Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Georgiana was teaching Elizabeth to play a duet, and Elizabeth was failing at it magnificently.
“No, no—your left hand,” Georgiana said, reaching across to reposition Elizabeth’s fingers on the keys. “The C, not the D. You are a full tone off.”
It had been months since she had been well enough to play, and her skill had been middling even then. “I am a full tone off because my left hand has never been formally introduced to the rest of me. We have an uneasy acquaintance at best.”
Georgiana laughed. She laughed easily these days, and the sound of it filled the music room the way the morning light filled the south-facing windows.
She had blossomed in the weeks since Elizabeth had met her, shedding the timid reserve that had clung to her at Ramsgate.
She played for Elizabeth now without being asked.
She offered opinions on novels, on ribbons, on whether her brother was handsome—he was—and she had begun to assert herself in small, delightful ways.
A few not-so-delightful ways as well, like the flippant comment to Fitzwilliam, but there was no malice in it, only the testing of one’s courage that happened when a girl was growing up.
Each morning, Georgiana appeared earlier, with plans and questions and breathless enthusiasm. Elizabeth could not bear to disappoint her for she could not fathom growing up without a sister to share her days. It must have been very lonely.
She missed them, her sisters at Longbourn, and Jane had not come to London after all. Her last letter had ended with an explanation.
I cannot believe it has been so many weeks already. Letters are a comfort, but I confess they have begun to feel a poor substitute for your voice, your laugh, the way you look when you are trying not to say something arch.
I have news which Mamma insists I relate: Netherfield Park has been let at last. A young man of considerable fortune, by all accounts, though accounts at this stage are chiefly Aunt Phillips’s.
Mamma is in raptures. She has already decided which of us he shall prefer, and I believe you can guess her selection.
I had hoped that your marriage might have soothed her nerves somewhat, but I am sorry to say that it seems only to have made her more ambitious.
As you must have surmised by now, Mamma will not hear of my coming to London while such a prospect remains in the neighbourhood. I have tried twice to raise the subject and both times found myself somehow engaged to dine with the Lucases instead.
I miss you, Lizzy . . .
She missed Jane too. All of them, really, even her exasperating mother. Georgiana was a wonderful girl. She could not look at her without feeling something vast and tender, something that was neither obligation nor duty but simply the quiet, overwhelming pleasure of being wanted for herself.
But she would like to see her Bennet family too.
“Try again,” Georgiana urged. “From the third bar.”
Elizabeth tried again. The result was correct, but not appreciably better. Still, Georgiana beamed at her as though she had performed a minor miracle.
“That was wonderful!”
“You are a terrible liar,” Elizabeth informed her. “That was dreadful.”
“It was not dreadful. You are improving.”
“Improving is perhaps not the word for a sound that would make a cat leave the room.”
“Cats are fickle creatures,” Georgiana said loyally. “You cannot depend upon them to judge correctly.” She sighed. “I wish we could keep a cat inside, but my brother says they knock things off shelves.”
Elizabeth imagined Fitzwilliam at the breakfast table, coffee in hand, paper spread just so, while a sleek cat met his eye and swept his correspondence to the floor. He would not shout. He would simply look disapprovingly at the cat, and the cat would look back without an ounce of remorse.
She smiled. “I see the difficulty,” she said.
“He fancies all dogs, though. He kept a terrier when he was twelve. It bit the vicar.”
Elizabeth added this to the expanding list of things she had learned about her husband.
The terrier joined the beam at the cottage, the early walks, the dislike of hats, the wildflowers in books, the cousin who was like a brother, a father who had preferred charm to substance.
Each piece revealed another part of the man she had married, and the picture that was forming was more complicated and more interesting than she had expected.
She had not seen that man in three days. Not truly.
Oh, he was present. He appeared at breakfast, courteous and attentive, enquiring after her morning and Georgiana’s plans with the steady consideration he brought to everything.
He attended meals. He spoke when spoken to.
But the ease that had been building between them had receded like a tide, and in its place was something careful and closed.
She had spent a lifetime learning the difference between presence and attention.
Her father had been present at every meal without truly attending to anything beyond his plate and his newspaper and whatever private amusement his own thoughts supplied.
Fitzwilliam was not her father—she would not do him that injustice—but the distance between them was growing.
He was carrying something. She recognised the posture, and it concerned her more than she cared to admit.
She noticed it at meals, the way he studied the middle distance when he believed no one was looking.
She tried to reach him that evening.
The library had become their place. Neither of them had named it so, but the habit was established.
After dinner, Georgiana would retire, and they read together by the fire.
He in his chair, she in hers, whatever volume that had caught her attention open in her lap.
