Chapter 25 #2
“I shall be brief,” Mr. Philips said, not waiting for me to break the seal.
“Mrs. Bennet wishes to formally terminate the companionship arrangement between Miss Elizabeth Bennet and your ward, Miss Georgiana Darcy. The relevant terms are outlined here, though in substance, the matter is simple: the duration of the engagement fell short of a fortnight, and as such, no compensation is due. Mrs. Bennet declines any payment and requests that the termination be considered effective immediately.”
“But…” Georgiana began and stopped when I held up my hand.
I broke the seal and glanced at the contents. They were, as Mr. Philips stated.
No compensation is due.
Four words. A financial assessment of what Elizabeth had done—the walks, the battledore, the kitchen, the confidence she had poured into Georgiana drop by drop with the patience of a woman who understood that trust could not be constructed on a schedule.
The library at midnight. The Commerce game.
The stile. The apple cores. The biscuits. All of it—everything—valued at zero.
“I see.” My voice sounded like someone else’s.
“Miss Bennet has come to collect Elizabeth’s belongings,” Mr. Philips continued. “And Miss Mary wished to see Miss Darcy, if that is permitted.”
“Of course. Mrs. Nicholls will show Miss Mary to the music room.”
I nodded toward my sister, and she approached Mary with a hesitant smile. “A pleasure, Miss Mary. I’ve been waiting to show you the fingering on that last sonata.”
Jane’s eyes darted to Bingley, but she made no move, as was proper. This wasn’t a social call, and I had nothing more to say. Elizabeth would never return.
“Mr. Darcy?” Jane’s chin dipped. “I shall need perhaps half an hour to pack my sister’s things. May I be permitted to enter her chamber?”
“Yes.”
She turned toward the door, and I heard my voice before I had authorized it.
“Miss Bennet.”
She stopped and looked at me. Sad. Miss Jane Bennet was not angry. She was sad, while her sister would be righteously angry, and it was as hard for me to take Jane Bennet’s sadness as Miss Elizabeth’s anger.
“Is she well?”
“She is with her family, Mr. Darcy. She is where she should be.” Her voice was gentle, but her answer was devastating.
I did not notice Jane Bennet leaving, nor Bingley, who bade Mr. Philips well, escorting him from the drawing room.
I stood alone with a letter whose words blurred, and I threw it into the fire.
I closed my eyes, rubbing my temples, and saw Elizabeth in the kitchen when I had made that wish: that circumstances were different, that I wasn’t her employer, and she wasn’t beholden to a duty.
That we were both free, and she had looked at me with that expression I would forever hold dear, and said, the choice is mine, Mr. Darcy.
And I had thought she meant the choice to stay, the choice to serve, the choice to be Georgiana’s companion. But she had not meant that. She had meant the choice to care.
The circumstances were different now. She had chosen. Not to stay, but to leave. And the leaving was not the termination of a contract but the exercise of the very agency I had admired. The intelligence of not offering herself where her regard was not returned.
And I, fool that I am, realized too late that I regarded Miss Elizabeth more than the Darcy name.
Georgiana found me after the sounds of departure had quieted. I sat in Bingley’s study and listened until there was nothing more to hear. The house was emptied of a woman who had filled it without anyone’s permission and without anyone quite registering the filling until the filling stopped.
And so, I sat, not looking out the window, but picking cat hair from my waistcoat, and that was when Georgiana found me. She came into the study without knocking, and her eyes were red.
“Mary says Elizabeth is not coming back.” Georgiana’s voice did not waver.
She stood with her hands clasped in front of her in the posture Elizabeth had taught her—feet apart, chin level, the stance of a girl who had been told that taking up space is not the same as being a burden, and you are allowed to do the former without being the latter.
“No. She is not.”
“Because of last night.”
It was not a question. Georgiana had been at the assembly.
She had been on the dance floor, laughing, turning, finding her feet, but she had also been watching—the way she always watched, with the attention of a girl who had learned at Ramsgate that the things that hurt you most are the things you did not see coming.
“Because of several things. Principally because of me.”
“What did you do?”
The directness was new. Three weeks ago, Georgiana would not have asked.
She would have accepted my account of events and trusted my version because trusting my version was safer than interrogating it, and the safety was the thing Elizabeth had been dismantling—carefully and patiently, with the steady hands of a woman who understood that a girl who never questioned authority was a girl who could be governed by anyone who claimed it.
“I hurt her. At the assembly. In the entrance hall, while you danced your first set.”
“How?”
I looked at my sister, all of seventeen years, on the cusp of being presented at court, a London debut, and the answer I gave would determine how authentic she would be with those she loved.
“I did not regard her as I should have. She told me something I did not wish to believe, and I told her to mind her own family while I minded mine.”
“But, Brother, I wish for Miss Elizabeth to be my sister. I thought you would dance with her, and she would fall in love with you.”
I flinched at her earnestness. “Things are not that simple.”
“But did you not see how pretty she looked? Taking extra care with her hair? And the way she looked for you at the entrance…”
I raised my hand to halt her observations, each one a dart cutting through my heart.
But this Georgiana did not quail, did not retreat behind a wall of silence. This was Elizabeth’s Georgiana, and she drove the dart deeper, not meaning it; she would never be so cruel.
“Her face brightened, Brother, when she thought she caught your eye. I was looking for her, and instead of me, she was looking at you.”
Her innocent, hopeful words ripped my heart in two. I swallowed hard, trying to mask my anguish, but Georgiana wasn’t done.
She crossed to the door, her hand gentle on the latch. “Brother. The jig she taught me. The one I was playing this morning.”
“Yes?”
“I shall go on playing it, if you do not mind.”
“I do not mind.”
She left. The door closed, and the house went silent. I sat with the cat hairs and the empty study and the fire that had consumed the letter.
I wished she had let me keep Cinnamon’s last gift—that crookedly monogrammed handkerchief with the straying hem. So Elizabeth.