Chapter What Georgiana Wants
Not the Handel, please. Anything else.”
At the pianoforte, my daughter, Anne, looks at me with an expression of petulance far beyond her seven years.
“But Mama, I’ve been practicing. I play it nicely now.”
She sits up taller and shakes her head, golden ringlets glinting in the sun.
She smiles at me and turns away, flips the sheet music as if she’s not playing only the right hand and by memory.
She is both pretty and defiant, a combination that amuses me now, but may bring us trouble when she is older.
Anne starts again, her playing halting but correct.
I’m tempted to leave the room to be alone, but that will only make it worse.
And the music didn’t start this; the thoughts gripped me again this morning, shortly after I awakened, when the pleasant blur of my dream—bare skin, entwined legs, lips on my neck—clarified into a face, a figure, and a name.
Anne strikes a wrong note, bites her lip, and carries on.
Her playing is slow and stiff, but still, it is too much to bear.
Under my breath, I recite the tasks to which I should attend today—a letter to Lizzie, a dress fitting with the seamstress, a basket for that poor family with the sick child.
Letter, dress, basket. Letter, dress, basket.
Anne starts the song again. It’s no use.
Physically, I am here at Headsworth, where I am wife to the dependable Edmund and mother to Anne and Thomas, but in my head and my thrumming body, I am on holiday in Margate, just shy of sixteen years old, sitting on an unfamiliar piano bench beside George Wickham, under the watchful eye of my companion, Mrs. Younge.
“Position your hands,” George had said, his silky, dark hair falling over his eyes. “Show me how to play.”
I placed my fingers on the keys, curving them as I’d been taught. He rested his hands on mine. His scent, warm and earthy, was strangely familiar.
“Now,” he said. “The minuet again. Handel.”
“Like this?” I looked down at his large hands, which concealed my own. A sea breeze drifted through the open widow. It was warm, but I shivered.
“Yes, like this.”
As I played, George’s hands stayed with mine, barely touching but moving along the keyboard as if he knew where my fingers were going to travel.
When we went up the scale, his shoulder leaned in.
When we came down, he pulled back. I touched the right notes but barely heard the song, so overtaken was I by the catch in my throat, the tingling up my arms, the warmth in my seat.
When we were finished, I didn’t dare face him.
Across the parlor, Mrs. Younge set down her needlework, stood up, and left the room.
My heart hammered like a woodpecker—as it does now.
In front of me, Anne jumps down from the bench, slips, and falls.
“Ow, my knee!”
I help her up from the floor. She hops on one foot.
“You’re fine,” I tell her. “Run along and find your little brother. I think he’s in the library with Miss Rookwood.”
I take Anne’s place at the pianoforte and practice scales, starting with the majors as always, C, then G, D, and A.
Briefly, my mind is at ease. The pattern of the music calms me.
I continue through E, B, and F, and then I start over, but the task is too slow and doesn’t require enough concentration.
A lock of hair tickles my shoulder where George once fingered a tendril that had fallen loose from my bun.
I start the scales again from C, but play faster.
Yet even as my fingers fly up and down the keyboard, my mind swirls with memories of those afternoons in the parlor—and the evening when George took my hand, turned it over, and pressed his lips to my palm.
“Annie! Come play with me!” I hear Thomas in the library. His excitement is palpable; he adores his older sister.
In the weeks after my brother brought me home from Margate, I spent hours at the piano.
As if in a dream, I’d move from the drawing room to my bedroom and back again, tolerating company only at meals, during which I barely spoke.
Being home at Pemberley was usually a comfort, but I took little pleasure in my surroundings.
My brother assumed I was using music to drown out my shame at having nearly eloped, but shame was not all that afflicted me; I was heartbroken.
I’d been so gullible and naive. And I regretted how virulently I’d argued with my beloved brother.
We’d never before raised our voices at each other.
After our parents were both gone, my brother had stepped in as surrogate father.
I knew that many found him proud, but to me he was the essence of kindness and care.
I still hate how I spoke to him in Margate.
“I don’t care if George is after my money,” I’d cried. “My thirty thousand pounds will be a factor in whatever match I make. Why shouldn’t it go to someone I love?”
