Chapter 23
Twenty-Three
In Which Darcy and Georgiana Have a Heart-to-Heart
It was glorious being home.
Darcy hadn’t spent a night at Pemberley in nearly a year, and he’d forgotten, as he always did when he went away, just how
much he loved it here. It wasn’t just the fine house, or the familiar servants who’d known him since he was a boy, or how
the bustle of London seemed very far when he was here—it was also being back with Georgiana once more. He felt proud and strangely
sad to see how much she’d grown in their time apart. Despite her casual appearance when they’d first arrived, she poured the
tea expertly and made brilliant and witty conversation with Lizzie and Charlotte. She efficiently saw that they were put up
in comfortable rooms, informed the cook that there would be three additional people at dinner, and when she heard that they’d
both arrived with little more than a change of clothes, she immediately saw to having spare clothing and garments placed in
their rooms.
Darcy knew his sister hadn’t been a child for a long time, but it was strange to realize she was a young lady now. Strange, but nice.
Given the strenuousness of their journey and their quick flight from Netherfield, Lizzie and Charlotte opted to turn in early
after dinner, and Lizzie whisked Guy along with her. Darcy had a serious word with Charleston and Mrs. Reynolds in the library
about the secrecy of Lizzie’s presence and the need for caution, and he was walking toward the stairs, contemplating just
how comfortable his bed here was, when he felt a poke in his ribs and turned to find Georgiana looking at him with something
like mischief in her eyes.
“Brother. I think we need to talk.”
He looked down the hall, where Charleston was instructing a footman. “Now?”
She rolled her eyes. “Unless you have more pressing business to tend to?”
He smiled. “All right. The grotto?”
Georgiana wrinkled her nose. “It’s dark.”
He looked out the window. It was a beautiful summer evening, and the sky was dusky, with pinpricks of stars beginning to dot
the night sky. “Are you afraid?”
Indignation flashed across her face. “No, but you are.”
“I’m afraid of dark, closed-in spaces,” he corrected. “There’s a difference—”
“Race you there!”
Georgiana took off down the hall, pulling up her skirts so she could run.
He rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. All right, she might be grown-up looking, but that didn’t stop her from still behaving like a ten-year-old.
“Didn’t your lady’s companion teach you it’s impolite for a lady to run? ” he called after her.
“I’m sure she would if she could catch me!”
Darcy took off after Georgiana, slipping out a back door to the gardens behind Pemberley. Georgiana eschewed the perfectly
serviceable walking paths to run across the lawn, dodging bushes and benches and cutting through flower beds. He shook his
head and followed her, feeling like he was twelve all over again. The ornamental gardens were large—one of Pemberley’s many
achievements—and they butted up against the woods. There, nestled among the trees, was a small grotto, half sunken into the
earth. The outside was uninspiring stone covered in creeping ivy, but when he followed Georgiana through the door, which was
sunken down three steps into the ground, it was as if they’d slipped into a different world.
Georgiana was already fiddling with a tinderbox, panting lightly as she struck the box and lit a candle. It let out a small
ring of light that did little to illuminate the space. “You’ve gotten slow in your old age, brother.”
“You won’t live until old age if you keep up with those jokes,” he said, picking up another candle and lighting it. “And besides,
you had a head start.”
“We started from the same spot,” she argued. He shook his head. Lord help him if he had to contend with both Lizzie and Georgiana
in the same house, arguing details with him.
They lit several more candles and carried them to various holders around the grotto.
Intricately carved walls and ceilings boasted designs of seashells carved into the smooth rock.
They were as familiar to him as his own childhood bedroom given the number of hours he’d spent in the grotto, which had been commissioned by his great-grandfather.
This place had been his first refuge, and later, a place he shared with Georgiana when they both needed an escape.
“It’s good to be home,” he said in a quiet voice.
“Next time don’t stay away so long,” Georgiana said. The cadence of her words sounded lighthearted, but Darcy heard the hurt
beneath it.
He winced. “I am sorry, Georgie. I wish I could say I had a good reason, but it all sounds like sorry excuses. I shouldn’t
have left you alone here for so many months.”
She looked down. “What were you to do? Father gave us our marching orders.”
Darcy was sick of marching. “Even still. How have you been? The truth, not what you tell others or what you think I want to
hear. If things have been miserable—”
“Not miserable,” she said. “I know I begged for you to visit, but it isn’t as though I was left to waste away in a nunnery.
