by Jayne Bamber
“Fanny? What is this about, Phyllis? Let us not reopen old wounds, my dear. There is no need.”
Phyllis began to weep harder. “Yes, brother, there is. It has haunted me these ten years or more. Every good thing that has happened to us has been at her expense. You made such an advantageous marriage, you were granted a knighthood, and your business is one of the most prosperous in London. I went to reside at Matlock and now I am marrying an earl. Even the girls have grown up amongst luxury and privilege beyond anything they might have known, had their parents lived. They shall have dowries and likely marry lords themselves, and for all this, it cost our dear Fanny her life.”
Sir Edward let out a shaky breath. He could not deny that he had been prone to similar notions more than once in the last decade, and he could well understand what his sister was feeling now. “I can only ask,” said he, “what good does it do you to dwell on such thoughts now? We cannot change the past, Phyllis, but our sister would never wish you to deny yourself any happiness on her account.”
Phyllis laughed bitterly. “Your memory is kinder to her than she deserves.”
“I suppose that is always the case, is it not? She was not a perfect woman, but she loved those girls, and she loved us. She would not wish us ill.”
Phyllis sniffled, seeming almost determined to wallow in her own misery. Do you not ever think of what life would have been like, if she and Tom had lived? I might have stayed at Longbourn a while longer with them, perhaps married our father’s handsome clerk in Meryton. You might have wed Miss Fisher....”
Sir Edward held up his hand to stop her. “I am sure we might have all been quite happy a hundred different ways, if this or that had been different, but this is what fate had in store for us, and we must accept it. You need not berate yourself for having had a happy life since the accident. It was not your fault.”
“I fear it was, sometimes. We were chattering away about –”
He cut her off. “I remember that day like it was yesterday, Phyllis. You have told me before. You and Fanny for speaking with great animation about my wedding, and woke the girls from their slumber. Elizabeth grew cranky and started crawling all over Tom, as she was wont to do. Fanny attempted to placate her, to no avail. Tom got cross, and got out of the carriage to sit up top and drive. He took the curve too fast, as did Lady Anne’s coachman, and that was that. I do not see how any of that was your fault; nobody at all was to blame, that is what an accident is.”
Phyllis wept into her hands for a moment before leaning forward and resting her head on his shoulder. “Oh brother, there was more to it than that, I fear.”
“What is it, Phyllis? Is there something you need to tell me?”
“Tom was not cross with Lizzy, he was cross with Fanny and I – at least I suspected he was. Just before he got out of the carriage, we were speaking of our plans to… forgive me, Brother… to prevent the wedding from ever happening.”
Sir Edward went rigid instantly, and drew away from his sobbing sister. “What?”
Phyllis clung to him. “I have wanted to tell you, all these years I have wanted to tell you, but I could see no good that could come of confessing the truth, and how it has weighed on me!”
Sir Edward felt as though the room had begun to spin, and he rested his arm on the sofa to steady himself. The events of that fateful day, and the horrible weeks that followed, were crystal clear in his mind, which turned to the moment Madeline Fisher had walked out of Pemberley without sparing him a backward glance. He groaned. “Madeline spoke to Fanny on her deathbed. You were there, Phyllis. What did she say to her?” He pressed his eyes closed, bracing himself for the worst. In some small way, he had known, he had always known.
“She told Madeline that your marriage could never take place, that Tom’s death and her own, and the loss of her child, her boy, had cursed your union, and that if Madeline married you, she would share the same fate. She said that any mercenary match in this family would be cursed.”
“Good God! She cursed us? And you sat by and allowed her to bully my fiancée?”
“She had me all twisted up, Edward. She said you ought to marry a fine lady, one that could someday put the girls into the paths of rich gentlemen. She said that she had married up, and that you and I ought to as well.”
Sir Edward let out a bitter sound that was almost a laugh. “She has certainly gotten her way, hasn’t she?”
“I tried to stop it, Edward. You must believe me. She had Miss Fisher in tears, and she was laying there, bleeding out. It was the most ghastly thing. I tried to stop it, but she turned on me at the end. She cursed me too, and now I am so afraid to marry Henry.”
