8. A Most Unwelcome Discovery #2
“You are going out?” Darcy asked.
“Later,” Georgiana replied. “Mrs. Younge says the wind will lessen by noon.”
“I said it may lessen,” Mrs. Younge corrected with a faint smile.
“That is nearly the same thing.”
“It is not.”
Georgiana accepted the rebuke with good humor. Her spirits were high, nearly too high for a sister whose brother was leaving her for several days. Darcy told himself he was being absurd. He had wished her happier. Now that she was happy, he found a new way to object to it.
The groom brought his horse around to the front. The animal tossed its head, impatient with the wind and the delay. Darcy drew on his gloves and gave Georgiana the instructions he had already given twice the night before.
“You will send for me at once if anything is amiss.”
“Of course.”
“And Mrs. Younge knows where I am to be found.”
“Yes.”
“And you will write.”
“If I have anything worth writing.”
“Write even if you do not.”
Georgiana tilted her head. “You would enjoy a letter containing nothing?”
“From you, yes.”
That made her face change in a way he had not expected. The playful answer she had prepared did not come. Instead, she stepped forward and embraced him, quickly, because servants were present and she was nearly sixteen and conscious of both facts.
“I shall write,” she said.
Darcy kissed the top of her head. “Good girl.”
She pulled back, making a face. “I am much too old for that.”
“Never to me.”
“Then perhaps I shall write very dull letters in punishment.”
“I shall deserve it.”
Mrs. Younge smiled with appropriate indulgence, and Darcy, reassured by the ordinary look of them both, went down the steps to his horse.
The groom held the bridle while Darcy mounted.
From the saddle, the house looked smaller than it had the day before, the windows bright under the morning sun, Georgiana standing in the doorway with one hand shading her eyes.
“Do not hurry back,” she called. “Ramsgate has plenty of diversions.”
The words were lightly spoken, but color rose in her cheeks before she finished them.
Darcy laughed, suspecting that she had embarrassed herself by sounding too eager for independence. “Behave yourself.”
“I always do.”
“That answer was too prompt.”
“It was deserved.”
Mrs. Younge raised a hand in farewell. Georgiana did the same, her ribbons fluttering in the wind.
Darcy touched his hat brim to them both, directed his horse toward the road, and rode away with Bingley’s letter folded in his coat and the foolish conviction that a few days’ absence could do no one any harm.
Darcy returned to Ramsgate in a temper which, though not violent, would have made Barton remove all unnecessary persons from his path had Barton been present to observe it.
The journey from Kent had been dusty, inconvenient, and made worse by the knowledge that its object had been nearly useless.
Bingley’s estate, praised in three pages of exuberant description and two more of hopeful conjecture, had proved to be a neglected house with cracked plaster, damp corridors, warped floors, and a roof that had admitted rain with more generosity than any house ought to display.
The gardens had surrendered to nettles. The stables smelled of rot.
One drawing room window had been boarded over so poorly that daylight forced its way through the edges in thin, accusing lines.
Bingley, who had arrived prepared to love the place, had tried valiantly to admire it for nearly an hour.
“The situation is good,” he had said, standing beneath a ceiling stained brown in three places.
“The situation is excellent,” Darcy replied. “Unfortunately, the house is also part of the estate.”
Bingley had laughed because good humor was nearly a moral habit with him, then addressed the estate manager with renewed hope. “I suppose the worst of the repairs are already planned?”
The man, a narrow fellow with ink upon his cuff and no shame in his face, gave a small cough. “No repairs are presently intended, sir. The house is let as viewed.”
“As viewed,” Bingley repeated.
Darcy had very nearly asked whether the phrase included the mushroom growing near the scullery door.
By dinner, Bingley’s disappointment had become impossible to disguise.
He had wished to be within easy reach of London, with good roads, pleasant country, and a neighborhood sufficiently genteel to satisfy his sisters without alarming himself.
The first estate had failed on nearly every count except distance.
The second, viewed the following morning, possessed a better house and a worse situation, standing so near Rosings Park that Darcy could almost hear Lady Catherine’s opinions forming across the fields.
“If you lease this place,” Darcy told him as they rode away, “you will be miserable within a fortnight.”
Bingley blinked. “Because of the house?”
“Because of my aunt.”
“Lady Catherine?”
“She will disdain you for taking a leased estate, disdain your sisters for wishing to be received, disdain your fortune for having been earned before you possessed it, and then expect you to dine at Rosings every Sunday so she may instruct you in improving all three.”
