7. The Proof of Courage
THE PROOF OF COURAGE
ELIZABETH'S POV
Georgiana kept her distance for three days after the roses, and Elizabeth understood, with a sinking clarity, that her warning had cost her exactly the influence she'd hoped to keep.
She tried twice more to find an opening, once at breakfast, once over needlework.
Both times she ran into a polite, impenetrable civility harder to fight than open anger would have been.
Anger, at least, could be argued with. This was a door shut and latched, hung with a curtain of ordinary pleasantness so no one passing would guess it was locked.
She was still weighing how to get any ground back when she found Georgiana in the corridor outside her sitting room, a folded note crushed in one hand, her face somewhere between terror and radiance.
"What's happened?"
"Nothing's happened." Georgiana said it too brightly. "Nothing at all."
"Georgiana."
The girl's resolve cracked a little, the way it always did under direct address, though not far enough.
"He wants to speak with me. Properly. Not in passing, not by chance—to explain himself honestly, and ask to address my brother, if I'll only meet him once where we won't be interrupted, or overheard by servants who'll carry tales before he's said his piece. "
"Why would an honorable proposal need secrecy at all?"
"Because if he's seen coming up to the house, he'll be turned away before he says a word.
You know that's true. You all but admitted it yourself.
He says—" Georgiana stopped, then pushed on, the words coming faster now, as if speed could outrun doubt.
"He says my brother gives no man a chance who can't buy his good opinion first. He says if I won't meet him, I'm only proving I'm still the frightened child from Ramsgate, too afraid of my own judgment to act on it even once. "
There it was, laid bare—the whole trap, built so carefully its walls looked like doors from the inside. Something cold settled under Elizabeth's ribs. Prove you're not a child by doing the one thing a child would be forgiven for and a grown woman wouldn't.
"Georgiana, listen to me. A man who calls your caution cowardice isn't offering you courage.
He's offering you a test rigged so refusing proves his point and accepting proves nothing at all.
By the time you've met him in secret, you've already given him exactly what he asked for, whatever else happens after. "
"You make it sound like every kindness he's shown me was calculated."
"I make it sound that way because I'm afraid it might be.
A girl who loves someone rarely wants to look too closely at the difference between kindness and calculation.
The looking itself feels like a kind of betrayal.
I'm not asking you to stop loving what you love.
I'm asking you to notice he's never once suggested you test his patience instead of your own courage.
The whole proof this arrangement requires falls on you. None of it falls on him."
Georgiana's composure wavered, just slightly, and Elizabeth pressed on before it could set again.
"A man sure of his own honor doesn't need a woman to prove anything in secret.
He asks to be received properly, in daylight, in front of whatever family she has, and lets his conduct answer for him.
Only a man who suspects he can't survive that daylight asks for darkness instead, and calls it romance. "
"You said yourself I should be allowed to judge for myself." Georgiana's chin came up, defiant in the way of someone arguing against a fear she already half shared. "This is my judgment. I've made it."
"Then tell me when, and where, and let me come with you—if nothing else, so you're not alone in a wood with a man neither your brother nor I have ever properly looked at."
"No." The refusal came instantly. With it came a look Elizabeth hadn't seen on her before, not defiance exactly, but the particular loneliness of a girl who's decided the secret is hers alone to carry now, even from the one person who'd tried hardest to share the weight of it.
"I've told you enough already. I won't tell you more. "
She turned and went into her room, and the door shut with a small, final click that told Elizabeth more plainly than words that she'd lost whatever ground she'd once had.
Elizabeth stood a moment with her hand half-raised toward the closed door, weighing whether to knock again, and decided against it.
Nothing to be gained by pressing now. She'd seen enough in Georgiana's face to know that pushing further would only set the knot tighter.
Whatever came next, she'd used up everything patience and honesty could offer.
She had nothing left but watching—a poor substitute for either, but the only one she had.
She stood alone in the corridor a moment longer, aware of something shifting in the air, a heaviness, a closeness.
At the window she found a sky that was, for all its brightness, gathering something dark along the western edge.
Far off, faint enough she might have imagined it, came the first low roll of thunder, though the sun still lay warm across the lawn.
It didn't feel like weather anymore. It felt like a warning she'd arrived too late to give.