Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
AN UNEXPECTED COMPANION
Darcy
Miss Bennet had scarcely crossed the threshold of Netherfield when she scattered my orderly life like a fox ruffling feathers in a henhouse.
She left Bingley amused, his sister in a sneezing fit, and Mrs. Hurst picking cat hair from the settee.
But most notable of all, my sister had actually laughed.
Not that I objected to Georgiana laughing—I had been trying to coax laughter from her since the disaster at Ramsgate, but that it had come from an orange cat brought by a woman I had insulted into becoming her unwanted companion was decidedly beneath me to notice.
I ought to be mortified by the glares from Miss Bingley and Mrs. Hurst, but I had long ago consigned Bingley’s sisters to the eighth circle of Dante’s inferno—the bolgia reserved for hypocrites and social climbers.
There, I imagined, their gilded smiles might finally match the leaden weight of their souls.
Caroline had skillfully suggested to Elizabeth that we Darcys had a reason to seek the obscurity of Hertfordshire—that we had made a hasty retreat due to unsavory connections.
How much did she know of Georgiana’s compromising situation?
I had not confided in Bingley… surely, she had no opportunity to listen behind doorways…
but… somehow, she knew, and she had chosen this morning, of all mornings, to let me feel the blade.
“If you’ll excuse me,” I addressed neither Bingley nor his sisters, and certainly not the supine Mr. Hurst, snoring like a millstone near the fire. Leaving the stuffy drawing room, I followed my sister and Miss Elizabeth, who had executed a masterful retreat.
They strode down the corridor toward the library, walking side by side, and a tiny sprout of hope pushed through the frozen ground of my concerns.
Perhaps I had done the right thing in bringing the lively, witty Miss Elizabeth into Georgiana’s orbit.
She needed guidance, an example of a woman unafraid of her own shadow—one who could stand up to the type of men who would diminish her.
I quickened my steps but kept to the shadows near the staircase landing, watching for signs of thawing. Elizabeth carried her cat, who peeked at me over her shoulder, while Georgiana produced the key from her pocket and turned the lock with a click.
“The library,” she announced, opening the door without entering.
“Thank you, Miss Darcy.” Miss Elizabeth’s voice carried none of the sharp edges she had wielded so effectively in the drawing room. If anything, it was careful, almost gentle. “Will you join me? Your brother mentioned that the collection was—”
“I have other things to attend to.” Georgiana dropped the key into Miss Elizabeth’s hand as one deposits coins into a collection plate—without looking at her, a clear dismissal. “The shelves are not well-organized. I expect you will manage.”
With that, she turned on her heel and walked toward the staircase where I stood. Forced to step into the light or risk being caught eavesdropping, I emerged from my hiding place, uncomfortably aware that this was precisely what I had been doing.
“Georgiana.”
She stopped three stairs below me, and the angle meant she had to look up, which I suspected she resented. My sister did not enjoy looking up at anyone, literally or otherwise.
“Brother.”
“That was unconscionably rude.”
“Was it?” She ascended two stairs, which corrected the angle between us to something closer to level. “I showed her the library. She has a key. What more is required?”
“Civility, for a start. She is our guest.”
“She is your employee.” The word arrived with Caroline’s inflection, complete with a slight curl at the corner of the lip.
“You engaged her, Brother. You signed the contract. If you wished to have a companion who would be treated as a social equal, you might have chosen one whose family did not require a solicitor to negotiate her price.”
“She is a gentleman’s daughter and a guest in this house.”
Georgiana had reached my step now, and she turned her head with an expression that caught me off guard. So much like our mother’s—that cool, assessing gaze that took the measure of a man and found it instructive rather than impressive.
“A gentleman’s daughter,” she repeated. “Barely. Her mother is a baker’s granddaughter, and her family, Gardiner, I believe, are tradesmen from Cheapside, is it not?”
“I was unaware you had taken such an interest in Miss Bennet’s genealogy.”
“Miss Bingley was kind enough to provide the particulars.”
I would deal with Miss Bingley later, but I could not tolerate Georgiana’s haughtiness and her imitation of a cunning woman whose interest in my sister had little to do with sisterly affection and everything to do with strategic positioning.
“I expected better of you, Sister. Miss Bennet is here at my invitation, and she is to be treated with the courtesy due any guest of this household.”
“Your invitation.” Georgiana’s laugh was a far cry from the genuine mirth heard earlier in the drawing room.
“Is that what we are calling it? From what I heard, the tradesman’s daughter arrived with a solicitor and cornered you in Bingley’s drawing room.
The clever Bennets may have maneuvered you into signing a contract, but that does not oblige me to pretend their daughter is fit company for the granddaughter of an earl. ”
“You will address Miss Elizabeth with the respect she is entitled to.”
“Forsooth, Brother.” She mimicked a curtsy. “She has you well trapped with that cat of hers. Walking around Netherfield like she owns it. All because you, dear Brother, could not hold your tongue.”
“The fact that I made an ill-considered remark in public and was held to account for it,” I said, with a control I did not feel, “does not constitute entrapment. It constitutes a consequence.”
“How philosophical, and how convenient that the consequence is a pretty girl living under your roof, or should I amend that, Mr. Bingley’s roof.”
The observation struck closer to the bone than I wished to examine. Instead, I focused on the carved banister rail, which was solid English oak and required nothing of me but that I refrain from gripping it hard enough to damage the varnish.
“You will be civil to Miss Bennet,” I said. “That is not a request.”
“Then what is it?”
“An instruction from the brother who has your welfare as his primary concern, and who engaged Miss Bennet for precisely that purpose.”
