The late spring sunshine was beating through the tin roof of the sports hall. Harriet yawned widely, she was now three quarters of the way through the GCSE Maths paper that she was fully aware she was failing wildly. She was glad that her mum had chosen to send her to Lambton High, a small average comprehensive school with middling exam results and a toadying headteacher. It had been a bit strange to begin with, especially as Mr Evans had made a particular point of making everyone in the school aware of who she was on the day she started, which was doubly strange seeing as it was the first day for most of friends from St David's Primary too and she didn't see why she warranted special attention. She tried to focus on the exam…algebra… when would she ever need it? Why would she need it? She rubbed her eyes and looked up at the clock, only fifteen minutes to go and then she would be free.
Hugh Darcy had been disgusted that his granddaughter was not to be educated at a London prep school, but soon furnished his consent after his daughter said that she would be happy for him to foot the bill if a private education was his wish. The Duke was already saddled with copious school bills for his youngest daughter, Lady Imogen, who was growing steadily wilder and the more he thought about it, the more he thought that state education would be an interesting experience for Harriet, who was the most like him of his grandchildren and, after all, it was what he paid his taxes for now that the government had closed the offshore loophole.
"Pens down," projected the invigilator from the front of the hall. There was a collective sigh from her year group and the immediate scraping of chairs along the floor. Funny how sports halls smell during exams, Harriet thought, like feet, desperation and silent farts. She collected her phone from the plastic tray and switched it on, taking a minute to wave to Summer, who rolled her eyes from across the room, tossed her blonde curls and gestured that she would meet her outside. The phone beeped four times: Mum, Mum, Mum, Dad. Oh, that was rare. Harriet sent her mum a quick confirmation text and made a mental note to reply to her dad later, before walking down the school corridor and out into the amazing freshness of the May afternoon.
Lizzy pulled up outside Starbucks in the shiny maroon Range Rover that she managed to borrow from Donald, the grumbly groundskeeper who lived at the main gatehouse with his wife, Anne. The car was his pride and joy, recently purchased by the estate and emblazoned with 'Pemberley Estates' and the shiny gold crest of the Darcy family, which also appeared on t-shirts, mugs and magnets available to purchase from the gift shop. Lizzy's own ancient Fiat had been slowly deteriorating over the past few months and she was getting tired of it deciding to strand her halfway down the main drive when the engine would fail and refuse to sputter back to life. She had found herself in trouble during the weekend of Mr Darcy's Regency Christmas when the car, loaded with Christmas shopping, had stopped dead at the ticketing kiosk, holding up the three coaches and stream of visitors desperate to see local actors re-enact scenes from Pride and Prejudice, whilst eating millefruit biscuits recreated from a recipe that had been found in the archives. Not only had she been firmly told off by Joyce over the walkie talkies she watched two helpful teenagers from the kiosk and a coach driver move the car out of the way, but she had then had to walk the length of the driveway with handfuls of shopping bags. Conveniently, Harriet's phone had been on silent that morning and so she did not answer any of the seventeen irate phonecalls from her mother.
It was Harriet that Lizzy was meeting for Starbucks – well, not exactly meeting, but collecting. Lambton didn't have a McDonalds or a Subway for teenagers to loiter about outside, so they all loitered about inside the converted pub, which capitalised on American tourists, and ordered Frappuccinos whilst taking advantage of the free Wi-Fi. Harriet said goodbye to Summer and Caitlyn with a multitude of hugs, even though they would be sending each other snapchats all the way home and meeting in town the following morning, and climbed into the car, passing Lizzy the grande skinny latte that acted as payment for the journey home. The trouble with living on an estate that wasn't built by Redrow was that it was very hard to catch a bus home, and even though Harriet was increasingly enterprising about making her own way back to the house, there were times when she had to rely upon her mum's good nature, or her guilty conscience, depending on what day it was.
"How did it go?" Lizzy asked, as she slurped her coffee and manhandled the gears.
"Maths, innit," Harriet sighed. "It just has to be a C."
"It just has to be a C?" One eyebrow was raised, and Harriet groaned.
"Yes, Mum! I only need a C for AS Levels, you know this." She harrumphed loudly and focused her attention on the constantly flashing phone in her hand, before turning the radio station over even though it was the middle of Women's Hour. They passed over the cattlegrid and turned onto the bridge, before settling onto the long, grand sweep of the drive. The flag was flying on top of the Cage, signalling it was open, and a few straggling visitors were slowly making their way down from the ancient hunting lodge, the bright colours of their jackets and wellies popping against the burnished hues of the ancient deer park.
"Did you hear from your Dad today?"