Sometimes they spoke. More often they did not, and the silence between them was the best kind, companionable and full and faintly charged with something neither of them had yet addressed.
Tonight she had brought the Brunton, which she was enjoying.
She was, however, nearing the scene she had been secretly dreading since she had determined where the plot was heading.
Laura Montreville, having learned the full scope of Colonel Hargrave’s villainy, was now attempting to release the man who loved her, De Courcy, from any attachment to her.
Not because she did not love him, but because she believed her unwilling association with Hargrave had ruined her.
Elizabeth set the book down in her lap, frustrated. “She is wrong,” she said.
Fitzwilliam looked up from his own book. “Who is wrong?”
“Laura. Miss Brunton’s heroine. She is trying to send De Courcy away because she believes a scandal that has been inflicted upon her has made her unfit for him.”
He was quiet for a moment. “And you disapprove.”
“I disapprove enormously.” Elizabeth drew her shawl tighter, not from cold but from the force of the feeling.
“She has done nothing wrong. The man has had her forcefully carried away, and now she is behaving as though his corruption has somehow transferred itself to her.” She shook her head.
“The worst of it is that society encourages precisely this belief. It is the woman who is whispered about. It is the woman whose reputation suffers. It is the woman who must remove herself from good company lest she contaminate it. The man who orchestrated the whole miserable business simply takes new lodgings and orders a fresh cravat.”
Fitzwilliam’s hand reached absently to touch his neckcloth.
“No, I am being generous. In my experience, men who cause catastrophes rarely even change their linen.”
Still nothing from him.
“Laura has spent the entire novel exercising the most extraordinary command over every feeling, every impulse, and now she is using that same discipline to destroy the one good thing that has happened to her.”
“You have strong feelings about Miss Brunton’s novel,” her husband said at last.
She laughed at herself. “Indeed. I have strong feelings about a great many things, as you have had ample opportunity to learn.”
“I have. I too keep notes.”
She smiled, but Fitzwilliam had gone quiet again. She saw his frown and understood, in the same instant, what he had heard. He had heard his wife say that a woman’s ruin was the fault of the man who had entangled her, and he had applied it to himself and the incident which had bound them together.
“I do not mean you,” she said. Her voice was quieter now. “Fitzwilliam. I do not mean you.”
His eyes found hers.
“You did not plan what happened at Ramsgate. You came to protect your sister, and someone used your devotion to her to design an event that served their purposes, not yours. The guilt belongs to the woman who accepted the charge of protecting Georgiana and instead betrayed every trust she was given. And Mr. Wickham as well, for he has benefitted from his association with your family.” She paused.
“It does not belong to you. But I will not accept Miss Brunton’s Laura or anyone else telling young women that the natural consequence of being wronged is to slink away in shame as though they had done the wronging. ”
The fire crackled. She was breathing hard, which produced a slight tickle in her throat. Her shawl had slipped off one shoulder entirely, and she suspected she looked rather wild, which was not the composed image she generally preferred to present in the library after dinner.
“You are rather magnificent when you are angry on principle,” he said quietly.
“I am angry on principle quite often. You may wish to prepare yourself.”
“Thank you, I shall.” The corner of his mouth lifted to reveal the real smile, the private one, and for a moment the warmth returned, the ease, the thread of connexion that had been fraying for days.
His eyes held hers across the low firelight, and she hoped he was going to say something more.
She hoped the door was going to open. It did not.
“I think Miss Brunton would find our marriage deeply distressing,” Elizabeth said.
Fitzwilliam chuckled. “Miss Brunton would find our marriage incomprehensible.”
“We have excellent biscuits,” she told him. “Surely that counts for something.”
“The biscuits are Mrs. Carroll’s contribution, not the marriage’s.”
The light was there in Fitzwilliam’s countenance, but just as quickly, it was gone.
The shutter fell. He returned to his book with a deliberateness that told her more than any words could have, and Elizabeth sat in her chair and felt the distance open between them like a crack in an ice-covered pond.
Something was wrong. She was certain of it now.
Not wrong between them, precisely, which was the only reason she had not insisted on being told the substance of the matter.
Whatever was troubling him was not her, she did not think.
But it was keeping him from her, which amounted to the same thing.
She had extended him grace when he had claimed a “business matter” because grace was what the early weeks of this marriage had required.
But forbearance had its season, and it was drawing to a close.
When they stood to adjourn to their separate chambers, the look returned to his face. He wanted to tell her something. She could see it in the set of his jaw, the way his hand opened and closed at his side, the breath he drew and held. But he did not speak.
“Goodnight, Fitzwilliam,” she said quietly.
“Goodnight, Elizabeth.”
She left him there, in the library, and climbed the stairs alone.