LIV Elizabeth Darcy
LIV
Elizabeth Darcy
Georgiana Darcy was at the pianoforte when Elizabeth was brought to her, not playing but merely seated there with both hands resting upon the keys, as though she had either stopped very suddenly or had come to the instrument in the hope that music might provide occupation and found the hope unequal to the attempt.
She was younger than Elizabeth had imagined, though not childishly so. Sixteen, perhaps. Young rather in the way of the carefully protected, marked by it in both its tenderness and its cost. She had Darcy’s colouring exactly — the dark hair, the pale skin, the grave mouth.
The door closed behind Elizabeth. They were alone.
No one had provided instructions for this interview. Richard had touched her arm once in the corridor with the pressure that said I can take you no further than this. After that, she had only herself.
Georgiana stood as Elizabeth entered. She did not curtsey. She only stood, with her hands gathered awkwardly in front of her and her chin a little lifted, watching Elizabeth cross the room with the strained politeness of having been told a stranger was coming up to see her and not told why.
Elizabeth did the only thing she could think to do, which was to come forward and offer her hand.
“Forgive the manner of my arrival, Miss Darcy. I have only just come from Scotland and have not been able to dress as I should have wished. My name is Elizabeth Bennet.”
Georgiana’s hand was already half-extended. It stopped in the air between them.
Her eyes widened, her lips parted on a breath she did not finish, the first tears arrived before she had time to govern them — and Georgiana sat back down on the piano bench rather suddenly, as though her knees had ceased to hold her. One hand went to her mouth.
“Oh,” she said. Then again, behind her fingers, “Oh.”
Elizabeth rushed forward a little. “Miss Darcy? Have I upset you?”
“He — he wrote that name. He wrote it from Netherfield in the autumn before. Then again, from Kent in the spring. I have known your name for —” She stopped.
She pressed the back of her hand against her eyes.
“Forgive me. I do not — Miss Bennet, I do not understand how you have come to be here. Was Fitzwilliam — were you and he — when he —”
She could not finish the question. She had hold of the word engaged and was not going to use it, because using it would commit her to a kind of grief she was not yet prepared to revise. Her hand stayed at her mouth.
Elizabeth understood, with a small cold drop in her chest, that no one had told this girl anything.
Richard had brought Elizabeth straight from her uncle’s library to this room.
He had left the news to be delivered by a woman, because he had decided his cousin deserved that much.
Whatever the colonel had said to his cousin upon his arrival, it had been nothing of consequence — only that a lady was coming up to see her.
“Miss Darcy. I have something I must tell you, and I must tell you carefully. Will you listen to me a moment without interrupting?”
Georgiana’s eyes had gone enormous. She nodded.
“Your brother did not die in April. He is alive. He is in London. I have come from him four days ago.”
Georgiana made a sound that was not quite a word. Her hand tightened on Elizabeth’s so hard it hurt. “What? How —”
“He has been living under a false name in Scotland to avoid a warrant on a charge he did not commit. The warrant has now found him, and he is being held in London pending trial — but he is alive, Miss Darcy. He is alive, and he has been alive every day since April, and I have come to your uncle’s house because we are going to bring him home. ”
“A… alive?”
“Alive.”
“You have — you have seen him. Spoken with him! Touched his hand. He is —”
“I have. He is.”
That undid her entirely.
Georgiana was off the piano bench in the next moment, and her arms went round Elizabeth’s neck without permission or preface, and she wept — not delicately, not in the polite manner of receiving difficult news, but open, ragged weeping.
Elizabeth held her. She did not know what else to do.
She had never held a sister-in-law before, had not been a sister-in-law at any moment of her life until perhaps five minutes ago, and the girl in her arms was crying with such complete trust against her shoulder that the whole strange ascendancy of her new position came down on her at once.
She put her hand against the back of Georgiana’s head and let her cry.
After a little while, Georgiana drew back and looked at her — close, searching, her face wet and unashamed — and her hands stayed at Elizabeth’s elbows as though she were not yet prepared to let go entirely.
“Is he — truly? He is truly alive! You have been with him?”
“I have been with him every day since our wedding in late July until he was taken from me in Scotland.”