“Love?” My brother scowled. “You are an innocent child. What can you possibly know of love?”
“And you know so much about romance, Mr. Darcy?” I knew he despised when I addressed him formally in this way, like a stranger or a servant, but I was beyond reason.
“George Wickham may not be perfect, but at least I have known love. You’ll never marry because no one meets your impossible standards. ”
Worse, I accused my brother of being jealous of George, whose sparkling eyes, fine countenance, and happy manners brought him friends and admirers wherever he went. Everyone at Pemberley adored him, our father most of all.
Now, a rustle of skirts at the door. The governess.
“I beg your pardon, Lady Stoughton, may I take the children outside now instead of later this afternoon? There are clouds in the distance, and I’m afraid it might rain.”
“Of course, Miss Rookwood. You don’t have to ask permission. I trust you to do what you think is best.”
She is still new, so young and tentative. I think she’s scared of me. If only she knew how frightened I am of myself!
In the next room, Miss Rookwood speaks to the children, who clap and squeal, delighted to play outside.
When I was their age, I used to roam all over Pemberley, looking for George.
The son of the estate’s steward, George grew up alongside my brother and, thanks to my father, was schooled beside him all the way through Cambridge.
Though a decade older than me, George devoted hours to my amusement.
He’d slip lemon drops into my hand under the table and sometimes tease me by tugging on my bonnet and feigning innocence when I whipped around.
“Moi?” he’d say, confusing me with his French.
“Mais non!” I loved fencing with him, a cattail as my sword, until he’d pretend defeat so well that I would cast myself upon him on the ground, sobbing only half in jest as I waited for him to lift his head, wink at me, and say something dramatic like “I live to see another day!”
If my brother was the sun of my girlhood, dependable and steady, George was the stars.
A horse whinnies. I go to the window. Outside, Edmund sits tall and straight-backed in the saddle as he prepares to ride out with the estate manager.
He bends to adjust a stirrup and, as if he can sense my eyes on him, looks up toward the house.
When my husband spots me, he grins and makes a flourish with his arm, like a court jester bowing to a queen.
I watch as he prods his horse and canters away.
How lucky men are to have important things to keep them diverted from whatever rumbles in their minds.
And how odd that I can move through my days as if I’m concentrating on a conversation, or the words in a book, or the stitches in my embroidery, while I am thinking only of long-ago moments that, even in memory, make my body vibrate like the plucked strings of a harp.
I am thankful that no one can read my thoughts.
My husband would be shocked. My brother would be deeply disappointed to know that, after all this time and all that we now know, I am still dreaming of “that wretched man.”
“To think what he might have done to you had I not joined you here in Margate unexpectedly,” he’d said, after I’d confessed our plan to elope. He told me that “Wickham”—he wouldn’t speak his Christian name—was not to be trusted or believed.
“He aims only to satisfy himself,” he said.
“It’s not his fault that he lacks for money,” I said.
“No? Our father left Wickham a living to enter the clergy, but he refused it and asked for money instead. I gave him money, but he squandered it. And then came back and said he wanted to enter the clergy after all, which was patently absurd, as he’d done nothing but pursue a life of idleness and dissipation.
He was livid at my refusal, but I never thought he’d stoop so low as to lure you and your fortune into his trap. ”
“But he didn’t,” I’d countered. “We met him by chance when we were walking along the seawall.”
I recounted how Mrs. Younge and I had been out strolling when the wind picked up and it started to rain.
I was struggling to open my parasol when I heard a man behind us say, “It’s only a mizzle; you won’t melt.
” It had been years since I’d seen George, and I was so happy to discover him that I forgot my manners and threw my arms around him like I was still a child.
“Could it be? Miss Georgiana Darcy?” he’d said. “Look how you’ve grown.”
I thought he was teasing me about my height—we were nearly eye to eye—but he spoke earnestly and declared me a proper young lady, which reminded me to act like one and introduce him to Mrs. Younge.
He bowed elegantly. I was sure Mrs. Younge was impressed that I was on such familiar terms with a man as pleasing as George Wickham.