Three #2
She had colonised the settee, the side table, and most of the carpet with squares of silk, muslin, and something that appeared to be cloth-of-gold.
Correspondence was stacked on the arm of the chair.
A fashion plate from La Belle Assemblée was propped against a teacup, and beside it lay a list in Georgiana’s careful hand, so long it curled over the edge of the table and brushed the floor.
His sister was getting married in June. The household had been informed of this fact repeatedly, in detail, and at volume.
“Brother.” She glanced up from a square of cream damask. Her face changed. The brightness dimmed, replaced by something sharper, more attentive. She set the fabric down. “What has happened?”
He lowered himself into the chair opposite and stretched his legs out. His body was finally registering the morning—the agency, the tea shop, the punishing stride home—and every joint protested.
“I found a governess.”
“Oh, wonderful.” The brightness returned. “Anne has been terrorising Alice constantly. The poor girl deserves a campaign medal. When does she start?”
“Tomorrow.”
Georgiana’s eyebrows rose. “That was swift. Who is she?”
He kept his voice even. This was a skill he had perfected over years of parliamentary dinners, estate disputes, and one catastrophic evening in a parsonage in Kent. “Her name is Miss Elizabeth Bennet. I knew her some years ago, when Bingley took Netherfield in Hertfordshire.”
Georgiana tilted her head. “Bennet. You mentioned the family once or twice. The father is a gentleman? Several sisters?”
“Five daughters. The father is dead.”
The tilt sharpened. She was reading him now, the way she read music—attentive to every rest, every change in key. “Go on.”
He told her. He kept the account spare—facts arranged in order, delivered without embellishment, the way he would present a matter to his solicitor.
Miss Elizabeth’s youngest sister had eloped with a man seven years ago.
The man had not married her. He had kept her a fortnight in London and abandoned her at the doorstep of her relations.
The scandal had been complete and merciless.
The father’s health failed under the strain.
He died within the year. The estate was entailed to a cousin, who claimed it promptly.
Mrs Bennet and her daughters were left with nothing.
They lived now in Somers Town, on charity from an uncle.
Georgiana’s hand had gone still on the damask at the word eloped, and by the time he reached abandoned, the colour had drained from her face.
“Georgiana. That man... “ His voice was quiet. “It was Wickham.”
She closed her eyes. Her fingers pressed into the fabric, her knuckles whitening against the cream.
Darcy waited. He had learned, over those years since her near elopement with the same man, that his sister did not require rescue from her own feelings. She required space and time, and then she emerged from them with a clarity that frequently put his own to shame.
Her eyes opened. The hand on the damask relaxed.
“How old was the girl? The youngest sister.”
“Fifteen when he took her.”
Georgiana pressed her lips together. She had been sixteen, one year older.
And she had one brother who arrived earlier than he was supposed to.
Those were the only differences. That was all that had separated Georgiana Darcy from the Bennet girl—one year and a brother who happened to change his travel plans.
“And Miss Elizabeth?” Georgiana’s chin lifted. “The one you hired. She was not involved, I presume.”
“She is the second eldest. She had nothing to do with it. None of them did, save Lydia. The family has borne a punishment entirely disproportionate to the crime, and the crime was not even theirs.”
Georgiana nodded. “You did well, Brother.” Her voice was steady now, clear, the tremor gone as swiftly as it had come. “Nothing was Miss Elizabeth’s fault, and we should not charge her with that reprobate’s sins.” She paused, then sighed. “Poor Lydia. I ache for her.”
Darcy studied his sister. The girl who had wept in Ramsgate, who had been so stricken with shame she could not meet his eyes for months, that girl was gone. In her place was a woman who could hold another’s pain without collapsing under the weight of her own.
“You have grown up, Georgie.”
She gave a small, wry smile. “One of us had to.”
He let the barb land. He deserved it, she knew he knew, and the warmth between them required no further elaboration.
Georgiana gathered the nearest fabric swatch and held it up, restoring order to the afternoon. “Is her chamber prepared? Mrs Hatfield will need to know about breakfast arrangements and the schedule for the nursery. What time does she arrive?”
“Our carriage will bring her early in the morning.”
“Then I had better speak to Mrs Hatfield now.” She rose, all business, the fabric samples abandoned. At the door, she turned. “Brother?”
He raised an eyebrow in question.
“Be kind to her. She has had enough unkindness.”
She left before he could respond, which was, he suspected, entirely deliberate.
The hours between Georgiana’s departure and Anne’s bedtime passed in the ordinary way—supper, correspondence, a brief consultation with Mrs Hatfield about the morning’s arrangements. Darcy moved through them with the outward composure of a man whose world had not rearranged itself before luncheon.
Anne’s bedtime ritual was sacred and non-negotiable.
