Chapter Twenty Four
Colonel Fitzwilliam arrived the night before the rest of his family descended on Pemberley to discuss Georgiana’s situation.
Elizabeth was not particularly nervous about hosting an earl and his lady, but she still rather hoped that they would be far easier than Lady Catherine.
“Am I to expect a grand inquisition from the start?” Elizabeth asked Colonel Fitzwilliam as soon as he leapt off his horse. “In what mood do your parents plan to come—you need not tell me if it would violate confidence. I intend to be equally cheerful no matter the answer.”
They entered the house, and Colonel Fitzwilliam washed the dust off his face and hands with the water offered by the servants.
“You need not worry about them saying anything. Your husband has been quite pointed in his letters. Darcy, my poor father is more than a little annoyed at you for your apparent assumption that we’d all be calling Mrs. Darcy ‘the fortune hunter’ to her face if you did not say you would not permit it. ”
“Oh, but do they call me the fortune hunter in the family circle?” Elizabeth grinned. The world just seemed like a cheerful place right now. She was sure some of this glow would fade, likely in a few years, but there was no point in not being delighted with everything right now.
“No.” Colonel Fitzwilliam said, “Though of course they are most curious to meet you, but you would be curious and have concerns in their position. But they have Lady Catherine’s description of how Darcy will respond to an insult to your honor.”
Elizabeth took her husband’s arm and said, “My champion.”
“By Zeus! You both look delighted. Marriage suits you, Darcy.”
“Well, of course,” Darcy replied. “At least when one has made the right choice of partner.”
“I was right,” Georgiana said, “it is very romantic.”
Elizabeth laughed. “She has not ceased to say, ‘I told you so’.”
After they settled in the drawing room Colonel Fitzwilliam said to Georgiana, “I understand that you are facing some difficulties.”
“I do not…” Georgiana sighed. “I know that must be why you are here. To discuss what you all wish to do with me. You wouldn’t have left your business with the regiment to be here otherwise.”
Elizbeth hugged Georgiana. “What do you wish to be done? I have asked you already, but you do not say much about the matter.”
“I…I have made such mistakes. And this…affects the whole family. Not only me.”
“Georgie,” Colonel Fitzwilliam asked, “you sound as though you know what you wish, only you are frightened to say it.”
She nodded. “But Fitzwilliam and Elizabeth are too kind. I do not want to say anything upon the matter, until I know what the rest of the family wishes me to do. I will go into exile, if I must.”
“No,” Elizabeth said, “no exiles. You are my newest sister, and I like you, and I’m keeping you.”
“But…I know what people shall say. I would never wish to put myself forward. Your position in the neighborhood… you can’t mean to keep me with you.”
“People say,” Elizabeth replied, “a great many things. Believe me, they have been said about me.”
“I behaved immorally! I will accept the consequences of my actions—if you will not exile me, must I marry someone? An old widower with five children who wants my dowry? I am willing.”
Colonel Fitzwilliam replied, “Do you wish to marry an old widower with five children who only cares about your money?”
Georgiana silently shook her head no.
“What if,” Colonel Fitzwilliam asked gamely, “I managed to find a particularly ugly old widower. One with a hideous bulbous nose? And whose breath perpetually reeked of decay and whiskey? But a man from a particularly long-lived family, so you would not need to worry about losing the joys of the marriage bed soon.”
This succeeded at drawing a snort from Georgiana, and a half smile.
“Georgiana,” Darcy said, “and what do you wish? Please, do tell us. If you might have anything in this matter, what would it be? Do not think in answering this question about what is good for us, but about what you want. We shall then figure out how close we can come to achieving it, or if it is possible at all, once we know what it is.”
“If I hurt you, if I make it so that people do not respect Elizabeth, or will not visit the estate, or…so they mistreat us and the servants talk, and everyone laughs at the Darcy name, I could not like that.”
Elizabeth thought that she really was a sweet creature, but she had too much of Darcy’s seriousness about such matters. Squeezing next to Georgiana on the sofa, Elizabeth gave her a tight hug. “There, there dear. But while it is hard to say, what would you wish?”
