Chapter 20 #2
Darcy did not yet know what the pair intended. Extortion, almost certainly, but the precise mechanism, the demand, the amount, the plan—none of that was here. Wickham believed he held the winning cards but had not yet played them.
It was unusual that he had not. Wickham was not a patient man. Mrs. Younge must be holding him back.
He stood. He needed to move, needed some sort of physical act to release what was building inside him. He crossed to the window and pressed his forehead against the cool glass and breathed, once, twice, again, until the anger that made his hands tremble subsided.
He returned to the desk and read Fitz’s note again. Do not tell E or G until we have the full picture. It will not be long now.
The logic was sound. He hated that the logic was sound.
Elizabeth, told that Wickham was circling and Mrs. Younge was spreading poison, would confront it directly.
She was constitutionally incapable of enduring slander without mounting some sort of defence.
He admired her for it, but direct confrontation would reveal their hand before they knew what Wickham intended to demand.
Rule the second—we shall be honest with one another, even when it is uncomfortable—rang in his head. He had agreed to the rules. She had trusted him to keep to his promise, and now he was breaking it. Having a reason did not make it feel less like a betrayal.
He would tell her as soon as Fitz believed it safe. A day. Two at most. He could hold it that long. He had carried worse secrets for longer. But he had not, then, been keeping them from someone whose good opinion he could not bear to lose.
He folded both letters and locked them in the second drawer of his desk, where Elizabeth would never look, because she respected his privacy. Because she was at least beginning to trust him.
The lock clicked shut. It was the loneliest sound he had heard in weeks.
Elizabeth returned from Somerset House with pink cheeks and a new ribbon in her hair. Georgiana had purchased them matching ones. Blue, of all the colours in the world.
Elizabeth appeared rather satisfied when she saw that he had noticed.
“We had the most wonderful morning,” Georgiana announced, settling into her chair. “The watercolours were tolerably good, but the real discovery was a print shop on the Strand. Elizabeth found a caricature of a man who looked exactly like you, Brother.”
“It did not look exactly like him,” Elizabeth said, though she nearly winked at him.
“It looked very like him. The eyebrows were precisely right.”
“The eyebrows were suggestive of his.”
Darcy looked between them. “I am delighted to have provided the morning’s amusement.”
“You provide a great deal of amusement, Brother,” Georgiana said affectionately. “Mostly without intending to.”
“Georgiana.” Elizabeth’s lips pressed together in the way that meant she was holding back.
She caught his eye across the table to send a silent apology, and for a moment the warmth from the carriage flickered between them, a shared recognition of absurdity, a thread of the ease that had been building over weeks of library evenings and breakfast table books and the slow, careful process of learning another person.
Then Georgiana asked Elizabeth whether she preferred the watercolour of the Roman ruin or the one of the Highland cattle, and the moment was absorbed into the current of his sister’s happiness.
He watched them through the meal. His sister and his wife, heads bent together as they debated the merits of the exhibit with an intensity that would have done credit to a parliamentary committee.
He should have been glad. He was glad. Georgiana had not laughed like this since before the summer, before Mrs. Younge and Wickham and the catastrophe that had led them all here.
And she had never spoken to him in such a way.
It would have to be addressed, of course, but there was a small part of him that was pleased she could assert herself in such a way.
She would need that sort of confidence, properly guided, for her come out in a few years.
Elizabeth had given her this, the laughter, the ribbons, the easy companionship of a loving sister.
But he and Elizabeth had not been alone together since the library, two evenings ago, and the distance between what he owed his wife and what he owed his sister had never felt so vast.
The luncheon was comprised of Mrs. Carroll’s raised game pie, a towering affair of golden crust layered with rabbit and pheasant, fragrant with thyme and mace.
Elizabeth had liberated Mrs. Carroll from twelve years of the same seven dishes, and Mrs. Carroll, it seemed, had decided to take full advantage.
“This is extraordinary,” Georgiana said, sounding awed. “Mrs. Carroll is a revelation.”
Elizabeth ate a piece and watched him devour his.
“You like it,” she said, pleased.
“It is well-prepared.”
She shook her head at him. “That is your third helping.”
He could not help but tease her. “We had an early breakfast.”
“We had breakfast at the usual time. You are simply incapable of admitting that something has changed for the better under your own roof because you did not think of it yourself.”
He considered this. “The crust is very fine,” he conceded.
“There. Was that so painful?”
He leaned back and touched a napkin to the corner of his mouth. “Moderately.”
That evening, Elizabeth came to the library.
She opened the Brunton. He watched her read. She was several chapters in, and her expressions changed as serious readers’ faces often did, the faint crease of concentration, the occasional lift of an eyebrow, the small, involuntary smile when the author had done something well.
Despite his cousin’s instruction, Darcy planned to tell her tonight.
After Georgiana retired and the house grew quiet and it was just the two of them and the fire and the silence that had become their best language, he would put down his book and say the words he had been rehearsing since morning: There is something I must tell you.
I ought to have told you sooner, and I am sorry.
But she looked up from her novel with a warmth that made his heart ache and said, “The story is very good. I shall read it to you when I am done.”
He chuckled. “I cannot think of anything I would like less.”
“You say things like that and expect I shall believe them,” she replied airily. “I do not.”
Elizabeth was right, of course. And he found that the rehearsed words would not come, because she was smiling at him, teasing him, and the letter locked in his desk would shatter every piece of this slow and careful thing they were building between them.
He was not brave enough to be the one to break it.
Tomorrow. He would tell her tomorrow, in the sunlight, when Fitz came with knowledge of the plan and the evidence, and there was something concrete to offer alongside the betrayal.