Chapter 11 #2
She positioned the basket with the attention of someone who had been given a task she did not wish to fail and stood beneath me, looking up with a hungry expression as though she were watching someone do the thing she most wanted to do and had been told she must not.
I tossed down six apples in quick succession. She caught four, missed one, and was struck on the shoulder by the sixth.
“My sincerest apologies!” I called down.
It is,” she said, rubbing her shoulder with more amusement than injury, “the first time I have been assaulted by fruit. Is this also part of the cultural instruction?”
“Indeed, it is—a lesson in reflexes. Excellent for deportment.” I descended from my perch, landing with a thud that startled a pheasant from the hedge. “Now, we shall take our repose upon this charming stile.”
She wrinkled her nose, studying the weathered steps built into the wooden fence. A stile was an obstacle not only for sheep and cattle, but for women dressed in long skirts and voluminous petticoats.
Undeterred, I hoisted my basket with one hand and gathered my skirts with the other, ascending the steps to the topmost rail. “Mind the splinters, Georgiana. A snag here will surely invoke a lecture from your lady’s maid later.”
I settled myself upon the broad top rail, my legs dangling freely. Georgiana hesitated, perhaps worried about her stockings showing. She looked over her shoulder, and then she shrugged. “I suppose my brother is out of sight, as is Miss Bingley.”
I bit into my apple with a satisfying crunch.
Georgiana watched me swallow it, and the temptation of the apple and perhaps the even greater temptation of doing something her brother might disapprove of won out.
She gathered her skirts with a defiant little hitch and stepped easily onto the stile, her legs being longer.
“Your brother would surely disapprove,” I remarked, offering her an apple as a reward for her daring. “The Bramleys are not for the faint of heart; they have a tart, wild snap that can make one’s eyes water, but they are infinitely more satisfying than those pale, sugary things grown in hothouses.”
“My brother disapproves of everything that was not on the schedule.” She bit into her apple with a crunch that sounded like a glorious insurrection. “He would say this is not part of the programme.”
“And what would you say?”
She considered this while chewing—the considering itself a novelty, because Georgiana Darcy had been told what to think and was only now, perched on a stile with apple juice on her chin, discovering that she was permitted to hold her own opinions rather than defer to her brother’s.
“I would say,” she said carefully, “that the programme does not account for everything worth doing.”
I took another bite to hide what my face was doing, which was something between triumph and tenderness and neither of which I wished her to see.
Georgiana Darcy was beginning to discover that a lady’s life need not be a series of frozen poses, and that the view from the top of a stile is worth a dozen stained petticoats.
“This is considerably better than I expected,” she confessed, although her lips puckered from the tartness.
“Most things are, when you have picked them yourself.” I wiped the juice from my chin with my sleeve, because there was no one to see and because sleeves were invented for precisely this purpose. “The secret lies in savoring the experience without fretting over one’s appearance.”
She took a second bite. Larger. Juice trickled down her chin. She did not wipe it with her sleeve—the Darcy breeding ran too deep for that—but she did not reach for a handkerchief either, and that, in itself, was a small revolution.
“There.” I pointed to the pond below us, where a family of ducks conducted its morning patrol with the self-important waddle of a committee that believed itself indispensable. “Can you hit the big one?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“With the apple core. Can you hit the duck? Not to injure—they enjoy it. The cores float, and they eat them.”
“I have never thrown anything at a duck.”
“You threw flour at me, and I hazard to say your aim was excellent.”
She beamed at me in a way reminiscent of Lydia up to her worst pranks, and threw the core.
It sailed over the duck and landed in the pond with a splash that sent the entire committee into offended disarray. The large duck recovered first, paddled to the floating core, and consumed it with the air of a creature who had been vindicated.
“You missed.”
“The duck moved.”
“Ducks do that. It is their primary defense against apple cores and everything else the world throws at them.” I tossed mine. It landed two feet from the big duck, who regarded it with regal disdain before deigning to eat it.
Georgiana threw a second core with considerably more force and less accuracy, and it caught the water at an angle that sent a spray across three ducks and a moorhen.
