Maggie Wickham knew one or two things about Lizzy Darcy that the paying public did not. Firstly, she knew that the string of pearls that she wore to greet visitors was fake. Maggie never understood why Lizzy felt the need to dress like an upper-class soccer mum when working the desk at Pemberley as she did every Saturday afternoon, but she did know that it impressed the card-carrying members of the Historical House Society to see their 'Lady Darcy' dressed up as they expected. She knew Lizzy didn't mind obviously, it was something that she did quite often throughout the year – always posing for photographs and playing the convivial host as generations of Darcys had done before her.
Secondly, Maggie also knew that behind Lizzy's perfect RP and noble name, there was a regular Derbyshire girl who betrayed her upbringing by dropping her 'aitches' and saying 'I' instead of 'one'. She was so unlike the other members of her immediate family; Winston had been one of the old guard – eighty-three when he died, he had been brought up with a stiff upper lip and a silver spoon thrust firmly up his backside, but he had been kind and generous and his upper-class curmudgeonly ways developed into a wonderful juxtaposition against the laidback manners of his granddaughter.
Lizzy had been five when her parents divorced, her home in Ealing divided by lawyers and fees. Her older brother, Charles, was already happily settled at boarding school, and nobody knew what could be done about Elizabeth, who was too young yet to be sent away. Her father stayed in London to be closer to his job as honorary chairman of a large department store, whilst her mother returned to her hometown in Connecticut. Hugh refused to let his ex-wife take her out of the country, whilst Patricia was busy planning her second marriage to a member of the Kennedy clan and did not consider remaining in England an option. Reminded of his own childhood Winston decided that he would look after his granddaughter until her parents could come to some arrangement and so the household at Pemberley took the slight, curly haired girl with piercing grey eyes and an enormous grin under its wing.
As much as the estate was Lizzy's home, it was Maggie's too; most literary loving visitors to Pemberley were usually astonished to see that a Wickham worked in these hallowed halls – it was almost sacrilegious - but as much as Fitzwilliam Darcy's family had played their role in the continuation of the estate, so had George Wickham's. Maggie was the great-great-great-great-great grandniece of that much maligned gentleman and her family had always resided within the grounds, despite their relative's dubious reputation. Maggie had been the grown-up twelve-year-old, introducing the young girl to their home with all its special places, hidden secrets and history. It was really something to live here, Maggie thought, and she instilled a reverence for the draughty old house in Lizzy, something that she always found hard to forget.
"Here you go, your ladyship!" Maggie walked over to her friend, handing her a large mug of coffee emblazoned with Colin Firth's face and 'I Love Mr Darcy' on it.
"Ooh, you are an absolute jewel, Miss Wickham!" Lizzy laughed, taking a large swig and grabbing her bag from behind the counter. The room at the back of the house was light and airy and at some point in the past it had been the head housekeeper's room, although it had been the 'shop' for as long as Maggie or Lizzy could remember. "I think I have some jammie dodgers in here-"
"You did, but Harriet pinched them when you were out doing a meet and greet with the Barnabus lot," Maggie smiled, rearranging some guidebooks that weren't in their proper places and tidying up a display in the centre of the room. She paused for a moment to take stock of the day; it had been the busiest of the season so far, and they had been rushed off their feet since the gates had opened. Poor Harriet had been serving afternoon tea all day in full regency costume and had suffered in the heat of the Ale Cellar tea room on this uncharacteristically hot Saturday in April. "Don't worry though, I sent her upstairs early with a club sandwich, two pieces of chocolate fudge cake and a Twix."
"Which she will have eaten all to herself," Lizzy chastised. "Not thinking that her poor mother might want to enjoy the succour of Mrs Reynolds' chocolate cake that has been her only joy in life for the past ten years." She postured herself dramatically on the ticket desk, hand swept over her face like dramatic heroine. "Nobody suffers like I do, Miss Wickham. No-one."
"Wow," Maggie deadpanned. "Just. Wow."