Bingley stared at him for several seconds. “You are serious.”
“Yes.”
“That is the most alarming recommendation against a property I have ever heard.”
“It was meant to be.”
The third house had been harmless, respectable, and so dull that even Bingley could not persuade himself into enthusiasm.
Its owner had filled every room with heavy furniture and heavier opinions, and the pleasing prospect lay from an upper window one could not reach without passing a corridor that smelled strongly of mice.
At last Bingley conceded defeat.
“I had hoped to be settled before autumn,” he said, looking with some dejection toward a field of barley waving beyond the inn yard. “Caroline will be intolerable if I return with no house.”
“Miss Bingley has survived disappointment before.”
“Not with any grace.”
“That is different.”
Bingley gave him a rueful grin. “You are very severe upon my poor sister.”
“I am occasionally accurate.”
“You must write to your man of business. If anyone can discover what is worth knowing before it is known everywhere else, it will be one of your people.”
“I shall write when I reach Ramsgate.”
“And you will not forget?”
“I have not yet reached such an age.”
“No, but you are in love, and that makes men unreliable.”
Darcy’s horse shifted beneath him. “Bingley.”
His friend laughed, the first genuine laugh Darcy had heard from him since the first roof stain. “I shall say no more. Simply write to your man, and I shall be grateful.”
Darcy promised it, parted from Bingley the next morning, and took the road back to Ramsgate with an increasing desire for his own chair, a clean coat, and a letter from Ireland.
The last was unreasonable. Elizabeth had not promised to write to him.
She would write to Georgiana. Perhaps Mrs. Gardiner would mention her.
Perhaps Georgiana would read aloud some paragraph concerning Irish roads or disagreeable inns. Perhaps that would be enough.
It would not be enough.
The house came into view late in the afternoon, its pale front catching the light from the water and the windows shining under a sky swept clean by wind. Darcy was close enough to see the railings when he noticed the carriage.
It stood before the door, not his own traveling carriage, but a hired one, with a driver already upon the box and two servants carrying trunks toward it.
Darcy drew rein.
One trunk was Georgiana’s.
He knew it because his sister had insisted upon a ridiculous blue ribbon being tied around one handle after a maid had once sent it to the wrong room at Pemberley. The ribbon fluttered now in the salt wind, absurdly cheerful.
For several seconds Darcy did nothing. The horse tossed its head, impatient with being held in the street, and the groom who had hurried forward from the mews stopped short at the expression on Darcy’s face.
“Sir?”
Darcy dismounted without answering and handed over the reins.
The front door stood open. Inside, the hall was in disorder: a cloak over one chair, a bandbox near the stairs, a maid hurrying down with a bundle of linen pressed to her chest. From somewhere above came the thump of another trunk being dragged too quickly across a floor.
Mrs. Younge stood near the foot of the stairs, one hand pointing as she directed a footman.
“No, that one first. Quickly, if you please. Miss Darcy’s—”
She turned.
The color left her face so completely that all pretence died before she attempted it.
“Mr. Darcy.”
He removed his gloves one finger at a time. “Mrs. Younge.”
“I— We were not expecting you so soon.”
“So I perceive.”
The footman looked between them and wisely stopped moving.
Darcy set his gloves upon the hall table. “Where is my sister?”
Mrs. Younge’s mouth parted. No answer came. She looked toward the stairs, then toward the open door, and in that small movement betrayed more than any confession might have done.
“Mrs. Younge,” he said, and every servant in the hall became still, “where is Miss Darcy?”
“I was—she wished—Mr. Darcy, there has been a misunderstanding.”
“Where is she?”
Before Mrs. Younge could produce another fragment of explanation, a door above opened. Light footsteps crossed the landing, quick and eager.
“Mrs. Younge, have they brought my blue cloak? I cannot find—”
Georgiana appeared at the top of the stairs.
For one instant she stopped, her face blank with astonishment. Then joy broke over her so swiftly that Darcy had no chance to prepare himself.
“Fitzwilliam!”
She ran down the stairs, careless of dignity, ribbons, and the maid trying to pass behind her, and threw both arms around him.
“You are home! Oh, I am so happy you have returned. Now you may come to my wedding.”
Mrs. Younge went white.
Darcy did not move. His sister clung to him, laughing, trembling with excitement, speaking against his coat of happiness and surprises and how glad she was that he had not missed it after all.