CHAPTER 64
The Duration of Summer
Elizabeth woke before full daylight and knew at once that Fitzwilliam had not slept.
He lay beside her on his back, one arm bent beneath his head, his eyes fixed upon the dim canopy above them.
The room was quiet with that peculiar stillness which belongs to very early morning, before servants, fires, trays, and duty begin making claims upon a house.
Pemberley, for once, had not yet asked anything of him.
That, Elizabeth thought, was perhaps why he looked so grave.
She turned onto her side. “Have you been awake long?”
His eyes moved from the canopy to her. “Some time.”
“That is an imprecise answer.”
“It was an imprecise night.”
She reached for his hand beneath the coverlet. His fingers closed around hers immediately, as if that part of him had been waiting for permission while the rest kept watch.
Elizabeth said nothing. Marriage had taught her that there were moments in which questioning a man only made him arrange his pain more neatly for inspection.
After a while he said, “I cannot leave yet.”
She had known it before he spoke. Still, the words settled heavily between them.
“No.”
“If I take Georgiana away now, and he worsens—if he dies while I am making every just argument for why I owed him nothing—” His hand tightened around hers. “I should know I was right. I do not think I should live easily with being right.”
Elizabeth’s throat tightened.
There were answers she might have given. That Mr. George Darcy had forfeited tenderness. That Fitzwilliam had already done more than duty required. That Pemberley’s illness must not become another chain around him.
All of them were true. None of them was the truth he needed.
“Then we stay,” she said.
His face turned fully toward her.
“Not forever,” she added. “Not because Pemberley has discovered it is more comfortable with you than without you. Not because your father’s need has erased his injury. We stay through the summer. At the end of it, we look again.”
“Through the summer,” he repeated.
“Yes.”
“And if by then—”
“If by then you cannot remain, we go home.”
“Portman Square.”
“Ours,” she said.
For a moment he only looked at her. The grey dawn softened nothing in his face; it merely showed more plainly how tired he was, and how much of him had remained braced even in sleep.
Elizabeth moved nearer and laid her free hand against his cheek.
His eyes closed at once.
That was answer enough.
“You are not surrendering,” she said. “You are choosing the limit of your own mercy.”
He drew a breath, uneven but quiet, and turned his face into her palm.
Pemberley would have him for the summer, then.
But not without terms.
Later that morning, after breakfast, Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam found Georgiana and Kitty in the small morning room.
Georgiana had a book open before her, though she had not turned a page.
Kitty was mending a pencil with more concentration than success, while Pom-Pom slept in a square of sun with the indifference of a creature whose future had always been arranged by others.
Elizabeth sat beside Georgiana.
“Your brother and I have decided to remain at Pemberley through the summer,” she said. “At the end of it, we shall review all arrangements again.”
Georgiana looked first at Fitzwilliam, then back at Elizabeth.
“Your father is not yet well enough to resume your care,” Elizabeth continued gently. “Until he is, your brother and I will answer for what is needed. That does not make you a visitor here. Pemberley is your home.”
Georgiana’s eyes lowered.
“But home may still require some ordering,” Elizabeth said. “Especially when the people in it have been very ill, very frightened, or very foolish. We shall take advice where it is needed, and we shall not pretend everything is settled merely because everyone is under the same roof.”
Georgiana nodded slowly. “I should like that.”
“Good. And if there are masters you would wish to have while we are here—music, drawing, languages, anything of that kind—we may consider it. Not as punishment. Not as occupation prescribed by anxious adults. Only if it would make the summer more your own.”
Georgiana’s fingers touched the edge of her book. “Music, perhaps. Not every day.”
“Then not every day.”
“And drawing,” she said, with a glance at Kitty. “If Kitty—”
Kitty looked up.
Elizabeth turned to her. “That depends first upon whether Kitty wishes to remain, and whether Mrs. Bennet can be persuaded to spare her for the summer.”
Kitty’s pencil dropped. “For the summer?”
“If you wish it.”
Kitty flushed. “I do wish it. Only—I do not know whether Mama will.”
“I shall write to her,” Elizabeth said. “I shall explain that you are of real service to Miss Darcy, that you are kindly received, and that a summer at Pemberley can only improve your consequence.”
Kitty considered this with dawning hope. “Mama likes consequence.”
“Mama has never been indifferent to it.”
Fitzwilliam’s mouth moved.
