Chapter 28 #2
I was moving before the sentence finished.
Down the corridor, through the door to the kitchen, where Georgiana Darcy stood with her grey cloak soaked, her grey muslin clinging to her skin, mud and water pooling beneath her ruined walking boots, and her hair plastered to her face.
She was coughing and trembling from both the cold and something far worse, but she stood straight and tall, shoulders back the way I had taught her to stand, and that posture nearly broke me.
“Elizabeth.”
One word. My name in her mouth, not Miss Bennet, never Miss Bennet from Georgiana, always Elizabeth because Elizabeth was the name of a sister, and I had told her once that sisters used Christian names, and she had taken me at my word.
“Georgiana.” I crossed the kitchen in four steps and took her by the shoulders. “You are chilled. Did you walk here? Across the fields? In this?”
“I crossed the stream.” Her teeth were chattering. “The water was higher than I expected. I gathered my skirts, and I did not look down. You told me not to look down.”
“Mrs. Hill, hot water. A bath. Immediately,” I called out while guiding her toward the kitchen hearth.
Mama took charge, seeing only the girl who needed mothering, not calculation on her brother’s income or the number behind her dowry.
“Jane, fetch Lydia’s flannel nightdress.
Miss Darcy looks to be her height. Lydia, go to the kitchen and tell Cook to heat broth.
Kitty, towels. Mary, start the fire in the guest room.
And Lizzy, the bath first. Questions afterward. ”
She was right, of course, but I resented being silenced, because my thoughts raced with the implications of Georgiana crossing the boundary stream alone, in this weather, without a chaperone, a note, or her brother’s knowledge—leading to conclusions, each one more terrible than the last.
We took her upstairs and peeled the cloak from her shoulders.
Beneath it, her grey muslin was wet to her stays, and her hands were blue at the fingertips, and when I took them between mine to warm them, she gripped my fingers with the desperate strength of a girl who had crossed a swollen stream in November rain because the other side of the stream was the only place she could think of to go.
I helped Georgiana out of her ruined clothes, and the helping was intimate in the way that tending to another woman’s body is always intimate—her fingers fumbling with buttons she could not feel, her shoulders shaking beneath my hands, the small, involuntary sound she made when the warm water closed over her, half gasp and half relief, and I knelt beside the tub and held her hand and did not ask anything, because Mama was right—the story would keep, and the girl came first.
Charlotte peeked in and said she had to go, to ensure her mother’s discretion, and my sisters left, each assigned to their task, leaving me alone with Georgiana. She sat in the water, hugging her knees, looking younger than seventeen and older than anyone should have to look at seventeen.
“Elizabeth.” Her voice was small. “She did it on purpose.”
“I know.”
“The music was not sorted. It was scattered worse than before. Pages torn and crumpled and shoved behind books. And then she sent Bingley, or Mrs. Hurst sent Bingley, and then she brought Lady Lucas and Mrs. Long to witness.”
“I know. Charlotte told us.”
“I was on my knees looking for the Clementi third page, and Bingley was handing me a torn scrap of Haydn, and the door opened. They were all there, and Caroline’s face was so kind. So worried. And underneath the kindness was…”
“Manipulation.”
“Yes.” Georgiana’s grip tightened on her knees. “I have seen that face before. Not only hers. A different face, with the same—the same underneath.”
The water stilled, and I did not push or prompt, because this was a story that needed to arrive in its own time, from a girl who had earned the right to tell it when she was ready.
Georgiana looked at me. Her eyes were dark and very steady, the steadiness that was not calm but the held-together quality of a girl who had practiced not falling apart and had become dangerously accomplished at it.
“There was a man, Elizabeth. At Ramsgate. Two summers ago. Not Mr. Bingley, despite Caroline’s intimations.”
I knelt beside the tub and held her gaze, a promise that whatever she said next would not change what she was to me.
“His name was George Wickham. He had grown up at Pemberley, my father’s godson. Father provided for his education, paid for Cambridge—everything a patron does for a promising young man. Wickham was charming and handsome, and he smiled constantly; he had known me since I was in the nursery.”
“Georgiana, you do not have to—”
“I need to. Because you need to understand why Fitzwilliam does what he does. Why he manages and guards and puts people in categories and closes doors. He does it because of me, Elizabeth. Because of Ramsgate. Because of what I almost did.”
I waited. The rain struck the window in sheets, and in the tub, Georgiana’s shoulders rose and fell with the breath she was gathering.
“Wickham had a piece of intelligence, or so he claimed. About my brother. Something from Fitzwilliam’s Cambridge days, an indiscretion—it does not matter what.
What matters is that Wickham used it. He told me he knew something that would ruin my brother’s reputation, and then he told me he would never tell a soul, and the never telling was the leash.