“I would wish to live with you, and raise the child, if God in fact gives him to me. And to find something useful to do with my time. I know that is impossible. And he would be a bastard, so you could not want him to live with your children, and—”
“First,” Elizabeth said, “the child might be a girl.”
Georgiana giggled as she cried.
“Odd as the family association would be, both George and Emily, but especially George, would be delighted with another sibling to grow up with, and I would not cast one away—Darcy, you do not disagree on this point.”
“No.” Her husband was smiling.
“I believe,” Colonel Fitzwilliam said, “this was much what Darcy and Elizabeth suggested they would prefer to have done in your letters to me.”
“What?” Georgiana looked between Elizabeth and Darcy. “But you cannot have properly thought about the matter. Surely you cannot want to face the judgement of everyone for keeping an immoral girl about you.”
“I would not,” Darcy said, “wish to be on good terms with a person who will happily remain friends with a man who killed another man in a duel, but who draws the line at a girl who made a mistake at a time she thought she would marry.”
“Oh,” Georgiana said. Elizabeth could tell she was more cheerful at that consideration.
While Georgiana of course did not judge her brother harshly, and could not, she knew very well that Darcy was annoyed that he had received almost no social sanction or scorn due to having participated in a fatal duel.
“Where did you get that notion that it would be best for us if you went into an ‘exile’?” Elizabeth asked.
Georgiana flushed. “I overheard conversations. Especially at Longbourn. What people said about me. I know that they judge me, and they should. And everyone I overheard said that of course you would wish to send me away if I was with child. Or to send the child away to be raised by a tenant farmer. I won’t let you do that!
I won’t. You can send me away, but I will not let my child be raised like a…
a piece of dirty laundry. Society can despise me.
It would be a lie to pretend I have not sinned.
But God shall forgive me, for I have repented.
But I do not believe I could be forgiven for sending my child away from me forever. ”
“Ah,” Elizabeth said. She smiled at Georgiana and hugged her again. “Then you shall stay with us.”
“Do you really mean that?”
“Certainly,” Elizabeth said.
And Georgiana burst into tears and sobbed on Elizabeth’s shoulder.
Elizabeth was, in fact, aware that they were doing something which would be judged.
But while not titled nobility, the Darcy family was great enough that most around them would ultimately shrug and say that the rich might do what they would about their immoral doings.
And besides, a man who had shot another man to protect his sister was fully in his rights to keep that sister about him.
Even if some of them would be rather surprised that he did not also shoot the sister.
But Darcy was an unusual man, everyone must see that.
Colonel Fitzwilliam clapped his hands twice.
“Decided. No sudden marriages. No going to Scotland for six months to visit a relation whom no one has ever heard of. But Darcy, if you are to be bold about the matter, be bold. A l’attaque.
Make it clear to your friends that you feel no shame about the matter, and that you will expect your sister to be treated kindly by all the neighborhood. Do not hide at all.”
“Is that not perhaps unkind to the neighborhood?” Elizabeth replied.
“Do I care? I offer advice on a matter of strategy, not on a matter of politeness.”
Darcy grimaced. “I cannot treat someone who stands upon a moral principle harshly, especially if their determination to stand upon such a principle is to my detriment. I must do as I consider right, and others will do as they consider right.”
“Well, Elizabeth,” Colonel Fitzwilliam said, “I think, for Georgiana’s case, we should confirm that you know that there are many persons, especially those with their unmarried daughters, who will not be likely to call on you, or seek your friendship in the way they ordinarily would on account of this. ”
“Oh, Lizzy,” Georgiana said, “are you really sure?”
Elizabeth laughed. “I honestly...I simply cannot care much? I have lived in circumstances that were too conscribed and too limited, and—I do of course hope to be friends with the neighborhood, but I just...there are persons who are my friends, and who will not flinch away from such a connection. If I find no friends here, besides those in this room, I shall spend more time writing letters, and I shall invite more people to visit. It just...I cannot see how I could be hurt by their disdain. They cannot place me in a situation where I need to work, they cannot hurt the esteem my husband and my family hold me in, and...it simply does not matter.” Elizabeth smiled at Georgiana.
“I assure you, that I am speaking from a sober consideration of the situation when I say that none of that matters to me in any way next to my concern for you.”