8. Weather Coming
WEATHER COMING
DARCY'S POV
The sky had been changing since noon. Darcy knew this stretch of Derbyshire well enough to read its moods, and he felt the storm coming on as a kind of dread with nowhere yet to land.
He was still unsettled from the quarrel two evenings past. He hadn't found, in all that time, the words to undo what his own fear had caused.
The darkening sky did nothing to steady him.
That morning he'd tried some small overture toward mending things: a book left with a marked passage he thought might please her, a remark at breakfast meant to read as an apology without either of them having to name it as one.
Elizabeth had accepted both with a courtesy that told him nothing had actually healed, only that she was too well-bred to let the household see its master and his sister's companion at open odds.
That wasn't enough, and he knew it wasn't. He had no better remedy than patience, which was running short that particular week.
He noticed first that Georgiana wasn't in the music room where she usually retreated before supper.
Second, that Elizabeth was moving through the house with a restlessness of her own, appearing in doorways and withdrawing again, her composure held together with visible effort.
That unsettled him more than open distress would have.
He'd gone to the music room himself, some vague instinct pulling him there before he could say why.
He found only the untouched pianoforte and a window left ajar against the coming weather, curtains lifting and falling in wind that already smelled of rain not yet arrived.
He stood there a moment longer than the empty room warranted before going to find Mrs. Annesley, who'd seen Miss Darcy an hour past and not since, and delivered the news with a calm that did nothing to calm him.
"Have you seen Georgiana?" he asked Elizabeth, coming on her at last in the hall, where she stood looking out at the darkening lawn as if she could will her eyes to see further than the window allowed.
"I was with her earlier." Something in the careful shape of the sentence, was with her, not she is, hit him harder than the words alone should have.
"Where is she now?"
"I don't know precisely." She paused, too long, too full. "I've been looking for her myself."
He heard it then, not the words but what sat underneath them. "Miss Bennet. What are you not telling me?"
Before she could answer, one of the under-gardeners came to the terrace door, hat in hand, water already darkening his shoulders. "Beg pardon, sir—thought I saw Miss Darcy on the lower walk, near the garden gate, not a quarter hour since. Alone, sir. Didn't think much of it at the time."
The lower walk led, eventually, to the road—the same stretch where Darcy now realized, with a cold that had nothing to do with the weather, Elizabeth's eyes had been fixed this last quarter hour. He turned to her and found her face already answering the question before he'd finished asking it.
"There's a young man," she said, fast now, the dam simply giving way.
"A Mr. Vale, an officer stationed at Lambton.
Georgiana's been writing to him. I saw them together once, some days ago.
She begged me not to tell you, and I tried to warn her myself.
I tried to learn who he was. I thought I had time?—"
"You knew." The two words came out of him with a violence he hadn't intended, three days of misdirected fear behind them. "You've known for days my sister was tangled up with a man neither of us has looked at properly, and you said nothing?—"
"Because the moment I told you, she'd have felt betrayed by the one person she believed wouldn't take her choices away the instant they frightened me. I judged, wrongly maybe, I don't know anymore, that her trust was worth protecting a little longer than it was?—"
The first crack of thunder broke directly overhead, close enough that the windows shivered in their frames.
A door banged somewhere in the rising wind.
Darcy felt his fear resolve, all at once, from something abstract and private into something with a name and a location: a girl unaccounted for, in a storm that had been building since noon and had waited, with something like deliberate cruelty, until now to break.
"Georgiana is missing." It wasn't a question, and Elizabeth's face, white and stricken, confirmed it before either of them said another word.
For one terrible instant neither of them moved.
Then Darcy was already turning, calling for his steward, for lanterns, for every man who could be spared from supper and sleep alike.
The house woke into motion around them as if it, too, had only just understood what the thunder had been promising all afternoon.