9. Missing
MISSING
ELIZABETH'S POV
The house came alive with the particular chaos of a household discovering, all at once, that its center is gone.
Servants were sent to the stables, the gatehouse, every room Georgiana might have retreated to.
Each came back with the same answer, and each answer made the rain outside seem to fall harder.
Mrs. Reynolds stood in the great hall with her hands pressed together, saying nothing, watching the master she'd known since boyhood move through his own house like a stranger to it.
"Tell me everything." Darcy's voice had none of its usual armor left. "Now. All of it."
"There's a soldier—Edmund Vale, stationed at Lambton.
He's been writing to her for weeks, telling her you'd never consent to a man without fortune, telling her I understood her feelings but was too loyal to you to say so, telling her that meeting him in secret would prove she wasn't the frightened girl from Ramsgate anymore.
" Elizabeth's voice didn't break, though everything in her wanted it to.
"I saw a letter, part of one. I saw them together once, on the eastern path.
I warned her as gently as I knew how, without breaking her confidence.
I believed—I still believe—that forcing her hand would only have driven her to him faster. "
"You should have told me the moment you saw them together." He didn't shout it. He said it worse than shouted—flat, controlled, wrecked. "Whatever you believed about her trust, her safety matters more."
"Yes." There was nothing left in her to defend herself with, only the plain, unbearable truth of it. "Yes, it does. And now we have to find her."
He looked at her a moment longer, not with the anger she'd braced for but with something rawer, something closer, in a calmer hour, to grief.
Then he was moving, calling for horses, for lanterns, every able man on the estate sent toward the roads to Lambton, the direction a soldier stationed there would naturally be found.
"Darcy." She caught his sleeve before he could pass her, and he stopped, startled by the touch as much as the name—she'd never once, all summer, called him by it plainly.
"I know I've failed you in this. I'll answer for it as fully as you need, whenever you need it.
But not now. Now we have to think about where she's actually gone, not where we're afraid to imagine her. "
He held her gaze a moment, some of the fury draining out of him at the sight of her own fear laid bare beside his, and gave one sharp nod before pulling free and heading for the stables.
But Elizabeth, standing in the doorway with rain already soaking through her sleeve, understood something his search wouldn't account for.
He knew the estate. He didn't know Georgiana's heart, not the way Elizabeth had come to, these past weeks.
Not the map of roads, but the map of feeling.
The logic of a frightened girl who'd been told, over and over, that courage meant choosing the path no one expected of her.
Georgiana wouldn't go toward Lambton, where she might be seen and turned back.
She'd go toward the one place she and Vale could meet unremarked: the lower walk, the old boathouse by the river, where the grounds went wild and the garden wall gave way to trees.
Georgiana had pointed it out once, half-wistfully, as somewhere she used to hide as a child when she wanted no one to find her.
Elizabeth thought, too, of the note crushed in Georgiana's hand three days past, and of a scrap of blue ribbon missing from her workbasket that very morning.
It was a small thing, easy to overlook, except that Georgiana had once said, laughing, that she meant to give some token to whichever gentleman proved himself worth the risk of her brother's disapproval.
Elizabeth had taken it for a girlish fancy at the time. She didn't now.
"The river path." She said it aloud, mostly to herself, and didn't wait to see if she was believed before she was moving, cloak already useless against the rain, down through the darkening garden toward the gate the gardener had named.
The storm had made the world small and loud and grey, thunder rolling almost without pause now, rain driving nearly sideways across the lawn.
Elizabeth ran until her side ached, following the wall down toward the water, calling Georgiana's name into wind that tore the sound away before it could travel.
She'd nearly reached the place where the lower road curved out of sight into the trees when she saw a flash of pale fabric, there and gone, moving fast and alone toward the tree line.
The path narrowed there, and the river ran high with days of rain she hadn't thought, until this moment, to fear.
"Georgiana!" The wind took the name and scattered it. The pale shape didn't turn, didn't slow. It vanished into the dark line of trees where the storm and the failing light swallowed every trace of her.
Elizabeth stood at the edge of the wood, rain streaming down her face. She understood, far too late to be of any use, that the secret she'd kept to protect one girl's trust had become, in the space of a single storm, the very thing that might cost that girl everything.
Behind her, faint through the rain, she thought she heard her own name—Darcy, maybe, his search turned at last toward the river once the roads to Lambton came up empty.
She couldn't be sure, and wouldn't wait to find out.
Every moment spent listening was a moment not spent closing the distance to the trees.
The river here ran fast and without warning, the bank narrow, the current deep under a surface that looked calm even in fair weather.
She didn't stop to think further. She went into the trees after her, into the dark, into the rain, with nothing left but the one true thing she still had. She couldn't undo the silence she'd chosen. But she wouldn't add to it the failure of turning back now.
Continue in Installment Four: THE PEMBERLEY SUMMER