The Letter Georgiana Hid (The Pemberley Summer #3)

1. The Promise She Did Not Make

THE PROMISE SHE DID NOT MAKE

ELIZABETH'S POV

It had been a fine, ordinary morning until it wasn't. Elizabeth had gone out walking mostly to get away from the parlor.

She wanted a break from Mrs. Annesley's careful conversation.

Georgiana's companion was a kind woman, but a watchful one, and watchfulness wore on a person after enough days of it.

She wanted a break, too, from the housekeeper's careful deference, from the whole careful machinery of a great house built around a young woman nobody quite dared ask a direct question.

She told herself she wanted air and the smell of the river, nothing more, and set off along the eastern boundary of the park.

The path was quiet enough that she heard the voices before she saw who they belonged to.

She came around the hedge just as the scene was ending.

Vale lifted his hat in farewell and turned his horse, and Georgiana's face was still bright with whatever he'd said last. By the time Elizabeth reached the stile, he was a shrinking shape on the road, easy in the saddle.

He'd clearly had practice leaving before anyone could ask him why he'd come.

Georgiana stood alone, guilty, and working hard not to look like either.

"Elizabeth." Georgiana's voice cracked on the name. "You won't tell my brother."

It wasn't a question, though she'd shaped it like one. Elizabeth took her in—the flushed cheeks, the hands twisting in her shawl, that particular brightness of a girl who's just been told she's remarkable. She felt the full weight of what she was being asked to carry.

"I haven't decided what I'll do," Elizabeth said. "I'd like to understand first what there is to decide."

"There's nothing to understand. We talked. He was riding past and stopped to ask after my health, and we talked about music, and about Ramsgate. He was kind, Elizabeth. He didn't treat me like I was made of glass."

"How long has he been stopping to ask after your health?"

Georgiana's chin came up, though her eyes didn't quite hold steady. "A little while."

"That's not an answer."

"It doesn't signify. He's done nothing improper. He's never once asked to meet me alone. Today was chance, I promise you it was chance. He's never suggested anything I ought to be ashamed of."

Elizabeth heard, under the protest, the shape of an argument already rehearsed—not by Georgiana, but for her.

She'd heard its cousin before, in a different voice, a different county, aimed at herself.

He's done nothing improper. That was the line you prepared when you expected to be doubted.

You only got that smooth at it when someone else had helped you write it.

"I don't think you're a fool, Georgiana," she said.

"I think you're being careful with a feeling that frightens you a little, and I understand that better than you'd guess.

But I can't give you a blind promise of silence.

If I came to believe you were in real danger, I couldn't just say nothing and call it kindness. "

"Then you'll tell him." Georgiana's voice went thin and cold.

"I didn't say that either. I won't act rashly.

I'll watch. I'll ask. I'll give you room to trust me with the truth before I'm forced to act without it.

" Elizabeth reached for her hand, relieved when it wasn't pulled away.

"I'm not your gaoler. I'd rather be something better—someone who won't run to Mr. Darcy the moment you frighten me, but who also won't let you come to harm rather than risk your being cross with me.

Can you live with that, even if it isn't everything you wanted? "

Georgiana said nothing long enough that a lark rose somewhere behind them, complaining at the disturbance. Then she said, low and grudging: "It's more than I expected. I thought you'd either promise everything or refuse everything."

"Very little in life divides so neatly."

It was only as she said it that Elizabeth understood what she had actually done.

She had not simply agreed to wait. She had agreed to stand in the gap between two people who loved Georgiana in very different ways, and to decide, moment by moment, which of them had the truer claim on what she saw.

Darcy would call this concealment, if he ever learned of it.

Georgiana would call it trust, and mean it as the highest compliment she had to give.

Elizabeth did not yet know which of them was right.

She only knew she had accepted a kind of authority no one had actually granted her, and that authority came with no instructions for how to use it well.

That was the part she hadn't weighed carefully enough before she'd spoken. A promise made in a hedge-lined lane, meant kindly, could still turn out to be the wrong promise. She would not know which until it was tested.

"He's not what you imagine." Georgiana's voice had gone quieter, testing whether soft might work where defiance hadn't.

"He asked me once whether I didn't tire of being spoken of as though Ramsgate were the whole of my history.

Whether a person might be allowed to outgrow one summer's foolishness.

No one else has ever asked me that. They just decided the answer for me, and have been careful enough never to mention it again.

That amounts to the same verdict, only quieter. "

Elizabeth felt the pull of that even as she distrusted the man who'd handed it to her.

It was true, in its way, and true things borrowed for false purposes were the hardest to argue with.

"It's not wrong to want to be more than one summer's mistake, Georgiana.

I only ask you to notice how well that wish serves a man who benefits from your believing no one else understands it. "

"You always find the shadow in everything."

"I've had cause to learn how to look for it." She didn't say more. The memory of a red coat and a charming voice rose up uninvited before she pushed it back down.

They walked toward the house together. If their steps didn't quite match, if Georgiana's eyes kept sliding back to the road, Elizabeth said nothing about it.

She knew she'd just taken on something that wasn't hers to take on—guarding a girl who wasn't her sister, in a house that wasn't her own.

She'd done it anyway. The alternative was watching Georgiana harden against her completely.

Some older, less reasonable instinct told her that withholding trust could do just as much damage as handing it to the wrong person.

She might have seized Georgiana by the wrist and marched her straight to her brother's study.

It would even have been the safer course, the one a stranger looking only at the facts would have recommended without a second thought.

But Elizabeth hadn't forgotten what it was to be young.

She hadn't forgotten what it felt like to have every grown person in your life decide the shape of your heart before it was given the chance to speak for itself.

She hadn't forgotten, either, how close she'd once come to trusting the wrong man for exactly that reason.

She was still turning it over when they came within sight of the terrace. Mr. Darcy stood watching their approach, an expression on his face she couldn't read at that distance but felt anyway, all the way down to her gloves.

He'd seen them come from the same direction.

He'd seen, probably, how carefully they weren't talking to each other.

Elizabeth arranged her face into something like calm and hoped it would hold.

She had a feeling already that it wouldn't, not for long.

She had no idea yet what she'd do when it gave out.