Chapter 10 Georgiana #2
"I want you to know," Georgiana said, "that I am happy about the engagement.
I was afraid, at first, when my brother wrote to tell me.
I was afraid you might be like the women at ton parties who look at me and see only my dowry and my connections.
But then he described you, and --" She blushed.
"He described you in terms that made it quite clear he was not thinking about connections. "
"What terms?"
"He said you argued with him at every opportunity, that you laughed at him to his face, and that you were the most magnificent woman he had ever met. He used the word magnificent three times in a single letter. I counted."
Elizabeth felt her own cheeks warm. "Magnificent is a strong word."
"He has never used it before. Not about anyone.
Not about anything." Georgiana turned on the bench to face Elizabeth fully.
"You make him different. Better. He smiles now.
He laughed at dinner last night -- actually laughed, not that polite sound he makes in company.
He is becoming the person I always knew he could be, and it is because of you. "
Elizabeth could not speak for a moment. The weight of Georgiana's trust, offered so freely after such costly experience, pressed against her chest like a hand.
"I will take care of him," Elizabeth said. "And I will take care of you. I know I am not the sister you might have expected --"
"You are the sister I hoped for." Georgiana said it simply, without drama, and then she turned back to the piano and began to play, and the music that filled the room was not the careful, technically perfect performance Elizabeth had heard before.
It was something looser, warmer, full of the particular joy that comes from being unafraid.
Elizabeth sat beside her and listened, and outside the frost melted on the Pemberley windows, and inside, something warm and permanent settled into place.
That evening, after dinner, Elizabeth wandered to the gallery. The house was quiet, Georgiana retired to her rooms, the servants moving with the soundless efficiency of long practice. The gallery was dim, lit by a single lamp at the far end, the portraits looming in the half-light like watchers.
She walked slowly, studying faces. Darcy's mother, painted in her youth: dark-eyed, beautiful, with a firmness around the mouth that suggested her son's stubbornness had been honestly inherited.
His father, kind-faced, the resemblance to Wickham's description of him unmistakable.
And at the far end, Darcy himself, painted at twenty-two, young and unlined and impossibly solemn, the weight of Pemberley already visible in his eyes.
She reached up and touched the frame.
"You are looking at a very unhappy young man," Darcy said from behind her.
She did not startle. She had learned his footstep too well for that.
"He looks as though the world is sitting on his shoulders," she said.
"It was." He came to stand beside her, looking up at his own portrait with an expression she could not quite read.
"That was painted three months after my father's death.
I was twenty-two, master of Pemberley, guardian of a thirteen-year-old sister, and utterly unprepared for any of it.
The painter told me to smile. I could not remember how. "
She took his hand. He laced his fingers through hers, and they stood together in front of the portrait of the man he used to be, and Elizabeth thought about the distance between that solemn, lonely boy and the man beside her, who had learned to laugh again and was still learning to smile, and she loved him so much in that moment that it felt like a physical force, an expansion in her chest that made her ribs ache.
"Georgiana told me today that you used the word magnificent three times in a letter," she said.
"I may have understated the case."
She turned to face him. In the lamplight, his features were soft, the hard lines of his public face dissolved into something private and tender, and when she rose on her toes and kissed him, it was not urgent or desperate or angry.
It was slow, unhurried, the kiss of a woman who knew she had time, who knew she had been chosen, who knew that the man kissing her back was doing so not out of obligation or guilt or the heat of an argument, but because he loved her, freely and fiercely and without reservation.
"I love you," she said against his mouth.
"I know." His hands settled on her waist, drawing her closer, and he kissed her forehead, her temple, the tip of her nose, each contact gentle as a benediction. "I love you too. Magnificently."
"Three times in one letter."
"It bore repeating."
She laughed softly and leaned into him, and they stood in the gallery at Pemberley, surrounded by the painted eyes of his ancestors, and the house settled around them like an embrace.
Outside, the first snow of winter was falling, quiet and white and new, covering everything with a fresh page. And Elizabeth, who had come to Pemberley expecting a house, found instead a home.