Phyllis was shaking from the force of her sobs, and Sir Edward was moved at last to embrace the poor woman. “Hush, Sister. There is no such thing as a curse. Our Fanny was not in her right mind after the accident, I am sure you saw it. Whatever her intentions were before... well, it does not matter now, does it? We must move on with our lives. Besides, you love Henry, and he loves you - yours shall not be a mercenary match.”
Phyllis nodded and wiped her tears. “I do love him so dearly, but… oh, Edward, I am so sorry for my part in all that happened with Fanny. I might have discouraged her sooner, warned you or Miss Fisher.... You might have been ever so much happier. I know it is not well with you and Olivia, and I am so sorry.”
Sir Edward closed his eyes and leaned into his sister. The last ten years had been kind to him in many ways, yet even now he struggled to reassure his sister that all was well. Of course there is no curse. It was the ramblings of a dying woman who was out of her mind with grief. There is no curse.
“I am not so very unhappy. Olivia is a... troubled woman, a complicated creature, but we have our sweet Rose, and another babe on the way. We have had some good years, and may yet expect more. You and Henry, I am certain, will have a wonderful life together.”
Phyllis nodded sadly, and was on the verge of speaking when they heard a noise outside, and Sir Edward crossed the room to open the door.
***
“Tom got cross, and got out of the carriage to sit up top to drive....” Elizabeth abruptly drew her ear for the wall and raised her hands to her mouth to conceal a gasp. Beside her, Charlotte has frozen in place, her eyes wide.
Elizabeth whimpered softly, her countenance crumpling into tears as she hid her face in her hands. Charlotte put a hand on her shoulder. “Hush Lizzy, do not cry,” she whispered.
Elizabeth drew away from the wall, pacing wildly. “Do you not see? It is all my fault. That is why they never talk about my real parents, because it is all my fault they are dead!”
Charlotte looked on helplessly, wringing her hands as Elizabeth continued pacing and weeping pitifully. Then, she pressed her ear back against the wall. Elizabeth wiped her tears, her mind spinning with a thousand questions. “What are they saying?”
“Hush, I cannot hear!” Charlotte leaned in, her face somber as she listened. After a moment she replied, “Your aunt is weeping so much I can scarcely make it out – something about a curse.”
“A curse? What curse?”
“Hush!” Charlotte listened a moment longer. “She says your real mother cursed them from her deathbed.”
Elizabeth felt as though someone had struck her. She knew so little of her birth parents; she could not even remember their faces. Her uncle and mother had given her only the barest information over the years, and she struggled to connect the specter of her birth mother that existed in her imagination with this new discovery. “My mother put a curse on Uncle Edward and Aunt Phyllis? It must be all my fault – my fault that she died!”
Charlotte was still eavesdropping. “Uncle says there is no such thing as curses... ah, but he also says he is very unhappy because of Aunt Olivia. She is rather scary at times, is she not?”
Elizabeth had sunk down onto the floor to softly cry into her hands, and Charlotte finally came away from the wall to help Elizabeth to her feet before embracing her. “D
o not cry, Lizzy.”
“But what am I to do?”
“I do not know – what can you do? I am sure there is no such thing as a curse, not really! It is the stuff of fairy tales, and your mother was on her deathbed. I think she must have given them a fright.”
Still Elizabeth wept. “My mother and father died because I could not behave myself in the carriage – and we were nearly to Lambton. If I could have kept quiet a little longer, my parents would be alive.”
“But then you would not live at Pemberley! Don’t you like it here?”
“Of course I do, but that just makes it worse! If I am happy here, then I must be happy that I killed my parents,” Elizabeth whimpered.
“What a horrid thing to say,” Charlotte gasped.
Elizabeth could only gape at her with a sense of horror and no little fear, which she had not the words to describe. And then the music room door opened, and her uncle was gaping at her in dismay. His face was stained with tears, and his astonishment at discovering her there seemed on the verge of turning to anger. She could not bear to face him; she took off running around the corner, and bolted down the hallway.
