North by Northanger (A Mr. & Mrs. Darcy Mystery) (33 page)

“Of course, ma’am.”

“Mr. Darcy and I have been seeking a strongbox that once belonged to Lady Anne. A carving of a Madonna lily graces its top, and a letter lock seals it shut. We have come to understand that on the day Lady Anne died, George Wickham had the box in his possession. Have you any knowledge of it?”

“That good-for-nothing bounder—I always knew he’d turn out a knave. Yes, I came upon him. Found him with a rock getting ready to smash the lock open. He tried to tell me it was his box and that he had simply forgotten the combination, but I took one look at the lily on the lid and suspected it belonged to Lady Anne. I snatched it up before he could damage it. He threatened to report me to his father and insist I be dismissed. I said, ‘Go ahead, boy. Mr. Wickham is a good steward and a fair man. Let us see what he has to say about young scamps who repay the generosity of the Darcy family by stealing from them.’ He blustered some more, but when I told him to get out of Lady Anne’s garden and that I never wanted to catch sight of his worthless hide in it again, he took off fast enough.”

That indeed sounded like Wickham. “What did you do with the strongbox?” she asked.

“Well, as I said, I thought it must belong to Lady Anne, but word
had passed through the servants that the midwife was with her, so I could not ask her about it. And I did not want to leave it anywhere that scapegrace might find it again. I knew of a place in the garden where it would remain safe until her ladyship could retrieve it.”

“Is it yet there?”

“Aye, it waits for her still. Or rather, I suppose it waits for you, Mrs. Darcy—as you are the lady of the house now.”

He led her to one of the alcoves along the garden’s perimeter. She remembered it well. This was where she had experienced the miraculous moment of quickening, where she had first felt her daughter stir within her. Without realizing it, she had been mere inches from the blessed statuette.

“Of the three alcoves, this was Lady Anne’s favorite,” he said. “When the Madonna lilies are in bloom, it offers the finest view She spent a great deal of time here the summer before she died, resting or reading on this bench, sometimes simply contemplating.”

With slow, deliberate actions, Mr. Flynn carefully mounted the stone bench and stood. Under ordinary circumstances, Elizabeth would have insisted on sparing him the climb, but given her shifting center of balance and the amount of grace with which she moved these days, the septuagenarian was probably the superior gymnast between them.

A large terra-cotta rosette adorned the wall behind the bench. With considerable effort, he lifted it away from the wall and set it down to reveal a niche behind.

Within the hollow rested a small rosewood box.

Elizabeth and Darcy stared at the small casket resting on the table between them. She had brought it straight to her dressing room, where Darcy had discovered her testing the letter lock.

“Would you care for a turn?” she offered.

“I have already attempted every word of four letters I could call to mind.”

“That was nearly two decades ago. Surely your vocabulary has acquired a few more.”

“None that my mother would have used.”

So close and yet so far. She had first tried simply
ANNE
, which was apparently too simple. She had next tried Anne and George’s initials without luck. So she’d tried
LUCK
, but the lock did not appreciate her sense of humor.

FITZ
had failed,
DEAR
had disappointed,
LADY
had let her down. She had thought herself brilliant when
LILY
occurred to her, but evidently it had not occurred to Lady Anne. Nor had
MARY
or
GOLD
.

“We are opening this lock if I have to retrieve Dr. Johnson’s dictionary from the library and attempt every word in it,” she said.

“Actually, that idea has merit. At least we would be applying a method instead of random guesses. But perhaps my mother’s correspondence would be a better place to start. Or her journal—particularly the entry where she mentions the lock.”

She retrieved the journal, George and Anne’s love notes, and the Tilney letters. She started with the journal. “The entry about the lock does not offer many inspiring four-letter choices. I doubt we shall meet success with
that, have, take
, or
whim
. Some of the other entries hold more promising possibilities. Try
baby
.”

He did, and shook his head.

“
Safe
?
Gift
?
Born
?”

No. No. No.

