket. “You’re here more than my own children, you’re practically family.”

  “Thank you, Your Grace,” she smiled. “It’s an honour.”

  “Joyce, please call me Winston.”

  She was unsure.

  “Winston.”

  “It is my name after all,” he walked through to the courtyard with her. It was empty on this brisk autumn day and she had been the only visitor to the house so far. “Would you like a job, Miss Hutchinson?”

  Her eyes went wide, a strange excitement filled her, “a job here… at Pemberley?”

  “Of course, a job here – it wouldn’t be too much money to start off with, and only on Saturdays – cleaning the house and dusting and what-not. When my children are back from school you would need to show them what to do.”

  Joyce would have no trouble telling the spoiled Darcy children, with their famous mother and their boarding school accents, exactly what to do. Especially Julia, who was the rudest of them all. Winston was more down to earth than all three of them, with his second-hand wellies and wearing the same tweed suit she had seen him in for years. He looked more like a jovial farmer than a Duke, with a fluffy moustache and hair smoothed down with Brylcreem, but he had a barrelling laugh that could be heard across the lake and, in the evenings, he was rarely seen without a cigar.