***
Richard Fitzwilliam had lingered longer than his brother John and cousin William in the library, but decided he ought to go out riding with them after all, even if that prat George Wickham was to be one of the party. As he stepped out into the hall, he was struck by a force that nearly bowled him over – his young cousin running at full speed down the corridor like an absolute lunatic. After staggering backward for a moment, Richard steadied himself and grabbed his cousin by the shoulders; she looked at him with silent, tearful panic as he pulled her into the room and sat her down on a chair by the door. “Dizzy Miss Lizzy, whatever is the matter?”
He crouched down in front of her chair and waited patiently as the tale came spilling out of her, and at the end of it he patted her head and replied, “Well, Cousin, I daresay you have been duly punished for dropping eaves!”
What he had meant as a gentle reproof only resulted in more tears, and Richard winced at his own folly. Would that he had gone down to the stables with John and William directly! “Now Lizzy,” he said, hoping some wisdom would follow.
Instead, Charlotte slipped into the room; after seeing them there, she sighed with relief and closed the door. “Uncle Edward is looking for you, Lizzy, but I shall not give you up.”
Richard scowled at his younger sister. “Charlotte, was this your doing? Lizzy is quite upset – it was not for either of you to be spying on an adult conversation. Now we are harboring a little fugitive; look what your mischief has done!”
He instantly regretted scolding his sister, for it only heightened Elizabeth’s distress as she pleaded with them not to tell her uncle where she had gone to hide. It tore at his heart to see her thus, for he knew how much Lady Anne, Uncle George, and even Sir Edward doted on the girls, and how assiduously they had worked to shield their young wards from knowing too much of their own tragic history.
“It must have been quite a shock,” he conceded. “I am sure my aunts and uncles must have wished you to be older yet before they told you the truth of it. It was a dreadful time, better left in the past, I fear. Can you not see why they should wish to keep this from you?”
“Indeed, Lizzy,” Charlotte said, still looking white as a sheet from the incident. “Let us pretend we heard nothing at all.”
“But Uncle saw, he knows that I know the truth, and that it is all my fault. I will be in trouble for spying, and now that I know the truth, they are all at liberty to hate me for it!”
“Hate you?” Richard patted her hand. “My dear Cousin Lizzy, your aunt and uncle could never hate you. All this business about the curse, it is simply stuff and nonsense. I understand you mother was not quite sensible at the end... you must not think anything of it, and you certainly cannot blame yourself. “
“But there must be a curse, for my aunt and uncle are so very unhappy, and all because I made my parents crash their carriage. I am the reason they are dead!”
Elizabeth was weeping so loudly that Richard could only wonder at how half of the family had not descended on them already, in such a state. “Do be calm, dear one. Charlotte is right. You must put it all from your mind. I am sure Uncle Edward will wish to speak to you about it, and then it will all be well again. You need not have run away from him.” He ran his fingers through his hair and began to pace, wishing desperately he didn’t feel so damned responsible for putting it all to rights.
The look on Elizabeth’s face was frantic, her eyes flickering about so much that he could almost see the rapid barrage of thoughts and doubts piling up on her. “Mother and Father have been so good to us, but I do not even deserve it, not now that I know what I have done. I ought to be banished for it! That is what Aunt Phyllis said.”
“I am sure it was not!”
“She said we have all prospered from my parents dying, and it is true.”
“What an idea! Lizzy, you must not torment yourself like this. You did not, at the tender age of three, concoct a vicious scheme to crash your father’s carriage so that you might be adopted into a wealthier family. Nobody is going to punish you or banish you. It was an accident.”
“But I am still to blame,” Elizabeth wept, and she rose from her chair to pace beside Richard. “I cannot bear to know the truth of it.”
“You must bear it, or better still, put it from your mind.”
“I cannot.”
“You must! We must all do difficult things in life, even silly little girls,” Richard cried with no little vexation at Elizabeth’s abundant supply of tears. “It is in the past, and there is nothing to be done. You cannot punish yourself for some imagined crime against your family.”