“Oh, God.” Georgiana pressed her hand to her mouth again. “Wedding! Oh, God, oh, God. I —” She caught one breath, then another. “How — how can you have come here? How can he have — Elizabeth, how —”
“May I tell you sitting down?”
“Yes. Yes, of course. Here.” She drew Elizabeth to the small sofa by the window and sat beside her and did not relinquish her hand.
“Tell me. Tell me anything. Tell me how he is. Tell me where he is. Tell me how he came to know you again — for he must have known you, he must have — Elizabeth Bennet! He wrote your name eleven times in one letter from Netherfield, did you know that? I counted.”
Elizabeth laughed once, broken, and her own eyes filled at last. “I did not know that.”
“He spoke of you to no one, but he wrote your name to me as though it cost him nothing to write it. I wondered for a year what had happened. He would not tell me when I asked. And now you are here, and you say you married him! Tell me how, Elizabeth. Tell me everything.”
So, Elizabeth told her.
Not all of it — not the dark months at Auchengray, not what passed between her and Darcy under a roof neither of them had been able to claim by daylight, not the night at the inn and the colonel’s hand on her mouth — but the shape of it.
That Darcy had not died in April. That he had gone north.
That an offer had been put to her family which she had not been at liberty to refuse, and which had brought her to Scotland under conditions she had not fully understood until very recently.
That she had been his wife since the twenty-third of July.
That she loved him entirely and would do whatever was now required to bring him home.
Georgiana listened without interrupting, her hand tight in Elizabeth’s, her wet face turned half against Elizabeth’s shoulder by the end of it, the tears still arriving silently.
When Elizabeth had finished, she did not speak for a moment.
Then she sat up and wiped her face with both hands, like a child, and looked at Elizabeth with eyes that were red and entirely steady.
“Did you know who he was when you married him?”
“No. I knew only that he was not what I had first feared, and that whatever else he might be, he was worth trusting.” Her voice softened. “By the time I learned his name, I had already decided he was worth keeping.”
Georgiana looked at her for so long that Elizabeth’s own hands, her own travelling gown, the stains still faint upon her cuffs from the packet, all came forward at once.
Then the younger woman wrapped her arms about Elizabeth’s shoulders and fell on her neck with a sob that was somewhere between grief and joy.
The gesture was so unguarded and so immediate that for an instant Elizabeth could not answer it at all.
“Then we will get him back?”
“God willing.”
Georgiana pulled back and held her shoulders, staring her in the face with a look so like her brother’s, it made Elizabeth’s heart squeeze. “Whatever is required. Whatever it costs. I shall do whatever you, my uncle, and Richard require of me. Tell me what to do.”
“I do not know yet. Your uncle and cousin are making the plans.”
“Then I shall do whatever he asks me. And I shall do whatever you ask me.” Her chin came up. It was Darcy’s chin exactly. “You are my sister now.”
Elizabeth could not answer that at once. She had been received in this house for less than an hour and had not expected to be claimed.
She lifted Georgiana’s hand and pressed it briefly to her own cheek.
“Bless you.”
The cutter put him ashore at the Tower wharf an hour before dawn.
He had been four and a half days at sea and had slept perhaps five of those hours, none of them continuously.
The cabin had been locked. The water had been rough off the Northumberland coast. He had been brought up on deck once, briefly, in a wind that had no opinion on his case, and put below again.
He had not been told where he was bound until the cutter rounded into the Pool and he saw, through the small port of the cabin, the river-front wall and the line of guns and the corner of the White Tower against the grey sky, and then he had not needed to be told.
The escort took him up the water stair. There were five of them, with a lieutenant at the head and four behind, and they walked him through a small postern and along a corridor and across a yard and through another door into a stone-flagged passage that smelt of wet boots and tallow.
The Gentleman Gaoler received him in a low room with a coal fire and a desk and an iron lamp upon it. The man was perhaps fifty, dressed in plain black, with a face that had practised, over the course of a long career, a neutrality proper to the disposition of other men’s lives.
“Mr Darcy.”
“Sir.”
“You have understood, I take it, the nature of the charge under which you are committed.”
“I have.”