A story first—tonight it was the tale of a brave knight who rescued a horse from a dragon.
Anne had firm opinions about narrative priorities and the horse was always more important than the princess.
Then prayers, which she conducted briskly, and a pointed request that God make tomorrow’s weather suitable for the garden. Then the final act.
She reached up with both hands and took his face.
Her palms were warm and slightly sticky from the sugared biscuit Alice had slipped her after supper, a transgression Darcy was aware of and had chosen to overlook.
Her fingers splayed across his jaw, small and certain.
She held him there the way she held everything—completely, without reservation, the idea that he might not want to be held had simply never occurred to her.
“Goodnight, Papa.”
“Goodnight, sweetheart.”
She released him and turned onto her side. Muffin was tucked against her chest, his painted eye facing outward, standing guard. Her breathing slowed within minutes—the enviable, instantaneous sleep of a child with no guilt or regrets, and no knowledge that the world contained either.
He stayed, watching her silently. Then he rose, adjusted the blanket, and left the nursery on quiet feet.
He walked to the master’s chamber and closed the door behind him. The room was dark, save for the fire. He lit no candles. He poured a generous measure of brandy. Moderation had already failed him once today and he saw no reason to pretend it would succeed now. Besides, he needed it.
He sat in the chair by the hearth. He took a large sip and set the glass down, only to pick it up again.
He should write to his steward. The drainage problem in the east field at Pemberley required a decision, and the tenant at Elm Farm had written twice about a fence.
These were real, tangible matters that deserved his attention and had absolutely no connection to the curve of Elizabeth Bennet’s neck.
The brandy burned, amber and slow.
He gave up all pretences.
Her eyes. That was where the trouble had begun in the agency.
The moment she had lifted her lashes and revealed them.
Dark, sharp, lit with a defiance that poverty had not managed to extinguish.
His breath had stopped, as if a hand had closed around his throat and squeezed.
He had always had a soft spot for her fine eyes.
And then there was her neck. The line of it above the worn collar of her dress, where the fabric had been mended so carefully that the stitches were almost invisible.
She had held her chin high—pride or habit, perhaps both.
The gesture had drawn the tendon taut beneath her skin, a single clean line from her jaw to her collarbone.
Christ, how he had wanted to press his mouth to the hollow at the base of it.
Not gently or politely. He wanted to... No.
In the tea shop, she had wrapped her fingers around the teacup.
He had watched her drink, and the thought had surfaced—unbidden, ferocious, ungovernable.
He wanted to take the cup from her hands and set his lips where hers had been.
The rim, still warm. The faint trace of her mouth on the porcelain.
He had wanted it with a violence that did not belong in a perfectly innocent tea shop.
He had sat there with his composed expression in place, and ordered more hot water as though he were not coming apart at the seams.
She had not eaten the toast. She was thinner than she should have been—her wrists were narrow, and her collarbones too sharp beneath the cotton.
The urge to feed her had risen in him with a force that bordered on irrational.
To put bread in her hands and watch her eat.
The desire to nourish her and the desire to touch her had knotted themselves together in his chest, and he could not find the seam between them.
He drank some more while the fire cracked and settled.
He should stop. He should put the glass down, close his eyes, and think about drainage and fences and the mundanity of a life that functioned perfectly well without Elizabeth Bennet in it.
Instead, his mind continued its descent.
Her mouth—the shape of it when she had smiled at him on the stairs.
The lower lip, fuller than the upper, and the way it had curved, reluctant, as though the smile had been dragged out of her against her will.
He wanted to trace that curve with his thumb.
With his tongue. He wanted to know if she tasted the way she smelled.
His blood stirred. Heat gathered, low and heavy, pooling where it had no business pooling over a woman who had rejected him brutally and was arriving in the morning to teach his daughter her letters. He shifted in the chair. The fabric of his breeches was suddenly insufficient.
He was not Wickham.
The thought was cold water, and he needed it.
He was not a man who took advantage of desperate women.
She would be under his roof, in his care, dependent on him for her livelihood and her family’s survival.
He would be her employer and her protector, and if there was a circle in hell reserved for men who confused the two, he would not be occupying it.
She had never wanted him. She had made that clear with a thoroughness that left no room for interpretation.
He would respect it, and keep his hands, his thoughts, and his treacherous, inconvenient desire to himself.
He would.
He finished the brandy and undressed. He got into his bed.
It was too large for one person. The sheets were cool, smooth, and entirely wrong, because his body was still radiating heat and his mind was still painting pictures he had not authorised.
Her jaw, her throat, the shadow beneath her collarbone, the skin below the mended collar that he would never see and could not stop imagining.
He pressed his face into the pillow and groaned.
Tomorrow would be agony dressed as employment and he knew it. But it would be more than he had yesterday.
Sleep, he commanded his brain.
It did not obey.