Chapter Eighteen #2
The answer was dangerous the instant it left her.
And Georgiana, by the small still alteration of her face, had heard it too—not as jest and not, perhaps, as anything she could yet have named, but with the alertness of a sister who had been kept indoors too long this winter and had lately begun to mark what her brother did not say.
Jane came in then with the tea tray, saw Georgiana in the chair beside the bed, and stopped so abruptly the spoon rang faintly against the cup.
“Miss Darcy?”
“Mrs Marsden. I hope you are not distressed. I came only to sit and have not done anything heroic.”
“Then I am relieved twice over.” Jane set down the tray and, in a breath, arranged her face to the same composed sweetness that had soothed sickrooms, servants, and frightened children since Elizabeth could remember.
Yet Elizabeth, having learned too much lately of what Jane could conceal, saw the tiredness under it and the swift glance Jane gave Darcy before she began to pour.
Georgiana in the chair. Elizabeth against the pillows. Jane at the tray. Darcy by the hearth, still holding himself as if pleasure must be justified before he dared admit it. It was the first time the house had held all four together in anything resembling company rather than crisis.
Tea was poured. Georgiana took half a cup and no more.
Jane watched the quantity with a nurse’s eye while pretending not to.
Darcy remained standing until Georgiana informed him that looming over invalids was a habit more oppressive than helpful and that if he meant to govern the room, he ought at least to do it from a chair.
He obeyed only so far as taking the one nearest the hearth, which proved that obedience, in him, was always limited by principle.
They spoke of harmless things because harmless things were all the afternoon could bear—the book Georgiana meant to send next, whether the valley’s damp was worse in November or March, whether south light deceived one into hopes the weather could not maintain.
Georgiana said March, because in March one expected mercy and did not always receive it.
Elizabeth said November, because in November one had the whole winter still to fear.
Darcy chose neither and was informed by both ladies that abstention only proved weakness of character.
He accepted the rebuke with a gravity so exact Georgiana laughed aloud.
Because Elizabeth saw that, she also saw what it must cost Jane to stand by the tray and watch such ease spring up where no one had planted it.
The hand that set down the teapot did so with deliberate care. The colour that had risen in Jane’s face faded by degrees. Darcy’s eyes went to it before anyone spoke.
At length Georgiana set down her cup.
“I think,” she said, looking not at Darcy but at Elizabeth, “I have been brave enough for one afternoon and ought to retire before my reputation exceeds my stamina.”
“An excellent principle,” Elizabeth said. “If I had learned it younger, I should have spared myself much trouble.”
Darcy crossed to her. He did not fuss. That perhaps was why Georgiana permitted the assistance. He offered his hand. She placed her fingers in it and rose, declaring to him as she did so that she possessed more strength than two weeks before
She went out with Darcy beside her.
After their departure, their impression remained in the room. Jane stood still by the tray.
“That is the furthest Miss Darcy has come in weeks,” she said quietly.
Elizabeth nodded.
“And the furthest Mr Darcy has looked from despair since we came,” Jane added so softly it might have been meant for herself.
Elizabeth looked at her sister.
Jane did not look back. She was turning the cups, gathering spoons, restoring order to objects whose arrangement had not in truth suffered at all. Tidying was always kinder than feeling.
When Darcy returned ten minutes later, Georgiana put back upstairs and Nan dispatched to remain with her, he came not back to the hearth but to the chair Georgiana had vacated. He took it with a deliberateness that acknowledged the room’s altered terms.
“She is tired,” he said.
“Naturally,” Jane replied. “But I think it is good tiredness. One of satisfaction and not exhaustion.”
“I hope so.”
The nakedness of the words—not over-dramatic, not intimate, merely sincere—caught Elizabeth in the throat unexpectedly.
Darcy’s eyes moved to her. “And you, Miss Bennet? Has all this improvement ruined you?”
“Not yet. Ask me again when Mrs Hadley returns to pronounce sentence on my rashness in receiving visitors.”
“She will do so with visible satisfaction.”
“As do most people right where I am concerned.”
He looked at her a fraction too long. “That has not been my experience.”
Jane lifted the tray. “I shall take these out before Mrs Reeves accuses us of founding a second household in this room.”
She left.
Elizabeth watched her go with a sudden, uneasy certainty that the withdrawal was not wholly accidental.
He rested one hand on the arm of Georgiana’s chair. “You have done my sister more good in one afternoon than I have managed in months.”
Elizabeth answered too quickly. “I did nothing.”
“You received her. Do not diminish the thing because it looks small from outside. She has been afraid of rooms, of stairs, of meeting pity before she was equal to it. She did not meet pity with you.”
Elizabeth looked down at her hands lying quiet on the coverlet. “Then I am glad.”
“So am I. More than I know how to say without embarrassing us both.”
The honesty might have driven a less stubborn woman into softness. Elizabeth, because softness was too like surrender, chose the nearest shelter instead.
“Mr Darcy, if you grow grateful at me in that tone, I shall demand a fresh ledger in compensation.”
His mouth changed. “Extortion under cover of benevolence. I begin to think your recovery dangerous to the peace of the house.”
“Only because the house has been too long accustomed to being dull.”
“If it was dull before, it has lately been instructed otherwise.”
There it was again—the live current beneath his words, undeniable now that neither gratitude nor necessity could wholly explain it. Elizabeth knew it and saw, in the altered set of his mouth, that he knew it too. Everything around them became at once less safe and more vivid.
Jane came back before either could make it worse. Mrs Hadley followed close upon her, took one look at Elizabeth’s colour, Darcy’s chair, and the length of the visit, and announced that everyone had had enough improvement for one afternoon.
There was no arguing with her.
Even this much company had exacted its price. By the time Jane had lowered Elizabeth more gently against the pillows, eased the weight of the blankets, and laid the next warm cloth over the wound, she was too tired even for wit.
But exhaustion did not prevent thought.
Later, after dusk, when the house had quieted and Mrs Marsden dozed unwillingly over her mending by the hearth below, Darcy sat beside his sister’s bed and watched her sleep.
The south chamber was warmer than the landing and still held the faint after-scent of the tea she had taken downstairs.
The fire burned low. On the table beside the bed lay the sheet music Nan had triumphantly brought up after the visit below, as if placing it within reach already counted for progress.
Georgiana slept with one hand outside the coverlet, fingers no longer rigid, face younger in sleep than it had been in the chair beside Miss Bennet’s bed.
She had come down. She had laughed. She had spoken with Miss Bennet as if the acquaintance had begun not two days ago by the exchange of notes between invalid rooms but months before, in some calmer country where friendship needed no negotiation with pain.
The sight ought to have filled him wholly with gratitude.
It did fill him with gratitude. That was not the difficulty.
The difficulty was that gratitude no longer came alone.
With it came the image of Miss Bennet in the winter light, one hand lying quiet on the coverlet, the other near the closed book, her face animated not by fever or fear but by attention.
With it came the sound of her voice saying beyond your management and the immediate knowledge that she had spoken in jest yet touched, by chance or instinct, the very nerve of the thing.
Change had entered Merebank not as catastrophe—catastrophe he understood well—but as possibility.
Possibility was harder to govern. One could barricade against disaster.
One could not so easily barricade against a house beginning, under one’s own eyes, to resemble something one had never permitted oneself to want.
He looked at Georgiana. At the music. At the fire. At the shut door beyond which the rest of the house lay in its winter hush.
He had come north for her life and had nearly lost his own footing instead.