“My welfare?” Georgiana spoke the word as though it were a euphemism she had grown weary of tolerating. “To be consigned to the ‘care’ of an unsuitable country miss with a tongue sharp enough to draw blood.”
“She is to be your companion, not an instructor or governess.” I folded my arms across my chest to keep my fists from clenching. “I would advise you to befriend her and learn from her observations.”
“Why? When I have been removed from every society in which I might form genuine connections, transported to a county where no one of consequence resides, denied the season, denied musicales, denied anything resembling the life I was raised to expect, and presented with a companion I did not ask for, whose chief qualification is a quick wit and a cat.”
The flash of old pain crossed her face and was gone before I could answer it.
“We are in Hertfordshire,” I said carefully, “because—”
“Of Ramsgate. Yes. I am aware. You have made it abundantly clear that my lapse in judgment requires perpetual penance, and that the penance shall be served in the most tedious corner of England you could locate at short notice.”
“That is not—”
“It is precisely what it is. You brought us to Hertfordshire because no one here knows what happened. Away from Lady Catherine, the Matlocks, and their uncomfortable questions, where the scent of manure and hay might mask the persistent whispers.”
She was not wrong. She was, in fact, correct on every particular, which was the most infuriating aspect of arguing with an intelligent seventeen-year-old who had been paying closer attention to the family’s strategic maneuvers than I had credited.
“The whispers,” I began, my voice laden with the gravity of responsibility, “are not your concern. Your focus should be on your improvement and preparation for a future—”
“A future as what, exactly?” The question came with a sharpness that stopped me mid-sentence.
“As the disgraced sister of Fitzwilliam Darcy, hidden in country houses until I am old enough to be presented to some dull baronet who will overlook the rumors because my dowry is large enough to silence them? Is that the future you are preparing me for?”
“Georgiana—”
“I have immersed myself in novels, Brother. I am well-versed in the fate that befalls girls whispered about in polite society. They become notorious. And notorious women, I have observed, are either pitied or envied. Given the choice, I should very much prefer to be the object of envy, if it is all the same to you.”
“You have been indulging in the wrong sort of literature,” I admonished.
“Because you have ensured that I have no other form of entertainment or callers of any interest. Only Caroline, who at least treats me as though I possess opinions worth hearing, and Bingley, who—”
She stopped, and the break was sudden, as though she had arrived at the edge of a sentence she had not intended to begin and was now deciding whether to retreat or leap.
“Bingley, who what?”
“Nothing.” She turned to continue up the stairs toward her bedchamber.
“You will be civil to Miss Bennet,” I called after her. “I would ask that you give her the opportunity to—”
“To instruct me? To improve me? To report my behavior to you each evening so that you might calibrate the degree of my confinement accordingly?” Georgiana’s voice had muted, which was worse than volume.
“Forgive me, Brother, but I have had companions before. The last one was paid to watch me, and she sold me to the highest bidder. You will understand if I am not eager to audition another.”
A flash of old pain stretched across my sister’s face. She was referring to Mrs. Younge, who had enabled her meetings with George Wickham for coin.
“Miss Bennet is not Mrs. Younge.”
“How would you know? You have been acquainted with her for less than a week.”
“I know because—” I began, but the words caught in my throat. Because she had disarmed me in a drawing room on the strength of a single glance, and that a woman who can engage Caroline Bingley’s cruelty without quailing demonstrated a strength of character my sister needed to face the London ton.
I did not say any of this. I said, instead, the sort of thing that elder brothers say when they have lost an argument and lack the grace to admit it, “Because I am asking you to trust my judgment.”
Georgiana regarded me with an expression that suggested my judgment was not the currency it had been.
“I shall be civil to Miss Bennet, since you require it. But I shall not pretend to be grateful.” She turned and ascended the remaining stairs with the dignified grace of our late mother.
I would not continue my unwanted admonition.
She had no parents to guide her, and I, her only brother, had a duty to her improvement.
Nor would I invade the library where Miss Elizabeth would be reading a book with a cat on her lap.
And I could not shake the look on her face when Georgiana had dismissed her so coldly.
It had not been wounded pride that I had glimpsed, but careful concern.
What manner of woman responds to rudeness with such empathy?
Rather than having to answer this and other questions with an accidental encounter with the object of my every other thought, I turned to my study, or rather the study Bingley ceded to me, where I labored over his ledgers and his steward’s recommendations.
Crossing to my desk, I reached for a brandy and stopped.
There, perched in the precise center of my blotter, atop the drainage proposal I had been explaining to Bingley when Miss Elizabeth Bennet first arrived in her shabby carriage, sat her cat.
Not on the floor near the desk, not on the chair beside it, but on the desk itself, regarding me with feline insouciance.
“I should have you removed.” I pretended to be cross with my hands perched on my hips.
But Cinnamon only stared at me with those amber all-seeing eyes, whiskers twitching, and I was too tired to ring for a maid to carry the creature away.
And so, I lowered myself into the leather chair opposite the desk, and we regarded each other in silent appraisal.
The sunlight through the window caught the orange of her fur, and she was, I had to concede, a handsome creature—well-proportioned, alert, with an intelligence in her gaze that reminded me, uncomfortably, of her owner.
“Your mistress,” I said, because apparently I had reached the stage of my decline where conversing with animals seemed reasonable, “is going to wonder where you are.”
Cinnamon began to purr. It filled the small study—warm, insistent, the sound of a creature satisfied with the present arrangement.
Then, with graceful deliberation, she leaped from the desk onto my lap, resettling herself with a contented curl and closed eyes, her purring intensifying.
My hand found the top of her head. I was not entirely sure when this happened.
“Your mistress,” I told her, “would be appalled.”