Chapter 34
T he morning was deliciously chilly, but with no rain on the horizon, and without seeking anyone’s permission, Georgiana and I excused ourselves after breakfast and trotted down a lane so familiar to me that I felt as if I had fallen into another dream.
I did not precisely know what I expected upon our arrival except that my sister and her friend would be just as affectionate upon meeting again as they had been upon parting weeks ago.
What I did not expect was that directly after their warm embrace, Elizabeth exclaimed, “But how lucky we are, for not five minutes ago, you will never guess who rode up our drive and paid us such a compliment in stopping here first.” As she spoke, Fitzwilliam emerged from the house to greet us alongside the rest of the Bennet family.
What ensued was a dizzy mixture of both reunion and welcome in which my sister and cousin featured as objects of great delight, while I, being the least demonstrative and admittedly the least favoured, was consigned to the shadows.
While some men might have been offended, I was grateful to be relegated to the role of spectator in what was shaping up to be a typical circus at Longbourn.
Once inside, still in the midst of this happy pandemonium, Elizabeth threw me a rueful look suggesting she was pretending to pity me, and she then came near enough to tease me, remarking that if I got any quieter, I might be entirely forgotten.
We were speaking privately while her sisters had gathered around Georgiana and Fitzwilliam as do birds around a fountain, and I said, “But you have not forgotten I am here.”
“How could I ignore you when you are in that brooding pose,” she said with a toss of her curls, “for when you cast your critical eye around a room as you do, well, I confess that such a look only ever sparks mischief in me.”
“I begin to wonder what circumstances do not spark you to mischief,” I said appreciatively, but unfortunately, we had been so taken with our conversation, we drew Mrs Bennet’s notice.
“Lizzy,” she cried of a sudden, “have you seen Miss Darcy’s sash?” And then, more petulantly, “Of what are you speaking so seriously to Mr Darcy? You may not have the conversation all to yourself, miss. What is he saying?”
Before I could do so, Fitzwilliam came to Elizabeth’s rescue. “I suspect my cousin and Miss Elizabeth are debating some matter of literature, and he is privately conceding the point.”
“Oh fie, Lizzy! Always showing your book smarts,” her mother said, turning a flattering smile upon the colonel. “She will never attach a man by engaging him in a game of wits now, will she, sir? You must tell her so.”
“My dear ma’am,” he said, softening what he was about to say with a wink, “I have known many a man to fall in love with an intelligent woman.”
“Well, I suppose so, but just so you know, my Jane?—”
“Mary, might you take tea to Papa?” Miss Bennet suddenly said, effectively cutting off the flow of her mother’s assertions of the cleverness of her eldest child. “Tell him we have guests if he would finish his chapter and—Oh, there you are Papa.”
Mr Bennet had indeed emerged from his hiding place, greeted us, and took his tea, while Elizabeth went to her sister’s aid by drawing Georgiana away from her mother and artfully turning the conversation to a rumour that Bingley would give a ball.
This topic was irresistible to most of the occupants of the room, and as a bonus, it provided my cousin with a convenient means to claim the first dance—if there was to be one—from Miss Bennet.
Even a ball could not be canvassed forever, and during a pause in the chatter, Mr Bennet, whose hearing was apparently acute even from his nearby book-room, surprised us all with a rare opener.
“I am curious, Lizzy,” he drawled, “upon what point did you debate with Mr Darcy, and has he indeed conceded to your opinion?”
Without hesitation I replied for her. “We speculated as to whether King John’s chamberlain was of Norman or Saxon descent, sir.”
“That old question? When, pray tell,” he said, turning to quiz his daughter, “did you have the leisure to engage in this debate?”
“In Kent, Papa. Do you not remember I told you Mr Darcy was there?”
“Ah yes, with his aunt, our cousin’s esteemed patroness. Yes, yes. Well, and what have the two of you concluded?”
“I cannot speak for Mr Darcy, but I myself have to agree with my mother that I should renounce my ambition to be literate, since I so quickly came to grief debating a man who has seen for himself the archives of the Royal Museum.”
She was so adroit in her use of words that only with great effort could I keep my eyes on the lady’s father as he examined her face and then shrugged almost imperceptibly.
With that gesture, it seemed as though either she or I had passed some unspoken test, and he then appeared to forget I was in the room.
This left me to marvel at how many lies could be so smoothly uttered in the space of a few minutes, and even as I thanked the stars that I did not stutter in the execution of a falsehood into which my cousin had inadvertently thrown me, I sent a conspiratorial smile to Elizabeth.
