Chapter 29
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
THE YES I SAVED
Elizabeth
I tried not to think about Fitzwilliam Darcy appearing at our door to demand the return of his sister, and I did not share Georgiana’s assurance that her brother had been listening, observing, and would come to the right conclusions.
He was watchful, yes, and I almost giggled picturing a Darcy owl perched on the tree at night.
Silent wings swooping over an unsuspecting mouse.
As to her claim that he loved me? As if it were self-evident? I shook my head as I smelled my hands, still scented with lavender soap. Sweet Georgiana was a seventeen-year-old girl, and having two sisters of that age, they imagined gentlemen falling in love with ladies all year round.
“Lizzy,” Mama’s voice rose from outside the guest room. “Come make yourself useful, and stop pestering Miss Darcy with questions. Let the poor dear rest.”
I shrugged at Georgiana, who had settled on a settee, still wrapped in a blanket over Lydia’s thickest nightdress.
“Go, Lizzy, I shall be well.”
“Yes, Georgie, for you shall be Georgie from now on as I am Lizzy to you.” I dotted a kiss on her forehead. “I shall bring broth and tea. Will you be wanting anything else?”
“Only let me know when my brother arrives, because arrive he will. He will find me missing without a note, and if he’s truly the wise owl we think he is, he will know where I went.”
“I believe so, yes.”
“He will be frightened, and he will be very wet, and your mother will insist on towels.”
I almost smiled as I turned into the corridor. The almost was the problem since Georgiana told me the truth—about another man who smiled too much, about Darcy’s fear and Caroline’s exploitation. It was Ramsgate, the locked room inside a locked man, and Georgiana had given me a key.
The key did not make the door easy to open.
That was the thing nobody told you about understanding a man’s worst moment—the understanding did not dissolve the anger; it complicated the anger, layered it with compassion that had no proper place to sit, and the compassion and the anger shared the same chair in my heart, and neither would yield to the other.
I descended to find Jane sitting in the drawing room with her composure intact. She had relaxed enough to read, no doubt anticipating Bingley’s arrival.
The clock on the mantel ticked away the minutes.
“She will be warm enough,” Mama said, sweeping in from the stairs. “Hill is bringing broth, and Lydia has donated her thickest nightdress, a sacrifice she has announced to the household no fewer than three times in the last quarter-hour.”
“It is a very fine nightdress,” Lydia called from the corridor. “And Georgiana should know it cost four shillings, which is more than Kitty’s.”
“Lydia. To the kitchen.”
“But Mama, I was only—“
“Kitchen. And take the biscuits out of the oven before they burn. Mrs. Hill has her hands full.”
Lydia retreated with the noisy compliance of a girl who wished her obedience noted and appreciated, dragging Kitty in her wake. The drawing room settled into the weighted silence of a household bracing for something it could feel approaching but could not yet name.
A half hour later, Georgiana joined me in the drawing room, her cheeks once again rosy and her hair dried, but let down.
I hadn’t bothered to pin my hair, and I realized with a belated consternation that my sleeves were damp and my skirts wrinkled, and I couldn’t do anything because the knock came.
Not a polite knock, but the pounding of a man who could not breathe properly until he had ascertained his beloved sister was safe.
“Hill will answer,” Mama said calmly, not looking up from the embroidery she was not actually stitching.
Every head in the room turned toward the corridor. Even Cinnamon lifted her chin from Georgiana’s knee.
Hill’s voice, muffled by the passage, said, “Good evening, sir.”
And then his voice. “Good evening. I apologize for the intrusion. I am here for my sister.”
Georgiana rose, and Cinnamon streaked toward the entrance hall. Mama caught Georgiana’s arm, but no one minded Cinnamon. Papa stepped from his library, no doubt having heard the commotion.
The drawing room door opened, and Hill announced, “Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley, ma’am.”
The first thing I saw was water. Darcy’s coat was drenched, his hair plastering that errant curl to his forehead, his boots leaving dark prints on Mama’s carpet.
He looked nothing like the man who had stood at the Meryton Assembly in pristine evening clothes.
This was the man who had gotten on a horse and ridden three miles through a November storm because someone he loved was out in it, and the looking undid something in my chest that I had been holding together with considerable effort.
Bingley was behind him, equally saturated, his hair in the state of enthusiastic disarray that was Bingley’s natural condition but amplified by the weather, and his eyes found Jane before his feet had crossed the threshold.
