Chapter 14 #2
They settled the boundaries they could enforce.
Wickham would not be received at Longbourn; Bingley had already excluded him from Netherfield.
Darcy would give Colonel Forster a factual warning about Wickham's debts and repeated attempts to obtain money by deceit, without naming Georgiana.
It did not make Wickham harmless. It ensured he would no longer move among them unobserved.
Mr. Bennet left them a few minutes later, remarking that a library ought not to become a courtship parlour, but that the door might reasonably stay open for five minutes, and not one minute more.
Elizabeth stood beside the desk. "Why did you tell me now?"
"Because I watched Wickham walk toward you today and realised my silence had become just another decision made for you, without your consent. I could not do that to you again."
"You had already told me enough."
"Enough for caution. Not enough for trust."
"You trusted me with Georgiana's pain the moment you started speaking."
"Yes."
The words pressed under his ribs. He understood, perhaps for the first time, that composure had never once made the telling of a hard thing painless. It only made it look that way from the outside.
Elizabeth came closer. She did not touch him. The distance she kept felt deliberate, and somehow more tender for being deliberate.
"I will tell no one," she said. "Not even Jane."
"I know."
"You could not have known that before today."
"I did."
Something in her eyes went soft at that. "Then perhaps the trust came before the explaining."
"Perhaps it did."
Mrs. Bennet's voice called for Elizabeth from the drawing room, bright and oblivious. Five minutes had ended.
Before she left, Elizabeth stopped in the doorway. "Fitzwilliam."
He forgot the open door. He forgot Wickham. He forgot, for one entire breath, the whole of Longbourn and everyone in it.
She coloured, but she did not retreat from it. "You have used my name for three days running. Fairness required an exchange eventually."
"Fairness has never been so generous to me before."
"Do not go poetic on me. McKeever will only recommend more Cowper."
She left him standing there. Darcy set one hand flat on the desk and waited for the room to stop tilting before he trusted himself to walk out of it.
At Netherfield that evening, McKeever presented a volume of Cowper alongside tomorrow's clothes for the call, as though this were a perfectly ordinary valet's duty and not an act of open sedition.
"Sarah suggested it," he said, entirely unbothered.
Darcy looked at the book. Then at his valet.
The servants, he reflected, had officially retired from matchmaking.
They had not retired far.
Darcy wrote to Georgiana after midnight, by candlelight, with the house gone quiet around him.
He began with Wickham, because Georgiana had asked to know whether the full account became necessary.
He told her that it had, that Elizabeth and Mr. Bennet had received it with discretion, and that precautions had been taken.
He did not report Elizabeth's response as proof of his own good judgement.
That felt too much like using her again, even in a letter meant only for his sister.
Then he tried to describe the courtship.
The word looked far too formal on the page, flat and legal, and it contained none of Elizabeth's laughter, none of the charades, none of the particular warmth in her voice when she had said Georgiana's name after hearing the Ramsgate history.
He tried another sentence. Crossed it out. Tried again.
McKeever came in with hot water and the unwanted volume of Cowper, setting both down without being asked.
"You are writing to Miss Darcy," he said.
"You know because I am sitting at the desk at one in the morning. A remarkable feat of deduction."
"You use the smaller paper for family, sir."
Darcy looked down at the sheets in front of him. McKeever was, infuriatingly, correct. "I mean to ask whether she will come to Netherfield with Mrs. Annesley."
"To meet Miss Elizabeth."
"Yes."
"She will come."
"You cannot possibly know that."
"No, sir."
Darcy set the pen down. "Does Sarah expect it?"
McKeever considered this with more gravity than the question required. "Sarah said Miss Darcy would wish to judge the lady who corrected her brother."
"Georgiana does not judge people."
"Then she will wish to meet her instead."
The correction was tactful and unnecessary, and Darcy let it go.
He returned to the letter and told Georgiana that Elizabeth's compassion had contained neither curiosity nor blame, and that she would never repeat a word of it. He added that no visit was required for his own sake. Georgiana might come when she chose, or not at all.
"Too many permissions," McKeever said, from over by the clothes press.
Darcy looked up. "Are you reading my letter?"
"No, sir. You have said 'if you wish' aloud three times in the last five minutes."
Darcy crossed one of them out.
"I want her to come," he admitted, more to himself than to McKeever.
"Then you might simply say so, sir."
"You have grown very free with your advice lately."
"Mrs. Darcy will require a candid household."
The title landed before the presumption behind it did. Something in Darcy's chest went tight and warm at once, before he could stop it.
"There is no Mrs. Darcy," he said.
"No, sir."
McKeever's innocence was hopelessly ruined by the hope underneath it, and he did not even try to hide it.
Darcy finished the letter by writing, plainly, that he wanted Georgiana to know Elizabeth because he loved them both. Then he sanded the page at once, in case the impulse to smooth the sentence back into something safer arrived before the ink dried.
"Send this by the morning post," he said.
"Yes, sir."
McKeever took the folded sheet and left the Cowper behind on the desk, as though he had forgotten it.
Darcy opened the book anyway. A fresh length of blue thread marked a poem about domestic peace. Of all things. Sarah's choice was sentimental almost past bearing. McKeever's decision to deliver it here, tonight, was worse.
Darcy removed the thread and set it in the drawer beside Georgiana's earlier notes, where a small, growing collection of blue silk was beginning to accumulate whether he wanted it to or not.
He had spent years guarding love by keeping it locked away and private.
Only now was he beginning to understand that privacy without any speech at all could look, from the outside, exactly like indifference.
Tomorrow the letter would travel to London. Georgiana would choose her own answer. Elizabeth would choose hers, when at last he asked. Darcy could control neither outcome.
For once, hope required no correction at all.