Elizabeth ignored him with dignity.
“And if you remain,” she added, “we may also look for a drawing master for you. It would be a pity to spend a summer in Derbyshire and improve only in the number of trees you have attempted.”
Kitty brightened fully now. “And windows.”
“Yes. Your windows must not be neglected.”
Georgiana smiled down at her book.
It was small, and private, and gone almost at once. But it was there.
Mr. George Darcy received the decision before noon.
Mr. Grant allowed Fitzwilliam and Elizabeth ten minutes, then looked at Elizabeth in particular as if she had personally invented long conversations and must be watched for relapse.
Elizabeth gave him her most innocent look, which had rarely deceived anyone who knew her well and did not improve upon acquaintance.
Mr. George Darcy was awake, his colour better than it had been the day before, his temper worse. Mr. Grant said this was a sign of returning strength. Elizabeth thought it was also a sign of character, but did not say so where Fitzwilliam could hear it.
Fitzwilliam did not sit. He had begun, by now, to choose his position in his father’s room with care: near enough for respect, not near enough for old obedience to look natural.
“We have decided to remain through the summer,” he said.
“Mrs. Darcy and I. Georgiana will remain under our care until you are stronger. Kitty Bennet may stay as her companion, if her family permits it. Mrs. Darcy will arrange masters if Georgiana wishes for them. At the end of summer, or when Mr. Grant judges you equal to it, we will review what is proper.”
His father listened with visible effort.
“Summer,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Georgiana—home.”
Fitzwilliam’s face changed, but his voice held. “Yes. She is home.”
Mr. George Darcy’s eyes moved toward Elizabeth.
“Not settled?” he asked.
“No,” Fitzwilliam said. “Not settled. Arranged for the present.”
After a moment, Mr. George Darcy shut his eyes.
“Fair,” he said.
Mr. Grant moved at once, triumphant in the disagreeable way of physicians who have been proved right by exhaustion.
“That is enough.”
Mr. George Darcy opened his eyes again with visible irritation.
Mr. Grant was unmoved. “If you wish to argue with me, sir, you must recover sufficiently to do it to advantage. For today, you have not.”
Elizabeth, despite herself, liked him better than was convenient.
When they left the room, Fitzwilliam was very quiet. Elizabeth waited until they reached the gallery before touching his sleeve.
He stopped.
“Fair,” she said.
“It is a very small word.”
“It is sometimes the only size that will pass through a sickroom door.”
His mouth moved, almost.
Then he put his hand over hers where it rested on his sleeve, and for a few seconds they stood in the gallery of Pemberley like two people who had not conquered anything, but had at least marked where the next day began.
For a fortnight, the arrangement held.
It did not become peace. Elizabeth distrusted any appearance of peace which depended upon locked papers, watched doors, physicians, and the absence of Wickhams. But it became something less sharp than emergency.
Mr. Grant had his patient. Mr. George Darcy improved by inches and relapsed by fractions; he spoke more clearly in the mornings than in the evenings, could endure Georgiana’s reading for a quarter of an hour, and was not yet permitted to believe that improvement gave him any authority over his diet.
Mrs. Reynolds had the household under such command that even those servants whose consciences were unsettled by Wickham connexions found obedience less frightening than uncertainty.
Bell had the estate office, though he wore the honour as if it were a damp coat he meant to endure until finer weather.
Mr. Latham had taken possession of one parlour, three tables, four clerks, and enough ink to suggest that truth, once let loose, required its own establishment.
Georgiana was steadier.
Not recovered. Elizabeth distrusted the word.
Recovery, when applied too early, seemed only another manner of demanding performance from the injured.
But Georgiana came down to breakfast more often than not.
She walked with Kitty in the mornings when Mr. Grant approved the weather.
She had begun to play again, though only when the music room was empty of everyone but Kitty, Elizabeth, and, once, Pom-Pom, whose opinion of Haydn was expressed by sleep.
Kitty, to her credit, had not attempted to improve the occasion beyond her ability.
She drew trees, dogs, windows, and, with a diligence that no one had requested but everyone tolerated, Bell’s hat.
She told Georgiana what Lydia would have said, and then, with growing judgment, did not always say it.
She wrote to Mary about the size of Pemberley’s library and to Jane about Georgiana’s kindness, and to Lydia only that Derbyshire had fewer officers than were desirable but more sheep than anyone had warned her to expect.