“Georgiana.” Darcy’s voice broke on the second syllable.
She ran to him.
I had thought I was braced. I had revised and processed and intellectualized my way through every piece of information Georgiana had given me, and I believed, truly believed, that I had assembled a working understanding of the man standing in my drawing room, and the understanding would protect me from the seeing.
It did not.
He caught her—the way a brother catches a sister who has been missing, with both arms and his chin on top of her head and his eyes closing and his entire body curving around her slight frame as though he could retroactively shield her from the weather and the stream and all the two years since Ramsgate.
Bingley crossed the room to Jane. He did not hesitate; he simply went to her the way water goes downhill.
“Miss Bennet. I need to tell you before you hear it from anyone else, what happened at Netherfield today, and what I have done about it.”
“Mr. Bingley.” Jane’s composure held, but only just, in the fine tremor at the corners of her mouth. “Charlotte has told us.”
“All of it?”
“Enough.”
“Then you know it was not, that I did not—Miss Darcy is my friend, and I would sooner cut off my hand than—”
“I know.” Jane’s voice was very certain. “I have always known.”
“Miss Bennet, Jane—” He caught himself on the Christian name, glanced at Papa, and the glancing was the most endearing thing I had ever seen Bingley do, because it was the glance of a man who understood that names had consequences and was prepared to accept them.
“I have sent my sisters away. Caroline and the Hursts leave at first light. They will not return. And I should very much like to call on you properly tomorrow, if your father would permit it, because there are things I need to say to you that I cannot say properly while dripping on your mother’s carpet. ”
And then, Jane tossed her head back, nodding and laughing. “Yes, Mr. Bingley, you are quite the sight, but you may say anything you wish, whether wet or dry.”
“You may call, Mr. Bingley,” Papa said from the doorway, and I noted Mama’s curt nod of approval. She had been watching, had set me watching, and whatever she saw, she liked.
“Thank you, sir. Thank you. I shall return tomorrow—at a civilized hour, in dry clothes, with—”
“Mr. Bingley.” Papa’s voice held the faintest edge of amusement. “Sit down before you propose by accident.”
Bingley sat, and Jane sat beside him. Their shoulders touched, and neither moved away. Mama looked at the touching shoulders and said nothing, which was the most eloquent commentary she had offered in the entire evening.
Darcy released Georgiana. She stepped back, wiping her eyes with the sleeve of Lydia’s nightdress, and he held her at arm’s length and looked at her—really looked, the way a man looks at someone he has been too frightened to see clearly.
“You walked to Longbourn. In this weather. Alone.”
“I crossed the stream.” Georgiana lifted her chin. “The water was higher than the stones were flat, but I gathered my skirts, and I did not look down.”
“You could have—”
“I could not stay at Netherfield. Not with Caroline. Not after what she did.”
“No.” His voice roughened. “You could not. The choice was yours, and you made it well.”
The words cost him. I could see the cost in the way he released her arms, as though letting go of her physically was letting go of something larger—the programme, the control, and the strict guardianship.
And then he looked at me, and I remembered that I had also claimed the choice to stay or to go.
“May I stay at Longbourn tonight?” Georgiana looked at her brother with those Darcy eyes that I now understood carried the same stubbornness as his, but pointed in a different direction. “I do not wish to return.”
Darcy glanced at Mama, a request and not an assumption, and the distinction mattered.
“Miss Darcy is welcome for as long as she needs,” Mama said, with the authority of a woman who had already prepared the guest room and was merely awaiting formal acknowledgment of what she had decided an hour ago. “Hill has made up the bed. There is broth, bread, and a fire.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Bennet.” He held Georgiana’s shoulders. “Caroline and the Hursts will be gone from Netherfield by morning. You will not be under the same roof with her again.”
“It’s my nightdress she’s wearing,” Lydia announced from the corridor, where she had positioned herself with the strategic visibility of a girl who wished to be seen without technically disobeying orders. “Because I am the tallest.”
“And the loudest,” I said. “Kitchen, Lydia.”
“I’m going, I’m going.”
Georgiana squeezed her brother’s hands, then deliberately stepped back. The girl who had rushed to him was now giving him the space he needed to act. This gesture was a gift, one she had carried across the boundary stream, along with the truth.