More failures followed. She abandoned the journal and turned to the love notes. She began with the last—the one George had written to Anne when Georgiana was conceived. For some reason, she was partial to it, perhaps because, unlike the breathless infatuation of the early letters, it bespoke a deeper, time-tested affection. She skimmed to the end of the now-familiar lines, to the final paragraph she had read countless times. It had never before made her gasp, as she did presently.

Of course! Why had she not thought of it?

“Darcy,” she said, barely able to contain her excitement, “try
love
.”

He rotated the four rings to
L-O-V-E
and tugged on the lock. It remained securely closed.

“Let me attempt it.”

Darcy relinquished the box. Elizabeth spun the rings out and back into position—with the same result. The lock would not budge.

She deflated. “I was so certain.” It had seemed such an obvious, natural word for Lady Anne to have chosen. So intuitive.
Love conquers all
. Apparently, today it did not.

They spent another half hour in futile attempts, interspersed with speculation about Helen Tilney’s ivories and who had dug up the marigold beds. Darcy shared her opinion that somehow Mrs. Stanford and her accomplices were involved.

“I wish we knew Wickham’s present whereabouts,” Darcy said. “If he is in the neighborhood, he could easily have stolen onto the grounds last night.”

“Lydia says he escorted her as far as Lambton, then returned to Newcastle.”

“With Wickham, that means nothing. He could have lied to her, or prevailed upon her to lie to us.”

“It would have to be the former. Lydia is incapable of keeping anything to herself.” She rotated the rings to
TALE
, without reward. “Yet even if Wickham is the offender, how did he come to suspect the ivories lay beneath the marigolds only hours before we intended to seek them there ourselves?”

“Might your sister have eavesdropped on our conversation? She was up and about late last night—as were my aunt and your mother. She might have then slipped from the house to meet with Wickham. How did she appear at breakfast this morning?”

“She did not appear at all.” Had a nocturnal rendezvous with her husband led to Lydia’s late rising? Her sister had never been one to welcome the day at an early hour. “I dislike contemplating Lydia practicing such deceit upon me. If we are casting a suspicious eye toward our relations, I would much rather blame your aunt.”

“You believe my aunt conspires with Frederick Tilney’s mistress?”

“No, with Mr. Wickham—he is such a favorite of hers.”
ROSE
met with rejection. “I suggest that Mrs. Stanford and company might not be our culprits at all. I caught Lady Catherine prowling in my dressing room during your absence, and for a time I was unable to locate Helen Tilney’s letters. Perhaps her ladyship borrowed the letters and drew her own conclusions from them. She may speculate that your mother hid her statuette with the others. Or she might want all the ivories for herself.”

“Even if my aunt has taken up espionage, I doubt she has ever held a shovel in her life.”

“No, but that would not prevent her from instructing someone else in its use. She has servants here at her command.” She pushed the box away, having exhausted her four-letter vocabulary at present, and asked the question that weighed most heavily on her mind. “The culprit’s identity aside, was he successful? Did he find the Northanger ivories?”

“If he did, he is long gone. If he did not”—an uneasy expression crossed Darcy’s face—”he may yet lurk about Pemberley.”

“Still trying to find the ivories before we do.” She became more hopeful. Perhaps the Northanger ivories had not slipped through their grasp after all. But if Helen Tilney had not buried them beneath the marigolds, where had she hidden them? The crib quilt came to mind again. Mrs. Tilney could not have sewn the ivories themselves into it—they were too large to go unnoticed—but had she secreted within the stitches some key to their whereabouts?

“I should like to take a closer look at the quilt Helen Tilney made,” she said.

They hid the strongbox in a secure location and went to the nursery. All was prepared for the imminently anticipated new Darcy, and Elizabeth realized that she had very little time remaining in which to contemplate such matters as ivories and letter locks. Tiny caps and tinier fingers, hungry cries and toothless smiles would soon consume her attention. She still contemplated the birth itself with apprehension, but the discovery of Lady Anne’s strongbox lent her courage.
Surely they would find a way to open it and access the Madonna and Child statuette before she was brought to bed. If they were also to solve the Northanger puzzle and clear the Darcy name before the birth, however, they would have to do so quickly.