Lizzy let out a loud, hard laugh which echoed out into the courtyard and made an elderly lady jump. She snorted, "Oh dear, best not upset the guests – that will be more points for Joyce to poke me with." Placing her cup down and grabbing a Pemberley postcard and magnet, she made her way over to the sour-faced woman with a beatific smile upon her face, freebies in her hand and 'the pleasure of meeting you' on her lips. Maggie smiled to herself, Lizzy Darcy could be about fifteen different people in one conversation, but she was always so wonderfully Elizabeth when it mattered. She watched as Lizzy charmed the old lady and took some selfies with the rest of the party, telling them information about the house and hugging them as if they were old friends. Maggie pulled her phone out of her pocket and read the email again just to make sure that it was real; she was through to the final stage of the application process… if she was successful it would mean that everything would change at Pemberley, as she wasn't one hundred percent sure that she was ready for it.
It was a wonderfully warm evening and the fragrance of the coming summer was held in the air like a promise. The flowers in the Italianate Garden were beginning to bloom and up in the Rose Garden you could see the tiniest buds beginning to emerge. Lizzy walked over to her best friend and threw her arms around her shoulder as they walked down the back stairs and towards the office to sign out.
"Maggie…" she said in her most persuasive voice. "It's such a nice night, don't you think?"
She smiled and laughed softly, "Lizzy, you know that we got in serious trouble last time."
"Yes," she whined. "But it was totally worth it…"
Maggie rolled her blue eyes, she was forty-four years old next month and if she couldn't risk the occasional disciplinary for drinking wine and eating takeaway on the lawn, then what was life even about.
The last guests were being politely ushered out of the gates, as the permanent staff began to close the house for the day, walking around the rooms covering furniture with dust cloths, turning off the fake coal fires that burned in each room, and resetting the house for the day. Walking through the rooms when no-one was about should have felt eerie, but it didn't. The volunteers and staff and the full army of people that it took to keep the house up to HHS standards was vast – but nowhere near the amount that it would have taken to run the house in its heyday. At night when the house had settled down for the evening, Lizzy often wondered how it would have felt being completely packed to the rafters, with people on every floor and living in every room. It had only been about a century earlier with all the young men called up to war, that Pemberley had reduced its staff down to a minimum, a small plaque marking the courage and valour of those lost estate boys and men in the garden. The Darcys always made an effort to remember everyone's name, and even though Pemberley was no-longer theirs, they still held the Annual Ball on New Year's Eve for the HHS staff paid for by the estate as had been the tradition since 1660 when George Darcy returned from exile in France.
For Lizzy living here in this vast house was a normal thing, during her schoolyears she was often chastised for turning up her CD player really loud in the Wyatt dining room and dancing to something inappropriate or running the length of the Long Gallery using the faces of her ancestors on the portraits lining the walls as markers, but it was her home – everything was tied to Pemberley and even though living her was part of her very essence, but every once in a while she felt swamped by the responsibility of it all, as if the house was holding onto her so tightly that it was getting harder to breathe.
The moon was high in the sky as Maggie and Lizzy finished their second bottle of wine and nibbled the cold remnants of their takeaway, eating as they did on the small slope directly in front of the south front of the house – the Pemberley View, immortalised in countless paintings, pictures, and on film. Small fairy lights, which had been placed there for a wedding a few weeks ago, twinkled in the bushes to the right of them, the moonlit house reflecting in the lake in front of them. It was a beautiful evening and the pair found that that after their earlier chatter they were now sitting in amicable silence, appreciating the beauty of their grand surroundings.
"Why can we only ever get pizza?" Lizzy questioned. "I really fancied a curry!"
"Because," Maggie stated her faux schoolteacher voice, "Pizza Bella is the only place that will deliver here after hours without reporting it to She Who Must Be Obeyed."
Lizzy always became indignant about Pemberley's Boss Lady and her strict observation of rules. She sighed, then shrugged, "I don't know what Joyce's problem is. It's not like I'm going to whip my boobs out and start running through the flowerbeds, and if she is looking for historical accuracy then every Darcy I have ever read about has always thought it a brilliant idea to dance on the front lawn," she slurped her wine. "Even her precious Fitzwilliam Darcy who, by the way, could be a bit of an arsehole, used to get drunk occasionally… And he also looked nothing like Colin Firth, did he? Did he?"