Elizabeth looked at him with wide, frenzied eyes, and she wept once more. “I do deserve to be punished! I am sure I do!”
He wanted to rip his hair out, but instead he drew his cousin into an embrace. As he looked helplessly to Charlotte for some assistance, Elizabeth screamed into his chest and pounded at his shoulders with her fists. He sighed with resignation, and allowed her to spend her ire. “Alright then. Let it out, get it all out.” After a minute or two, Elizabeth had vented her emotion – and given him something of a beating – before she sat back down, deflated. Charlotte sat beside her and took her hand, murmuring little soothing sounds.
Richard observed the act with curiosity, confirming his own suspicion that he had not the talent for conversing with teenage girls at all, which was quite fine by him. He had tried to reason with the girl, but Charlotte’s nonsensical muttering seemed to have more of an effect. Shaking his head in frustration, he warned the girls that he would leave them be for now, but they must begin to collect themselves, and prepare to face Sir Edward. Closing the door to the library to afford them some privacy, he headed toward the front parlor in search of his Aunt Anne, hoping it wouldn’t break her heart to face Elizabeth’s emotional discovery.
***
There was an old staircase in a little-used corridor at the back of the ballroom, which could easily be accessed by another passageway at the back of the west gallery upstairs, that led to a little ornamental balcony overlooking the ballroom. Elizabeth had always imagined it must have been used for visitors who were very grand – the King himself might have visited and stood up on this balcony, looking down on the guests in the ballroom and waving before he made his grand descent. She had discovered the spot by accident, and it had become one of her favorite haunts when she played with her cousins.
She and Charlotte were hidden away there, sitting cross-legged on the floor, concealed from sight by the shadows and the thick stone railings, taking in the spectacle of the Twelfth Night ball. “It is so very grand,” Charlotte whispered.
Elizabeth looked out across the ballroom in wonder. “Everyone looks so fancy,” she breathed. “Is this what London will be like?”
“It will be for me, when I come out next year. I cannot wai
t!”
Elizabeth knit her brows. It was all very dazzling, but frightening, too. “I wonder how I shall get on in London.”
“You are determined to go, then?”
“I must,” Elizabeth said, tearing her eyes from the ballroom below to look over at her cousin. “Mamma and Uncle Edward said I do not need to go away, that I am punishing myself for no reason.”
“That is what Richard said, too.”
“I know.” Elizabeth sighed, feeling as though she were full of swirling, angry emotions that she could not gather into words. “I want to go.”
“Jane will be cross with you.”
“I know. Oh, what does it signify? She is going away to school in a few weeks, when William goes. She will not even miss me.”
“Lizzy, there you are!” Jane peeked her head into the alcove behind them, and Charlotte swatted at her. Jane grimaced, and crouched down to hide herself from sight of the ballroom. Sitting down on Elizabeth’s other side, she said, “You are always getting up to something without me, Lizzy.”
“That is because you never want to sneak around with us.”
Jane gave her a gentle but reproving look. “You will get into trouble. Mother and Father are already worried about you, and Uncle was very cross with you last week.”
“They need not be. Look, they are having a very fine time.” Charlotte smiled as she pointed out Lady Anne and Sir Edward dancing together halfway down the ballroom.
Jane flicked her eyes over to Charlotte, and then back to Elizabeth. “You are wrong, you know, Lizzy. I will miss you when you go to London. I think it is very unfair that Uncle Edward should take you away from Pemberley.”
“William goes away to school, and soon you shall, too. Why should I not go to London?”
“But why should you?”
Seeing Charlotte on the verge of speaking, Elizabeth nudged her. “Because.” Because I do not deserve to live here. “I want to.”
“I am happy you are coming to London,” Charlotte said. “You will not be able to go to balls and parties with me – not yet, anyway – but I shall be happy to have you close. Your aunt is to be my new Mamma, so I am sure we shall be together very often. It will be such fun!”