She looked toward the windows for the quilt, but it no longer hung between them. It was on the floor.

Torn into countless pieces.

Thirty-four

Elizabeth suspected herself to be the first creature who had ever dared to trifle with so much dignified impertinence
.

—Pride and Prejudice

T
he quilt was mutilated, the blocks torn apart, the top ripped from its backing. Whoever had visited destruction upon it had done a thorough job of profaning a gift whose stitches had bound together the fabric of two women’s lives. And an equally effective job of robbing the quilt of any clue it might have held.

The sight sickened Elizabeth. Her stomach weakened; a low pain began in her back and radiated to her abdomen. She sank into a nearby rocking chair.

Darcy observed her with concern. “Has your leg fallen numb again?”

She shook her head. “I shall be fine in a moment.” She looked at him in astonishment. “Who—”

“I do not know, but I intend to find out. Unlike the garden vandalism, this offense must have been committed by someone within the house, and no one will rest tonight until my questions have been answered.”

When she recovered from the shock, Darcy escorted her back to
her dressing room. He ordered her some tea and sat with her awhile after Jenny brought it. Then he departed to begin his interrogation.

Elizabeth tried to distract herself by returning to the strongbox and its letter lock, but it could not hold her attention. She found herself repeating failed combinations as the image of Helen Tilney’s destroyed handiwork continually intruded into her thoughts. The remains of the lovingly created baby quilt kept calling to mind another innocent victim of violence, the child she had read about yesterday in the Prioress’s Tale. She shuddered again as she had upon reading it—what a dark story to be told by a character who wore a brooch inscribed with “Love conquers all.” Or whatever the Latin words were that Georgiana had read aloud.

She paused.
I have taken the precaution of putting a lock on the casket. . . . I think Madame Eglentyne would approve
.

She scooped up the lockbox.

The large tome of Chaucer’s complete works remained in her morning room. She found the chamber blessedly free of Lady Catherine, her mother, or anyone else who might have considered herself at liberty to make use of it. The book lay where she had left it, its massive weight apparently having rendered it immune from the susceptibility of other written material at Pemberley to disappear and reappear at unpredictable intervals. She set Lady Anne’s box on the desk, went to the book, and rapidly flipped pages until she found what she sought.

And theron heng a brooch of gold ful sheene, on which ther was first write a crowned A, and after
Amor vincit omnia.

She rotated the rings of the lock.
A-M-O-R
.

It opened.

Her heart pounding, she removed the lock from the hasp and lifted the lid. Velvet cushions surrounded a small cylindrical object covered in a soiled, tattered scrap of fabric. She held her breath as she reached inside and carefully lifted the treasure from its cradle. Slowly, she unwrapped the fragile mantle to reveal the Madonna and Child.

She released her breath. The statuette was exquisite, reflecting at once its medieval origins and an ageless veneration for its subject. The ivory captured the Christ child as a boy of perhaps two, offering Mary an apple as she held him. Her face reflected serenity Elizabeth wished she could borrow, and indeed, gazing upon the figurine, she felt a sense of calm envelop her.

Until a jarring voice shattered it.

“I see you have recovered my statue for me.”

She turned so quickly that she almost dropped the ivory. Not trusting herself to keep a firm grasp on the statuette, she set it back in the cushioned box. She then walked toward Lady Catherine so that she blocked Darcy’s aunt from the prize.

“It is not your ivory. Your mother gave it to Lady Anne, who in turn passed it to me.”

“Insolent, grasping upstart! How dare you claim my mother’s heirloom as your own? Your pretension exceeds all bounds of tolerance.”

“And your selfishness surpasses even that of which I had thought you capable.”

“Hand over my ivory or I shall take it for myself.”

Elizabeth had done with her ladyship’s riding roughshod over everyone in her path. Physical discomfort and the day’s events had also rendered her cross in general. Women with swollen ankles should not be provoked.