"Yes," Harriet confirmed. "He's coming to stay with Maggie next week, so I guess I will be over there for the weekend."
"Oh."
Harriet noticed the change in her mum's mood immediately and, somewhat wisely, changed the radio station back to Women's Hour. They pulled up at the East Front gate, parking the car in Donald's space at the front. Walking silently together under the gateway and around the circular driveway, Harriet nudged herself into Lizzy's shoulder and the two Darcy ladies hurried inside for a Netflix binge and a microwave Biryani.
Lizzy Darcy and Matthew Wickham had grown up together at Pemberley. Closer in age to each other than to the very grown-up twelve-year-old 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, Barbara, 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, but she didn't really notice him at all until after they had left high school and gone to separate colleges. Now she watched as Wickham brought 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. She followed him around like a lost puppy, until one day he found her reading in the library and, overwhelmed with something he thought was love, he kissed her so hard and so furiously that she was convinced her lips were going to fall off. She kissed him back, and for the next year the young couple were completely inseparable, spending long summer days at the Cage, cold Autumn evenings walking hand in hand around the grounds, and dark Winter nights making their lips sore in front of a roaring coal fire that blazed in the Tudor fireplace of the drawing room. There was something blissful, Lizzy thought, about falling in love with your best friend, there was no qualms and no hesitations, just happiness.
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.
Wickham and Darcy promised to stay true, but time and distance can wear down anything and by Christmas they mutually decided to have a break. Lizzy knew it was for the best, because even though she was pretty much 100% sure that she was going to marry Matthew Wickham one day in the future and cause a furore in the literary world with such a union, she knew that they both needed to experience other people and other relationships to reassure each other that this was 'It'. Unfortunately, Matthew Wickham had 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 cried to Maggie on the phone, a lot, because even though he was doing nothing wrong, it hurt like hell. Her friend was thankful that their cross-network phone calls were only 5p a minute.
Elizabeth was walking out of a lecture on European Law when she realised that her grandfather had shuffled off this mortal coil. She had twelve missed calls from her dad, the man who never called anybody; there was no need to return the call as she knew the reason for it. She got the bus back to Didsbury, her head full of sadness and confusion, before driving the thirty-eight miles back to Pemberley. Hugh was there already, teary-eyed and sad. 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, Carole, was sitting on the shabby drawing room couch holding tightly onto Imogen, whose podgy toddler limbs poked out from her expensive woollen coat. Lizzy felt light-headed. It was all so vivid and yet surreal, as if she was having an out of body experience. The last thing she heard were the booming, Chelsea tones of her brother, before she passed out and landed on the threadbare Victorian chenille rug with a thud.
She awoke in her bedroom hidden away in the Elizabethan part of the house, the sheets were heavy and warm, and she could feel the smouldering heat of the fire. She smelled something very familiar that made her open her eyes; wearing his regular aftershave and with his hair suitably shorn, Matthew was watching her intently from his seat next to her bed. He looked tired.
"I am so sorry about Winston," he had said. "He was a truly great man and I am going to miss him so much."
She nodded in understanding before the tears came. He climbed into the bed with her and held her close that night until she slept, and he was there in the morning when she woke, the sadness of the situation washing over her once more. He continued to hold her until there were no more tears left.
The Darcys were all aware of the clause in the Duke of Derbyshire's will. The house, as much as it was loved and cherished by them, was too expensive for one not very wealthy family to support. About a decade earlier, Hugh and his siblings had agreed with their father that the house should be bequeathed to the Historical House Society, or similar, to be preserved for the nation. Hugh would primarily inherit the titles, the Grosvenor Square penthouse, and the villa in Cap Ferrat, whereas his brother, Jeremy, was quite happy to remain at Longbourne; their sister, Julia, who was never happy, preferred a financial settlement over property and was awarded it. There was to be a family apartment made available as a condition of the transfer and this was one of the terms that Winston Darcy had been adamant about – there must always be a Darcy in residence at Pemberley. It was decided that for now the Darcy would be Elizabeth, who was the obvious choice to remain.
Three months after the death of her grandad, Lizzy had finally packed up all her belongings from the room that the new guidebook referred to as 'The Knights Suite"; she had also been allowed to keep a few personal items of furniture from various rooms in the house that had not been deemed important enough to be added to the Society's inventory. She hadn't been able to be in the house when the stocktakers had gone through every room cataloguing each item, however small and she had thrown herself out into the grounds, walking for miles around the estate until night fell. It had been sad for her indeed when she watched as her grandfather's writing bureau was taken from the house to take part in an Austen exhibition in London - the inlaid initials on the top confirming that it had originally belonged to Fitzwilliam Darcy, and she cried a few tears in the days that followed as the walnut encased pianoforte was removed from the drawing room for the same reason.