She blushed and faltered momentarily in her contribution to an animated discussion of plans for the coming days, a discomposure that pleased me to no small degree.
Soon after, we stood to go, and the three of us left Longbourn on horseback after being cordially waved away by a knot of chattering girls.
As we went, Georgiana enquired of my cousin’s journey, and I was unsurprised to learn he had spent the night not fifteen miles from Meryton with an old friend.
Fitzwilliam had friends scattered from one end of the country to the other, and in consequence, he rarely had to pay for rooms on the road.
He was in an expansive mood, and to my eyes, he even seemed to have regained more mobility in his shoulder than when I had last seen him.
“I see Donaldson has not let you revert to wearing a sling even when riding,” I remarked. “Did you bring him?”
“He continued on to Netherfield while I stopped at Longbourn. You should commiserate with him as to my regimen of cure if it interests you,” he replied with a shrug of his uninjured shoulder, “but do not ask me anything about what I prefer not to describe.”
“Well, I hope you never get so drunk you fall off a horse again,” my sister said with prim disgust, startling us into exchanging a wary look. Having temporarily forgotten she had not been privy to the truth, we had been speaking too freely of his injury.
“For your sake, Georgie, I pledge never to do so again,” he said with a lightness that suggested he was not, in fact, seriously considering sobriety.
Then directing us away from that treacherous topic, he asked her what she thought of her friend’s family, which led the two of them to pull slightly in front of me to ride close enough to talk without raising their voices.
This left me free to fall back and to consider them as they talked animatedly of the visit.
I admired Fitzwilliam’s gift for such adept manoeuvres executed so seamlessly, for Georgiana had no idea his intention was to make her think of something else.
But by his posture alone I knew his mood had changed, and he was, in fact, newly preoccupied.
Our little slip had hung heavily over both of us.
I would consider it a tragedy if, upon hearing his name mentioned, my sister was to be thrown back into a state of dejection over George Wickham.
After seeming to have forgotten that rake’s existence, her happiness was so profound of late, I thought its loss might be much worse than it would have been had she only been mildly content for once.
The remainder of the day was full, however, and only late that night did Fitzwilliam come to my room to speak privately to me.
“By the grace of God I did not make a joke about being shot like a partridge,” he said. “Perhaps we should not have brought Georgiana with us,” he added as he paced in front of the fireplace. “What if Wickham’s name is brought up in conversation?”
By this time, he was gripping his forehead as if forcing his brain to know what to do.
“But,” he continued, now engaged in dialogue with himself, “the militia is no longer here, and Colonel Forster did liberally brand the man a deserter. Would that his name has been struck altogether from this society because of it.”
Unable to offer him any reassurance, I listened to his wrangling.
And when he fell silent, I said, “If Wickham’s name is mentioned in her presence, and if she is shocked and overborne by such memories as must beset her, the chances are Miss Elizabeth will be beside her.
We have no choice but to trust her friend to pour enough sense into her that she might quickly recover. ”
“And if they are not together?”
“They enjoy sufficient confidence that I believe Georgiana would confide in her. You and I,” I said resignedly, “cannot always protect her from that memory, and if she sooner or later must confront it, let us assume she can weather it. She has grown up a great deal.”
He conceded that she had and that was something at least. And when he left, I sat up for another hour, pondering this wrinkle along with every pitfall of this, my latest adventure.
What emerged from this spate of deep thinking was a map, per se, of how I should negotiate this visit to Hertfordshire.
Ostensibly, we had come to provide Miss Bennet some support, aided by my cousin’s plan to take a few arrows for her.
My sister’s felicity was perhaps as great a consideration.
I was wholly invested in Georgiana’s first genuine friendship, which had grown deep and must at all costs be preserved.
Other than finding opportunities for the two friends to meet, I had little else to do in that regard.
And as to the matter of my own standing with said friend—which was so primary an issue it had become an assumption upon which all else was based—I considered my first interaction with Elizabeth earlier that day while at Longbourn.
I had been standing in the background, and unlike everyone else in the room, she did not forget me. She had approached me.
For some reason, my cousin’s words of months ago returned to me.
Napoleon’s strategy is his strength. I decided that I, too, should have a strategy, and though I wished to immediately march over to Longbourn and speak to her father, I felt that patient constancy was required.
I would be as a tree branch to her ever-mutable bird, for she would, in time, need a place to land.