Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
There was music in Pemberley again, the music he had grown up with.
His talented sister was singing, the melody resonating around the room, with people by the instrument admiring her.
Memories of another life flooded back. He felt the touch of the past unlike he had in all the years he had been here with Elizabeth.
Aside from the clothes, it was a tableau straight from the life he left behind.
He felt hot all over and fixed in place.
Part of him told him to leave the room and push away this powerful image reminding him of a forgotten life he no longer wanted.
But he could not falter now. Regardless of his own hurt, Georgiana had left her home and thrown herself into the unknown just for the chance to talk with him.
He had acted selfishly, and it was time to remedy that.
Darcy clapped with the others when she finished, politely nodding her acknowledgement while her cheeks burned pink. Performing was easy for her; talking with strangers after was the struggle. The museum director congratulated her while the visitors moved away to see other parts of the house.
“That was fabulous! Can I record you tomorrow? I want to put you on our social media. Your voice is amazing.”
Darcy saw in her face that Georgiana stumbled over the meaning of social media and what would be recorded. She looked on the verge of downright panic. He caught her gaze over the director’s shoulder and gave a slight nod.
“It would be my pleasure,” she breathed, shrinking a little.
The director left, and Darcy approached his sister. “You sound even better than I remember.”
“Did you recognise the song?”
“It was from Dalayrac’s Les deux petits Savoyards. I don’t hear music like that anymore.” He briefly closed his eyes as his memory passed over the song. “I had forgotten musicale evenings with operas and ballads, but the moment I heard you, it all came back.”
“Should I apologise?”
Georgiana said it gently and without an arch look, but he still felt her rebuke. She was astute, but would never challenge him outright for his neglect. She was naturally reticent, and from a time when women submitted to men, and he was still her older brother who had acted like her father.
“May I speak with you privately?” he asked. “I would like to apologise to you.”
She turned pink but agreed, and he led them from the music room outside to the summer house, the small roofed open-air building in the garden.
“We should be free from any visitors here,” he said as they sat out of the sun.
“Most of them come to look at your gowns. If they come outside, they spend their time walking the park.”
“We talked here about travelling through time and how you missed Elizabeth after you told me the truth about Nine Ladies.”
He supposed they had. And now it was fifteen years of life experience later.
Their clothes were markedly different—as his sister thought wearing trousers was the oddest thing in the world but still wore them—but brother and sister were still sitting together in the garden pondering time travel and love.
“I am exceedingly sorry that I have treated you coldly since you arrived. It was hurtful and selfish of me. You came here for whatever guidance and encouragement I could give, and I treated you like a stranger rather than a sister.”
Georgiana turned to look him in the eye. “Why did my return distress you? You could not truly think I would go back and undo the life you and Elizabeth have here.”
The fear of it choked him. It was why he never so much as wanted to send another letter back to the past. What if Georgiana did anything that meant his wife and his child were no longer here with him? It was nothing Georgiana would do on purpose, but it was possible.
It was one thing if he was here and Pemberley was not, if he had neither documents nor home.
But if it meant he was not married to Elizabeth?
If Sandra did not exist? His hands shook and he clenched them into fists.
Georgiana searched his eyes, and he steadied himself.
His anxiety over possibly losing his family was separate from his reluctance to connect with his sister.
“No,” he said, forcing himself to be calm, “it was because you are a reminder of the life I did not choose.”
Now she looked perplexed. “You love your wife and your child, and you seem fulfilled here. You cannot have any doubts about your choice.”
“No, not at all,” he insisted. “This is what I wanted, and I made it happen so that I took care of what mattered most to me: you, Elizabeth, and Pemberley, both then and now.”
“Then why does my mere presence trouble you?”
He sighed, stretching out his legs as he looked over the garden.
“This life with Elizabeth is what I want, what I need to be happy. I want this life more than the old one. That old life ended when I came here. I could never go back, so I never looked back. Not because of painful memories, but because there were so many good ones.”