“Better. You have a talent for disruption, Miss Darcy.”
“Caroline says disruption is unbecoming.”
I did not answer or inquire because Elizabeth Bennet asking questions about Caroline Bingley would produce guarded answers, but Elizabeth Bennet eating an apple in comfortable silence might produce honest ones.
“May I ask you something?” she asked, taking another apple from the basket.
“You may ask, although I reserve the right to deflect.”
“Do you like Caroline?”
The directness was so unexpected that I nearly choked. Her gaze was steady, not challenging or conspiratorial, but curious, the way a girl inquires when she has been receiving one version of reality from one source and suspects there might be another.
“I find Miss Bingley to be a lady of accomplishment and decided opinions.” I chose my words with care.
“She is a devoted friend to your family, which speaks well of her constancy.” I took another apple from the basket, considering it as if it held particular fascination.
“But I’m curious to know your impression of her.
After all, you’ve spent far more time in her company than I have. ”
“She is exceedingly kind to me, and to Fitzwilliam,” Georgiana began, her brow furrowed in thought. “And she concurs with my brother regarding the necessity of my improvement.”
“Does she.”
“Caroline is very attentive and caring.” She looked across the pond.
“She tells me when I have played a passage well and when I have worn the wrong ribbons for the weather. She says we are already sisters in spirit.” Georgiana’s expression flickered with a confused sort of guilt.
“Miss Bingley is very kind. My brother says I am lucky to have her.”
“And does she feel like a sister?”
A long pause. Below us, a duck let out a solitary, flat quack. Georgiana’s thumb picked at the apple skin, a tiny, jagged movement.
“I don’t know. Is a sister someone you are always trying to please?”
She looked at me then, and the carefully cultivated Darcy mask slipped.
There was no trace of the “improvement” or “accomplishment” so prized by her brother—only a young woman weary of the relentless programme of refinement thrust upon her, unaware that Caroline’s attentions were tainted by her aspiration to become a Darcy herself.
But I said nothing of my uncharitable thoughts. Instead, I moved closer and nudged her shoulder with mine. “A sister is the person who tells you that your brother is being a pompous owl, and then helps you hide the evidence when you laugh about it.”
“Do you truly believe my brother resembles an owl?”
“He has that reserved, unblinking quality, does he not? Watching everything from a great height with profound inscrutability.”
“An owl!” Georgiana repeated, her shoulders finally losing their Pemberley rigidity. “I shall never be able to look at him over the breakfast table again without checking for feathers.”
“It is a very noble bird,” I added with a wink. “And he is very wise. Just perhaps… a bit too fond of the sound of his own silence.”
We shared a moment of quiet, the kind that only exists between those who have shared a secret and an apple. It was the perfect opening—a door left ajar.
“And what of his companions?” I asked, trying to keep my voice as idle as the ducks below. “Mr. Bingley, for instance. I imagine he is much more… vocal. Do you find his company agreeable?”
Georgiana’s reaction was immediate. A rosy flush crept up her neck to her cheeks. She looked away, her fingers busily shredding a leaf.
“Mr. Bingley is… most amiable,” she said, her voice small. “He is very kind to me. Caroline says… she says he finds my company ‘refreshing’ and that we are remarkably well-suited in temperament.”
My heart gave a ponderous, discomfiting thump.
The pieces of the puzzle—Caroline’s ‘sisterly’ affection, her constant efforts at ‘improvement,’ the carefully orchestrated shared visits—all began to align, forming a map that led to an inevitable destination.
If Caroline could secure Georgiana for Charles, she would be that much closer to becoming the mistress of Pemberley.
“He is certainly easy to like,” I managed to say through a cold prickle of unease.
She looked down at her hands, a shy, soft smile touching her lips—the type of smile that makes a sister’s heart sink. “I think… I think any woman would be very safe with a man who cares so much for everyone’s comfort. He is never cross, never brooding. It is quite… lovely.”
To a girl who had spent her life under the shadow of the great Darcy pride, Bingley’s easy warmth must appear as a welcome sanctuary.