The instrument had once belonged to Georgiana Darcy, purchased as a gift by her devoted older brother and documented in the nation's second favourite book. She knew that, and she understood its importance, but it was also where her great-aunt Sybil had practiced Holst's 'Jupiter' with her for days before the grade 2 piano exam. Even though she had not played for years, it was hard to acknowledge that she would not be able to place her fingers on those well-worn keys again unless she paid an entrance fee and illicitly stepped over the velvet rope. 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 mark 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. When she had first moved to Pemberley, Winston had read her a story and tucked her in under heavily embroidered sheets, trying to make the room feel homely and suitable for the five-year-old mass of curls with the sullen lip who was now under his guardianship. Those first few weeks without her mum had been hard but were made a lot easier when Maggie had told her that the bed had been made by a distant ancestor for a queen of England, who had slept in this very room. Lizzy slept a lot easier knowing that she was sleeping in an actual real-life princess bed, and her grandad made the room a lot more child friendly by wrapping the posts in fairy lights, much to the chagrin of Mrs Reynolds, who could see how the hot lights were damaging the finish of the ancient wood.
She looked out of her window for a moment, noticing how ornate the mouldings were, how tall the statues on the main portico reached, and the distance to the ground below. Lady Elizabeth Darcy 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. There was a tremendous sense of loss that swept over her; first Matthew, then Grandad and now her home, but more than that – her own sense of identity, she was now 'Lady Elizabeth', living at Pemberley as the Darcy in residence and playing a role she never auditioned for. There was also the question of University, now having to live in Derbyshire she had given up her place in the house she shared with her friends and resigned herself to the daily commute that would dominate her final year of study. She had passed her second year with flying colours but was didn't know if she wanted to continue, despite making stubborn plans in her own head to finish. She had studied Law as Winston himself had done and followed his wishes, but despite her obvious inherited talent for it – there had been a practicing attorney in the family since the 1840's - she found that she had no predilection for it. There was a knock on the door and she opened it to reveal a young man with red hair and a friendly face, wearing the purple t-shirt of the HHS. His shiny new name badge said 'Steven' and he gestured to her remaining box and grabbed it for her. She followed him out of the room up to the flat on the top floor, where sparse staff quarters had been transformed into a quirky, misshapen, three bedroomed flat. Lizzy sat down on the battered old red couch that had once lived in the drawing room but was now hers. And she cried.
In the late 1700's, George Darcy had remodelled the north front of the house for reasons only known to himself. He had employed the services of James Wyatt who found some of the more Elizabethan aspects of the house not exactly pleasing to his eye. George, whose wife Anne was in town and due to give birth to their first child within the next few weeks, left the venerated architect in charge and returned a year later with wife and son, Fitzwilliam, to see that the bellcote on the north gatehouse had been removed and rebuilt on a small incline to the east of the house. George Darcy was now in possession of a three-story folly with a spire which Wyatt had named 'The Lantern', his wife laughed at how remarkably in fashion they now were and how her sister would commission something even grander to be built in the gardens of Rosings Park. Sometimes in the evening, when their son had been taken to the nursery and they were alone, they would walk the short distance to the edge of what was now called Lantern Wood and enjoy each other's company until the servants lit the beacons, signalling to their Master and Mistress that it was now time to return home.
Matthew Wickham, currently languishing around the stable block apartment, found himself constantly berated by his sister and mother for his lack of housekeeping skills. Escaping the four walls on a balmy September night, he found himself walking up to the Lantern to have a cheeky cigarette and a can of lager. Unexpectedly, he found Lizzy there doing the same, the Marlboro Light balancing off her lip as she poured her Fosters into a plastic pint glass. They talked and reminisced and drank, falling back into their friendship as if it was the easiest thing in the world. Overwhelmed with grief and nostalgia, 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. Six weeks later, Elizabeth Darcy was throwing up her breakfast with alarming regularity and Matthew Wickham had disappeared into the ether.
Lizzy had always been civil to Matthew for the sake of Harriet, but she did not want him walking in and out of the house as if he owned the place, and she most definitely did not want to have to deal with him for more than a few days.
"Harry?" She whispered to her daughter, who was curled up on the couch next to her.
"Yea?" A sleepy response to a long day.
"How long is your Dad staying for?"
Harriet paused for a moment, thinking, then said, "about ten weeks, he said. He's producing the film, innit."
That's just brilliant, Lizzy thought, just bloody brilliant. She downed her glass of wine poured herself another.