Georgiana was quiet for a while, shifting to look out like he was, sitting shoulder to shoulder with him.
“I never thought my being here would be heartrending to you. I thought, once you overcame the surprise, you would feel joy in seeing me again. I believed that I had the opportunity of a lifetime to see my brother again, to have a sister, to meet your child, so you must naturally feel the same about seeing me.”
Darcy shook his head. “I see you and I think of everything I missed, all the friendships lost, all the family I’ll never know, all the amusements and activities I can no longer experience.
” Georgiana sighed, and Darcy put an arm around her.
“But that is not your fault, and it is not a reason to keep you at a distance. I am sorry.”
She rested her head against his shoulder, and for a while they looked at the flowers and garden paths, lost in their own thoughts.
Elizabeth would have jumped in to urge Georgiana to ask Mr Willers to marry her, but such a tactic would not suit his sister’s reticent manner and her natural reluctance to speak first.
And after ignoring her for weeks, he had no right to dictate his opinion on her behaviour.
“I am surprised to see so many rooms and furnishings here are nearly the same,” she said pleasantly. “Aside from the modernisations that have taken place over the generations, this Pemberley feels familiar.”
“The caretakers after you tried to keep the integrity of the house just as you left it.” He would talk with her vaguely about Pemberley, but he would not add that her son’s untimely death and how her raising her grandson led to a longer reach of her influence.
“You established a brilliant plan to bring Pemberley into the last century and this one, and nearly intact, except for the land sold.”
Holdings had to be sold to pay death duties, and Mr Willers had structured the lease to allow that to happen. Darcy now had only a few tenants and some of the park, but the house and its contents survived.
“That plan worked because my sister and her family felt a sense of duty to Pemberley’s legacy,” he insisted.
“You have done well too. And with Elizabeth’s help,” she said. “You would not be able to do this without her.”
Did she think he needed the reminder? He knew men in the nineteenth century who would, and, sadly, some born in the twenty-first who would also think that way. “I know it, and I wouldn’t want to. She has excellent business sense, and she brings out the best in people.”
“She does. And she loves them deeply. Elizabeth left a letter for me when she returned home in 1811. It reminded me to not sacrifice my self-respect, that I am a capable woman despite my shyness, and not to be in a hurry to marry. She even thought I might do some good at Pemberley. I am not certain she realises that she has done just as much good here.”
He thought he was the luckiest man in the world to have married Elizabeth, but it saddened him that she doubted her own worth.
There was nothing he valued more than her.
“She is the one who convinced me that you needed to know you were as much a Darcy of Pemberley as I was, that you needed to be told you were worthy of the responsibility. Her faith in you first made me realise that you could take care of Pemberley if you wanted it.” He turned to look at her, guilt pressing on his chest. “Did you want it, or did you accept because you felt like you had to?”
She gaped at him for the question. “Yes, I wanted it. I did then and still do. It is unnatural for a woman to admit such a thing—”
“Not in my century.”
She laughed a little. “I cannot understand that sort of freedom, but I am glad the ladies who live now have it and can speak unreservedly if they choose it. It feels unfeminine to be ambitious, but yes, I wanted Pemberley.”
“Even now, with Mr Willers leaving?”
Her adamant expression faltered. “Yes. I can manage without him. Can I not?” she added weakly. “It will be so difficult to be there without him—without his assistance, I mean.”
“You are capable of great things. But you do not have to manage without him. If you know why he is leaving, you could give him a reason to stay.”
He had hoped she would tell him why he was leaving, but she said, “No, he does not want money. I must employ someone else. But how many other stewards will see me as a competent manager? How many will arrogantly assume they know more, or that because I am a woman, I cannot possibly make a decision?”
Could she not guess Mr Willers was leaving because he assumed his love for her was unreturned?
Regardless, Darcy would have to encourage her in the belief that she was capable.
That mattered more than convincing her she needed a husband.
“You would never employ someone like that, and if they deceived you, it would not take you long to remove him and find another. I would not think long on that concern.”