“But he does smile a great deal, doesn’t he?” she added, her brow furrowing slightly.
“Indeed, he does.”
“I find it…” She paused, and the pause was long so that I held my breath, waiting. “I find it difficult to know what a smile means when someone offers it so freely. If everyone receives it, then it signifies nothing in particular, and yet—”
She stopped. She had arrived at the edge of something and pulled back, and the pulling back was so instinctive that I understood it was not the first time she had stood at this particular edge and retreated.
Someone, it seemed, had once smiled freely at Georgiana Darcy, leaving behind a wound that had taught her to mistrust such generous displays of emotion.
I did not pursue it. Some doors are not opened by pressure but by patience, and Georgiana had just offered me more than she had anyone in months, and I would not damage this confidence by demanding more.
“Shall we continue our walk?” I said instead, standing and stepping down from the stile. I extended my hand, and she took it, trusting.
We followed the orchard wall toward the western direction, and I purposely took a path toward the boundary stream, because even though Darcy had promised to fix the drainage, I needed the evidence of my own eyes.
And indeed, as we strode down the western fields, we found three men with shovels filling the channel that would have directed the water toward Longbourn’s fields.
The earth was being packed back into the trench, the gradient erased, and a new channel was being cut, exactly as Darcy had promised.
He had kept his word, riding out this very morning before I had even stirred from my slumber to oversee the correction.
“Elizabeth?” Georgiana had begun calling me Elizabeth in the orchard as though testing whether the name would hold. “The stream there—that is the boundary?”
“Yes, it marks the division between Netherfield’s grounds and Longbourn’s land.”
“My brother redirected the channel,” she noted. “He always keeps his word.”
“Like an owl? Who… Whoo.”
“Never forgets?” she finished, a smile tugging at her lips. “No, like an owl who invariably does what is right.”
I tucked the characterization away for future contemplation. While Bingley’s smiles might be insincere, Darcy’s would be genuine, which could explain their rarity.
“We are rather close to my home,” I said, aiming for casual. “Should you like to visit? My mother would be delighted to receive you.”
Georgiana fell silent. I could see her turning it over, weighing the propriety of arriving unannounced, the absence of her brother’s permission, and the fact that Caroline would never walk through a field to visit a family she considered beneath her notice.
“My mother’s biscuits are renowned throughout the county,” I added, which was no exaggeration—Mama’s biscuits were legendary in the county—and was also not an invitation but a piece of information placed in the path of a girl deciding whether to step beyond the boundary she had been taught to respect.
“I should like that very much,” she said finally, making her choice, “to see where you come from.”
We hitched up our skirts, and when we approached the stepping stones, Georgiana hesitated.
I stepped across, urging her not to look down, but at her destination, and she haltingly picked her way across, looking proud when she accomplished the crossing.
And then, we walked through Papa’s lower fields and up through the kitchen garden where the last runner beans dangled from their poles, and Mama’s herbs grew in tidy, domestic rows.
Georgiana slowed. She looked at Longbourn the way I imagine a traveller studies a foreign country—not with disdain, but with the thoughtful attention of someone who understands that she is seeing something private and important and does not wish to see it wrong.
“It is smaller than I imagined,” she said.
“It is exactly the right size. For a family of seven and more love than the walls can reasonably contain.”
I was about to suggest we enter through the kitchen—because the kitchen was my domain, and I wanted Georgiana to see Longbourn the way I saw it, from the inside out—when the back door opened, and my mother stepped into the garden with a basket of shelled walnuts.
“Elizabeth.” She set the basket on the garden table, wiped her hands on her apron, and turned the full warmth of her attention on the girl standing behind me with apple juice on her chin and uncertainty in her eyes. “And this must be Miss Darcy.”
I introduced them, and Mama smiled, warm and measuring, as she relieved us of our baskets. “Do come in, child. You look as though you could benefit from a cup of tea and a biscuit, and I have just this moment taken a batch from the oven.”
Georgiana looked to me for reassurance. I nodded, encouraging, and as we stepped through the doorway, Mama murmured so softly that only I could hear, “Well played, Lizzy. Well played indeed.”