He came back again and again, and each time the secret held me closer, because I believed I was protecting Fitzwilliam by keeping Wickham’s confidence, and Wickham let me believe it. ”
My gasp was entirely involuntary, and I tried to swallow it back, but Georgiana didn’t seem to notice as she continued, “He proposed an elopement. We would go to Scotland, so that my thirty thousand pounds would secure us both, and that once we were married, the secret about Fitzwilliam would be safe forever because a brother-in-law would protect his interests. He made it sound like safety. He made it sound like love.”
“How old were you?”
“Fifteen.”
Fifteen. A girl of fifteen, with thirty thousand pounds and a brother’s reputation in her hands, and a man many years her senior telling her that the annihilation of her future was an act of devotion.
“I packed a trunk and wrote a letter. I was halfway to the carriage when Fitzwilliam arrived. He had come early, some change of plans, and he found me in the hallway with my luggage and my letter, and the look on his face—” Georgiana closed her eyes.
“I have never seen a man break without moving. He stood perfectly still, and the breaking happened behind his eyes. I watched him break, and I have been watching him guard against it ever since.”
“Georgiana.”
“He sent my companion away and faced Wickham. He settled debts—I don’t know the amount or the reason—then took me from Ramsgate, and we haven’t discussed it since.
Because talking about it means facing it, and Fitzwilliam can’t stand that.
He refuses to acknowledge that his plan—to protect, manage, and tightly control everyone around me—failed when it truly counted.
That he nearly lost me. Now, every day since, my brother has been attempting to compensate for Ramsgate, and this constant effort is wearing both of us down. ”
The bath had gone lukewarm. I helped Georgiana stand, dried her, and wrapped the flannel around her thin shoulders. The act of care was so simple and inadequate that it felt like placing a sticking plaster on a wound that ran the length of a life.
“I will never reveal this to a soul,” I assured her.
“I know, and I told you because you must understand my brother.” Georgiana gripped my arm as I helped her step from the tub.
“That is why he did what he did at the assembly. Not because he does not regard you, but because the Caroline Bingleys and the Wickhams of the world have taught him that the people closest to Georgiana Darcy are the people most likely to use her, and when you said Caroline was dangerous, he heard you saying that his entire system of protection had failed, and he could not survive hearing that. Not again. Not from someone whose opinion actually mattered.”
“But I am not like Miss Bingley. I truly regard your well-being.” I wasn’t sure why I felt the need to compare myself to Caroline, if only to assure her that some people who drew close to her truly cared for her.
“I know, and that is why my brother loves you.”
My heart took an involuntary lurch, and then I was the one shaking, even in this warm room with the fire bright and the water cooling.
“Georgiana, you cannot know—”
“I know my brother better than anyone. He stops in the breakfast room and stares at the empty chair. I hear him pause outside the music room when I play the jig, and the pausing tells me he is listening for your voice beneath the notes. He carries a book he will not read and will not return and will not put down. He burned your contract letter and sat in the study picking cat hair from his waistcoat, and when I told him you had taken extra care with your appearance at the assembly, he closed his eyes as though I had struck him. A man who does not love does not close his eyes at the memory of a green ribbon.”
My hands were trembling. I clasped them in my lap to stop the trembling, and the clasping did not help.
“I do not dare—” I began, and stopped, because the sentence had too many possible endings and I was afraid of all of them.
“You do not dare hope,” Georgiana said. “I know. I recognize the expression. I wore it at Ramsgate, and I have been wearing it since. You taught me to take it off.” She reached across and took my hand, her grip fierce.
“You told me the choice was mine. I am telling you the choice is yours. But you cannot make it if you do not know the truth, so I have brought you the truth. It is wet and muddy, and it crossed a stream in a rainstorm, and I am asking you to listen to it.”
The lump in my throat was too thick for words, but I managed. “Mama will have a woolen blanket and chamomile and a lecture about walking in the rain, and you will submit to all three, because you are at Longbourn now and at Longbourn we do not let girls catch their death for want of a cup of tea.”
“Elizabeth?” Georgiana said as I led her toward the stairs.
“Yes?”
“My brother will come looking for me when he discovers I have left.”
“Let him come.”
“He will be coming for me, or so he will say, but he will ask for you—to see you, Elizabeth.”
“He will come for you, Georgie, and he will see you here, warm, dry, and safe with a family that took you in because you are loved, not because you are leveraged.” I gave her a warm hug.
“Let him see where you chose to go when you needed to be safe. Because a man who pays attention—and your brother pays attention, he’s the owl, after all, will know what he must do. If he is listening.”
“He is listening, Elizabeth. He has always been listening. He simply does not know how to answer.”
“Or he already knows.” I thought of the word exhaled in between bites of ginger biscuit, magnificent, remarkable, extraordinary, and I tried not to hope, because Darcy would come for Georgiana to manage the scandal, and what to do with Bingley, and these reasons had nothing to do with me.
I repeated this to myself twice, which was how I knew it was not working.