Maggie shook her head, smiling; the picture of Fitzwilliam Darcy which hung inside the Oak Suite showed a man with a furrowed brow, dark eyes and a chin you could cut glass with; casting agents around the world did him a great favour by choosing such handsome men to play the role. In 1995 when Darcymania had been at its height, they had put the portrait of him in the drawing room, it had been a mistake, most visitors were disappointed to see the real-life gentleman, who whilst still handsome, was nothing like his television counterpart. Eventually Winston paid for a local artist to paint an oil of television's Mr Darcy and the end of each day was spent removing underwear and tributes from the shrine that had appeared.
"Darcy and Elizabeth did stupid things occasionally – Miss Austen wrote them very well, Maggie, very well indeed." She was shaking her finger now. "They loved each other, obviously, but it was just a normal marriage and they argued and pissed each other off, and she got mad one time and left him, went to stay at Dunham; there are all these letters she wrote. It would have been a much better book if Jane bloody Austen had put all of this stuff in there, you know."
"I think Jane Austen put enough in the book, don't you think?" Maggie had studied the book for her A-Levels and she remembered that some parts were quite shocking – especially as there had been no attempt to disguise the identities of the main players.
"A book is life with the boring bits taken out, but she took out some of the more dramatic bits. The bits that made it real."
"And you have proof of this, do you?" Maggie asked teasingly.
Her thoughts immediately recalled the tall tales of Lizzy's youth, particularly one where she attempted fruitlessly to convince her grandfather that a large silver tureen had always been full of mud. Lizzy folded her arms, her chin jutted out and she sat on the rug, indignant, the true Darcy inheritance streaking across her face.
"Come off it, Lizzy, if there was any evidence of Darcy and Elizabeth doing anything particularly extraordinary then we would have known about it long ago," Maggie reasoned. "All of those researchers from Austenation squint over the archives every year trying to find some more information about them. The only thing they found of any interest was that Darcy spent three grand on a pineapple…which he didn't even eat!"
Lizzy laughed out loud, she loved the story of the pineapple, which had been family-lore and then confirmed by fact. "You know what," said Lizzy, still laughing. "I bet I fell asleep one-night reading Jane Austen fanfiction and got all confused... It sounds like something I would do, doesn't it?" She got up from the rug on the lawn, collected the rubbish in the carrier bag she had brought with her, after fighting to remove it from her trouser pocket, and began the short walk back to the house. "I'm off to Bedfordshire," she said, turning. "Goodnight, Miss Wickham."
"Goodnight, Lady Darcy," Maggie joked.
"Oh, piss off!" Lizzy laughed. "You know full well that it's Lady Elizabeth!" She did a little curtsey and began laughing again, her laughter echoing against the sandstone walls of the south front of the house and down into the ravine.
Maggie watched as her friend walked through the wrought-iron gates of the garden entrance and across the courtyard. She grabbed the blanket and started the short walk across the lawn and up to her own apartments in the stable block. As she walked through the rose garden and up the steps, she turned around for a moment to look at Pemberley – resplendent in the moonlight, it was beautiful and stately and everything the seat of the Darcy family should be, but Lizzy's statement had concerned her, because if there were private letters that had belonged to Fitzwilliam and Elizabeth, then these were of national literary importance and should be preserved for future generations, they couldn't just be kept under the bed in a cardboard box, which is where her friend kept everything of any significance.
Lizzy watched from her living room window to see Maggie reach the stable block and sent her a quick text message to let her know that she was home safely too. It was something that they always did, despite their proximity to each other. She sat on her bed, reaching under it until she found what she was looking for, in her hands was a small wooden box, not really of much significance, but inside were bundles and bundles of letters, fastened with yellow ribbon, safe and sound for nearly two centuries. These were the letters written by Elizabeth Bennet-Darcy and her husband, from the time of the failed proposal at Hunsford parsonage to the day of his death. Lizzy had made a mistake tonight, and she knew that the letters would no longer be safe under her bed. She knew their importance, knew that the women from Austenation would love to get their hands on this priceless correspondence and the stories about the Darcys that it told. She had spent her teens reading them in the small room off the dining room and she knew that she did not want the private words of her ancestors sprawled across the newspapers in the Sunday supplements, or printed in books to be given as gifts on Valentine's Day. Fitzwilliam and Elizabeth may have been immortalised forever by Jane Austen, but she wanted to keep the most private parts of their lives sacred. For now, the secrets of her great-great-great-great-great grandparents were safe; Lizzy was keeping a piece of history all for herself in the great house that once belonged to Mr Darcy of Derbyshire.