Anne had risen from her cushion. She approached her grandmother with the measured steps she had been practising all week, her hands folded at her waist, her expression solemn. She stopped at the appropriate distance and executed a curtsy that would have satisfied the most exacting dancing master in London.
“Good afternoon, Grandmother. I am very pleased to meet you.”
Lady Catherine stared down at her.
“You may call me Lady Catherine,” his aunt said. “Grandmother is a title that must be earned.”
Anne absorbed this without flinching. “Yes, Lady Catherine.”
Elizabeth gathered the book, the cushion, a slate and chalk from the low table. Her movements were unhurried, professional, betraying nothing of what she must be feeling. She caught Darcy’s eye as she moved to the door, a glance so brief it might have been accidental, but he read it clearly:I am leaving. Watch over her.
He gave the slightest nod.
Elizabeth passed Lady Catherine without a word, without a curtsy. She had already curtsied, and to repeat it would have been excessive. She slipped through the door and was gone, her footsteps fading down the corridor.
Lady Catherine did not watch her go. Her attention had fixed on Anne with an intensity that made Darcy’s skin prickle.
“Sit,” his aunt commanded, gesturing to the window seat. “Let me look at you properly.”
Anne sat, folded her hands in her lap and raised her face to the light, patient and composed, a portrait of childish obedience.
Darcy remained by the door. He would not leave his daughter alone with this woman. He would not leave her undefended, no matter what blood they shared, or did not share.
Lady Catherine lowered herself onto the opposite end of the window seat, her black skirts pooling around her. She reached out and took Anne’s chin in her fingers, turning the small face towards the light.
Darcy watched his aunt’s composure begin, very slowly, to crack, because the child’s face was a stranger’s face.
He had known this would happen. He had prepared for it, in the abstract way one prepared for battles that could not be avoided, by acknowledging the terrain, calculating the risks, bracing for impact. But watching it unfold was different. Watching Lady Catherine’s fingers tighten on Anne’s chin, watching the recognition bloom in his aunt’s eyes, watching her confront the evidence of a scandal she had buried with her own hands, it was something preparation could not soften.
Anne held still under the examination. She was accustomed to adults studying her, commenting on her features, remarking that she did not much resemble her father. She had learned to endure it with patience. She understood, on some instinctive level, that certain questions were not to be asked.
“You have your mother’s chin,” Lady Catherine said. The words came slowly, as though she were testing them for truthand finding them wanting. “The shape of it, the stubbornness.”
“Did my mother have a stubborn chin, Lady Catherine?”
“She had a stubborn everything. It was the only strong thing about her.”
Anne considered this. “Miss Bennet says stubbornness is determination with poor manners. She says I have a great deal of determination.”
“Does she indeed.”
Lady Catherine’s thumb moved across Anne’s cheek, tracing the line of her jaw. Her gaze was fixed on the child’s face with an intensity that bordered on hunger. She was searching, cataloguing, looking for something that was not there.
Darcy knew she was looking for the narrow, delicate features of Anne de Bourgh, preserved in miniature. The echo of her daughter, the continuation of her bloodline, the proof that something of Anne had survived what had taken her.
She would not find it.
Anne’s hair was blonde, curling softly around a face which was round where her mother’s had been narrow. Her eyes were blue, but not the pale, watery blue of the de Bourgh line. They were a vivid, striking blue that belonged to a man Lady Catherine had never known. The child was beautiful. She was healthy, clever, and beloved. She was everything Anne de Bourgh had not been, and Lady Catherine was staring at her as though she were a letter written in a language she could not read.
“You do not have her eyes.” Lady Catherine’s voice had gone strange, flat and distant, as though she were speaking from very far away. “I had hoped—but no. These are not her eyes.”
“What colour were my mother’s eyes, Lady Catherine?”
“Green. Like mine.” Lady Catherine released the child’s chin. Her hand fell to her lap, and Darcy saw, with a jolt of shock, that it was trembling. “She had my eyes, my colouring, and none of my constitution. She was ill from the day she was born. I thought—I believed—”
She stopped, the silence stretching taut and terrible.
Anne waited. She was six years old and she did not understand what was happening, but she understood that something was wrong. She understood that the tall woman in black was upset, that the air in the room had changed, that her father was standing very still by the door and watching with an expression she had never seen before.