5. A Warning Without a Betrayal
A WARNING WITHOUT A BETRAYAL
ELIZABETH'S POV
Her letter to Mrs. Gardiner went unanswered, for want of time rather than want of trying.
A reply couldn't be expected for a week at least, and Elizabeth had already begun to suspect she didn't have a week.
Mrs. Reynolds, gently sounded, knew only that a Mr. Vale had come recommended to his regiment from somewhere in the north, and was accounted a pleasant, well-spoken young man by the tradesmen of Lambton.
That was, Elizabeth thought sourly, exactly what a patient, practiced deceiver would be accounted by people who'd known him a few weeks.
She chose the garden for the next attempt, thinking the open air might loosen what closed doors had shut. Georgiana walked beside her with the wariness of someone expecting a lecture and already armed against it. Elizabeth, recognizing the posture, tried a different door.
"I never told you the whole of what happened with Mr. Wickham." Georgiana startled at the name, said so plainly. "Not because it's a great secret. Because it does me no credit, and one doesn't offer such stories freely."
"You needn't?—"
"I'd like to, if you'll let me. He was charming to me exactly the way he's charming to you.
More charming, if anything, because I had no fifteen-year-old's excuse, and ought to have known better.
He told me things about your brother that flattered my own opinion of myself, for having disliked Mr. Darcy first. He made me feel clever for believing him, and made your brother's silence look like guilt instead of honor.
I didn't learn the truth until it was nearly too late to matter.
I've never quite forgiven myself for how easily I was led—not because I was foolish, but because he was good at it.
That kind of skill doesn't announce itself. "
Georgiana kept walking, eyes on the gravel. "Mr. Vale is not Mr. Wickham."
"I don't say he's the same man. I say the method rhymes.
A method that's worked once tends to get used again by men who find it effective, whether or not they think of themselves as villains for it.
Very few men who do harm think of themselves as the villain of the story. That's rather the trouble with them."
"How did you find out? That you'd been deceived, I mean."
Elizabeth thought about it honestly before answering.
"Slowly, and then all at once, the way you discover a floor's been rotting under a carpet only when your foot finally goes through.
I had evidence before I had belief. A letter.
An account from someone with nothing to gain by lying.
A pattern that no longer fit the story I'd built.
But I didn't want to believe it. Believing it meant admitting I'd been made a fool of by my own vanity as much as by his skill.
That's the harder door to open, Georgiana.
Not the one that shows you a man's falseness, but the one that shows you your own willingness to be flattered by it. "
"You think I can't tell a good man from a bad one."
"I think no one can, easily, when the bad one is patient and the good people around her are impatient.
That's not a fault in you. It's only how deception works, and I'd rather you knew the shape of it than trust yourself blind out of pride.
" She stopped walking and turned to face her.
"I'm not asking you to distrust your own heart.
I'm asking you to let it be examined a little longer before you act on it—the way you'd let a doctor look at something before you swallowed whatever medicine a stranger pressed into your hand. "
Something in Georgiana's face wavered. Elizabeth saw it, the flicker of a girl who wanted very much to be believed, and to believe in turn.
"Darcy would only forbid it. However patiently you examine it, in the end he'll simply forbid it, because he's never once let me choose anything for myself that mattered. "
Elizabeth opened her mouth to deny it and found the denial wouldn't come easily. She thought of Darcy's instinct to arrange, to manage, to protect through control instead of trust. It was an instinct she'd challenged in him herself, more than once, this very summer.
"I can't promise you he wouldn't," she admitted, and heard, in the silence that followed, exactly what that honesty had cost her.
"Then you understand," Georgiana said, quietly triumphant and quietly wounded at once, "why I can't tell him. You've just told me yourself my own fear is likely to prove true."
"That isn't what I—" But Georgiana had already turned back toward the house. Elizabeth was left standing among the roses with the uncomfortable knowledge that her honesty, meant as a warning, had landed as permission.
She stood there a few minutes after Georgiana disappeared through the garden door, running the conversation back for the exact point it had gone wrong.
She couldn't find one false word in anything she'd said.
That was the worst part. She'd told the truth as she saw it, and the truth, told honestly, hadn't been strong enough to outweigh a fortnight of flattery from a man with nothing better to do than cultivate a lonely girl's heart.