Pemberley is an enchanting prison, and Mrs. Watts isn’t entirely awful.”
“What’s she like?” Darcy asked.
“Sickly. And a bit pedantic, if I am being honest. But she’s not terrible company.
We would get the papers from London, and I’d share your exploits with her and she’d make a face”—Georgiana puckered her lips as if she’d just sucked on a lemon wedge—“and she’d say, ‘A proper gentleman like your brother ought to settle down, not find himself running amok!’”
“She sounds like a delight,” Darcy remarked dryly.
“Oh, you haven’t even heard her expound upon her opinions of proper table etiquette,” Georgiana said with an eye roll. “But
she is right, you know. A proper gentleman like you ought to settle down. And now that you’ve brought Lizzie here . . .”
Darcy could see where this was going. “Georgie, I didn’t bring her here to ask her to marry me.”
“No, you brought her here to keep her safe. But why not ask her?”
“It’s complicated.”
Her face darkened. “Don’t tell me you haven’t asked her to marry you because of him?”
“No,” Darcy said honestly, because even if his father were begging him to propose, he still wouldn’t unless he knew Lizzie
was ready.
But Georgiana didn’t appear to be listening. “For someone who acts so indifferent to us, he’s rather good at making our lives
miserable. You know, for my birthday, he wished me a happy fourteenth year!”
Darcy winced. “He forgot.”
“He’s wished me a happy fourteenth year for two years in a row!”
Darcy opened his mouth to offer some words of comfort and found that he couldn’t summon any.
It was just as well, because Georgiana didn’t appear to require them.
“He left me here with no one but Mrs. Watts and nothing to do or look forward to. I should be in London, having a season at the very least, but instead I am locked up like one of his many priceless treasures he stashes away, only worse—because I am his daughter, not a plaything! And you are his son, and you should be able to marry the girl you love. Instead, we both obey his every command and live the lives he’s imagined for us.
Well, I don’t want that, and neither should you—it’s no way to live! ”
It appeared that Georgiana was not as content as she let on in her letters. Profound guilt weighed upon Darcy, and not just
over having abandoned her. He was just old enough to remember their father as he had been before their mother died. Sometimes
the memories felt like dreams. He used to take Darcy to the river’s edge, and they’d race wooden boats in the gentle current.
He rode an impossibly tall horse, settling Darcy in front of him in the saddle, keeping him in place with his strong arm.
He laughed. Darcy couldn’t remember his father laughing after Georgiana’s birth.
Everything changed the day Darcy’s mother drew her last breath and Georgiana her first. From then on, there were nannies and nurses, and later a tutor for him and a governess for Georgiana.
Their father never set foot in the nursery, and when he was home, he’d summon Darcy like he was a pupil and his father a headmaster.
It had prepared him for school—but his father had ceased being a father.
Darcy wasn’t sure whether he was lucky to have these memories or cursed because he knew what they’d lost. He’d never told
Georgiana about them, afraid that doing so would hurt her even more.
But she was hurt now. He hadn’t been able to protect her, not fully.
“You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t you ever just yearn to break free and do what you want, for the sake of doing it? Consequences be damned?”
“Georgie!” he admonished.
“What? I read books. I can curse if I want.”
“Hellion,” he pronounced, but there was no bite in his words. “And yes, since you’re asking—I do. All the time. And . . .
I might have done a bit of breaking free, consequences be damned, as you so eloquently put it.”
“Really?”
“Really. But the problem is, there are consequences. I love Lizzie very much. I want to marry her. But Father has threatened to disown me if I do.”
Georgiana went still. “He wouldn’t.”
“Are you willing to test him?”
When Darcy had felt obligated to propose to Josette Beaufort, he’d thought they’d made a sensible match.
He hadn’t been prepared for the vehemence of his father’s disapproval, although he hadn’t threatened to disown Darcy then.
But he hadn’t needed to—instead he’d implied all the ways that Darcy would ruin his reputation, and Georgiana’s, and Pemberley & Associates’, if he went through with it.
Would he have gone through with the marriage if his father had put his foot down?
Probably not, he realized with shame. Josette had likely sensed it, too, which was why she had broken it off.
But with Lizzie, it was different. He was prepared to fight for her.