Eternal Flame ~ A Pemberley Fairy Tale

Chapter Four

An hour later, Liz was cursing herself for letting Mr. Bingley leave so easily. Although she hadn't expected anyone to show her around the house on the night of her arrival, her daydreams had often involved an extensive tour on her first full day. From what Mrs Ellis had said, it seemed that any viewing would be at the whim of her host, and then only when he could fit it into his schedule. If his appearance hadn't surprised her quite so much, she might have thought to ask him while she had his attention.

If she'd known in advance how young the owner of Pemberley was, or how handsome, Liz would have been sick with nerves long before she even stepped over the threshold. Handsome men had always unnerved her. It had been the same ever since university, when she'd been the 'geeky history girl'. While she'd had her crushes just like everyone else, none of the good looking ones had given her a second glance, and she'd been too busy to develop any meaningful social life.

Not only was William handsome, in a rugged Burberry-model kind of way, it appeared he wasn't short of a pound or two either. Under any other circumstance, she would be a quivering wreck by now.

Shaking her head as though to empty her thoughts, Liz looked at the piles of documents surrounding her. They were a historian's dream come true. Had anything ever been thrown away? It seemed as though every tradesman's bill, inventory, ledger and day book were stored in the strong room, going back over the last two hundred years at least. There had also been relatively few structural alterations, the biggest changes being the simple pleasures of indoor plumbing, heating and electricity; the kinds of things most people now took for granted. There were invoices from stonemasons who had made repairs to the fabric of the house and bills from decorators and cabinet makers, when rooms had been refurbished and new furniture ordered.

A small painting on the wall illustrated Pemberley's south side, a façade of the house she'd never seen. All her dreams had focussed on the north facing elevation. Although she'd visited a number of well-stocked libraries, including the British Library in London, Mr. Bancroft's illustration showing a Palladian fronted mansion set in a landscaped park was the only image from the nineteenth century she had been able to locate. She'd even bought a copy of the print from an internet auction site and pinned it to the wall by her bed. The successors of that guidebook had printed the same image for a handful of editions before dropping the grand estate of the Darcy family, the original owners, from later versions.

Local directories covering the area had mentioned little of the estate or its residents, and it wasn't until she sent a letter of enquiry to Derbyshire Archives that she received proof that the building had survived into the twentieth century. Even then, the only photograph they held was a grainy black and white aerial shot taken in the seventies as part of a local environmental survey, the house no bigger than her thumbnail in the background.

It was almost as though someone had sought to erase Pemberley from history.

And yet now she was sleeping here, like a princess in a castle. She was glad she'd not told Amanda about her invitation. Her step-mother was the worst kind of social climber and Liz didn't want to imagine the lengths she might go to in order to secure a visit while Liz was here.

Liz spotted a roll of papers sticking out from one of the higher shelves. When she spread them out on the desk—the corners weighed down to stop them rolling closed—she realised they were blueprints for the house, drawn up ten years earlier at the time they'd last renewed the electric wiring.