CHAPTER 60 #3
George Darcy received it as if he deserved it. Perhaps he did.
His mouth worked once.
“Keep her.”
“I shall.”
“And—” His father’s hand moved, not quite reaching. “You.”
The physician stepped forward. “No more at present.”
George Darcy resisted the order by mere instinct, but even that small rebellion exhausted him.
Fitzwilliam leaned a little closer.
“Georgiana is safe. You are not to be troubled by visitors. Rest now.”
His father looked at him with a desperate impatience which might have been command, apology, warning, or all three trapped in a body too damaged to deliver any of them properly.
“Fitzwilliam,” he said again.
This time it was clearer.
Fitzwilliam bowed his head. “Sir.”
There was nothing else he could give him then.
Mr. Grant ended the interview with professional firmness.
Mrs. Reynolds moved at once, adjusting the pillows, speaking low, restoring the sickroom to its narrow order.
Fitzwilliam left because if he stayed another moment he did not know whether he would ask too much, say too much, or stand there like a boy still waiting to be believed.
In the passage, the door closed behind him.
He stood still.
For several seconds he could do nothing but breathe.
His father had asked first for Georgiana. Not for papers, not forgiveness, not defence. Georgiana. That mattered. It did not repair. It did not absolve. But it mattered.
He went downstairs.
Elizabeth was where she had said she would be.
She was seated now, though only barely; to call it rest would have been generous.
Georgiana was not in the room. Kitty had gone with her, under Mrs. Doddridge’s quiet direction, to see that Miss Darcy’s own rooms were aired to her liking and that no one mistook company for interrogation.
Elizabeth rose the moment she saw him.
She did not touch him at once.
“Well?”
He looked at her, and for a moment some part of him was still in the room above.
“He asked first for Georgiana,” he said.
Elizabeth’s face softened.
“She will need to know that.”
“Yes.”
“And the rest?”
He looked toward the window. Evening light lay over the lawn with indecent gentleness.
“There is more. He could not tell it. Mr. Latham has papers. My father says enough to make everything worse before it is clearer.”
Elizabeth was silent a moment.
“Then it need not be clearer tonight.”
He looked back at her.
The mercy of that nearly undid him.
“I do not know what I feel,” he said.
Elizabeth came to him then.
Her hand found his, warm and certain.
“No,” she said. “That would have been too convenient.”
The sound that left him was almost a laugh and almost nothing.
No one asked him for Mr. Latham that night.
Whether Elizabeth had contrived it, or Mrs. Reynolds, or Mr. Grant by his own authority, Fitzwilliam did not know.
He only knew that Latham’s papers were not brought, the steward’s office was not opened, and no one used the word duty loudly enough to rouse what remained of him.
They were shown, later, to the rooms that had once been his.
Mrs. Reynolds had made them ready for Mr. and Mrs. Darcy because she had received Elizabeth’s express, and because Pemberley, for all its long injustice, still knew how rooms ought to answer names when properly instructed.
The bedchamber had been aired; the curtains stood open to the late-spring dusk; fresh water waited; linen had been laid out; his old writing table remained near the window, polished and altered only by time.
Someone had removed the boyish things long ago, but not all traces of him.
The proportions of the room knew him. The view knew him. The silence knew him.
That was almost worse than being unwelcome.
A servant came and went. Evans came and went. Hot water was brought. Dust was washed away. Boots, coats, pins, gloves, and all the small armours of travel were removed by degrees until the day had been made, outwardly at least, survivable.
By the time Elizabeth dismissed her maid, she had exchanged the dust of the road for a white nightgown and a light wrapper. Her hair was braided over one shoulder; her face looked younger for fatigue and more determined for it.
“You must sleep,” she said.
“I doubt I can.”
“Then fail at it lying down.”
He obeyed because there was no strength left for refusal.
It should have been impossible to rest in that room.
His father lay ill in the adjoining part of the house.
John Wickham had vanished. Mr. Latham waited for morning.
Georgiana was under the same roof as the father whose trust had failed her and the house whose protection had been misused.
Elizabeth was too tired and would not admit it.
Pemberley had received him and not absolved him, summoned him and not yet told him what it required.
Yet when Elizabeth lay beside him and came into his arms as if this too had never been in question, his body believed what his mind could not arrange.
He held her carefully at first.
Then less carefully, because she moved closer and set her hand over his heart.
“Not tonight,” she murmured.
He did not ask what she forbade: grief, papers, anger, memory, all of it. Perhaps she meant only that he was not to keep watch against the whole house by himself.
The last thing he knew was the open window, late-spring air stirring the curtain, Elizabeth’s hand warm against him, and Pemberley lying around them in all its old, injured silence.
His father had called him home as a son.
Tomorrow, Pemberley would require something harder.