4. Unboxing Pemberley #2
“Brother, you are here.” The girl grabbed Darcy’s hand, then thought better of it and seized the door frame instead, peering past him with shameless eagerness.
“And this is… oh, Brother, you must introduce me at once; Mrs. Reynolds said I was to wait upon the steps with the others and be dignified, but I cannot wait to be more dignified.”
“Georgiana.” There was a tenderness in his voice that Elizabeth had not heard before. Whatever this man withheld from the world, he did not withhold it from this child; the wall simply was not there. “You will give Mrs. Darcy the impression we keep you in a menagerie.”
“Mrs. Darcy.” Georgiana turned her full attention to Elizabeth.
“I have wanted a sister my entire life and have quite given up hoping for one. Now I am to have one delivered to the door, and a clever one. Brother wrote that you were clever—you did write it, do not deny it—and I mean to like you so well that you shall be quite worn out with being liked.”
“Then I am fortunate,” said Elizabeth, charmed beyond all resistance, “for I have four sisters and am thoroughly practiced in being both liked and disliked. Although I am warning you, I can withstand a great deal of both.”
“Four sisters!” Georgiana looked as though she had been handed the keys to a kingdom. “You must tell me everything about all of them without delay. Today.”
“She must do nothing of the sort,” Darcy said, descending, “for she has been four days on the road and you are conducting her first interview through a carriage door.” But he handed his sister back from the step with a gentleness that gave the lie to the reproof, and then he assisted Elizabeth down with the same gentleness.
Elizabeth gave his hand a reassuring squeeze, letting him know she liked Georgiana and would forgive her intrusion.
She did, however, feel the entire assembled household watching her the moment her foot touched the gravel.
She had braced herself, but apparently not enough.
The servants stood in two orderly lines, arranged along the steps and across the entrance in an order that was plainly significant.
The housekeeper and a stately man she took to be the butler stood at the head, then a descending gradation of black-and-white and starched aprons that ran on and on, more servants than lived in all of Meryton.
Every eye was fixed on her, the small, travel-worn stranger their master had married without warning.
Darcy offered his arm, and Elizabeth took it, grateful as she walked like he had taught her—with authority and without a smile.
She supposed an unacquainted observer would call her proud, but she understood instinctively that certain stations could not be breached without confusion.
Clarice, her newly hired maid, a woman of around thirty-five, had already informed her they would not be friends.
Darcy stopped before a woman of perhaps sixty with keys at her waist and an expression schooled to perfect neutrality. “Mrs. Darcy, may I present to you Mrs. Reynolds, our head housekeeper?”
“Welcome to Pemberley, madam.” The housekeeper’s curtsy was flawless.
“Thank you, Mrs. Reynolds,” said Elizabeth. “Mr. Darcy tells me you have kept this house since before he was breeched, and that I should be wise to learn everything I can from you.”
“We shall manage well enough, madam, I expect,” she said, which Elizabeth understood to convey a provisional welcome. A housekeeper who had held the keys for over ten years without a mistress would be the one ally she needed.
The butler was Hodges; she lost his particulars at once and resolved to learn them tomorrow.
And then, mindful of her instruction, Elizabeth turned and drew her own maid forward.
“Mrs. Reynolds, this is Clarice, who is new to my service. I leave her gladly in your good hands, that she may learn the house from the person who knows it best.”
She saw Darcy incline his head a fraction, conveying that she had done the introduction correctly and in the proper order.
The line went on. Following Darcy’s guide, Elizabeth inclined her head, said little, and let their faces pass, knowing she would remember not one in ten.
The great door stood open at the end of the line to a hall so vast and beautiful that she nearly forgot her resolution not to gape.
She had to clamp her teeth over her tongue and keep from smiling at the thought of her mother’s likely noisier entrance, accompanied by exclamations and shrieks of delight.
Darcy did not accompany her into the hall but paused upon the threshold, and she saw the change come over him, fully the master of Pemberley, as he addressed his wife.
“Mrs. Darcy, I hope you will forgive me,” he said.
“I have been a month behind with my affairs. Miss Darcy will show you the house—” his sister gave a small bounce that suggested this was the happiest commission of her life “—and Mrs. Reynolds will see you have everything you require. We shall dine at six o’clock, and I would advise you to consider nothing further until you have sufficiently rested from your journey. ”
“And what of Thomas?” she asked, for the boy had not left the back of her mind through the whole long performance of arrival.
“His nursemaid will bring him to the family parlor after you have rested, if you find yourself agreeable to such an introduction. The boy does not do well with too much that is new at once. Tomorrow would do as well, if you prefer.”
“Today,” said Elizabeth. “After I have taken a little rest. I have traveled a considerable distance specifically to meet the boy, and I should be most unhappy if he were made to wait while I busied myself admiring the house’s chimneypieces.”
She probably should not have contradicted him in front of Mrs. Reynolds, but Darcy’s expression did not change. He nodded, bowed, and departed toward the rear of the house to attend to his estate duties.
“Come, Mrs. Darcy!” said Georgiana, seizing her hand with a warm squeeze.
“I shall conduct you by the grand staircase so that you might see the gallery. Your chambers are the most delightful in the entire house, naturally, as they belong to the mistress of Pemberley. Nothing has changed since, well, before I can remember, but Mrs. Reynolds has had them aired out. The room is decorated in the softest blue imaginable and receives the finest light with the fluffiest pillows in all of Derbyshire. I have tested them, and—oh, you will see Mamma on the way, in the portrait gallery.”
Georgiana talked the entire length of the great staircase, and Elizabeth, content to be towed, let the bright current of her chatter wash over her without interruption.
“That is she.” Georgiana stopped before a portrait of a fair, grave, handsome woman in the dress of twenty years before, and her chatter quieted into something younger and more careful.
“Lady Anne Darcy. I do not remember her very well—only soft things, a scent, her hands, and a song she used to sing that I cannot quite recall. I was six. Fitzwilliam remembers her properly, but he will not speak of her, and Papa never would either, so I have made up most of her myself, which I think is allowed when one is left so little to go on.” She gazed upward at the painted face with a child’s open longing.
“Fitzwilliam says I resemble her, but I suspect he says this only to be kind, for I am by no means as grave as she appears here.”
Elizabeth regarded the portrait, the fair woman who had left instructions for the running of a house, and a six-year-old who could not recover her mother’s song, and felt the day’s strangeness settle into a steadier and sadder sensation.
“There is one of Fitzwilliam, of course, heir of Pemberley.”
“Where is it?” Elizabeth’s gaze flicked across the rows of dour and disapproving ancestors. “I do not see anyone without gray hair.”
“He does not wish it to be displayed prominently,” Georgiana said, dropping her voice, “but first, you must tell me, for I have been bursting with it, and I simply must know.”
There were any number of things Elizabeth meant to pry from this girl, but for now, she supposed Georgiana’s curiosity about her background must be satisfied first.
“You may ask me anything you wish,” Elizabeth replied with a gentle smile. “I am a woman of simple origins, born and raised at Longbourn with no secrets to conceal.”
“Indeed?” Georgiana led her through the gallery. “No one tells me anything, but I must ask, are you Fitzwilliam’s secret lover?”
“Pardon me?” Elizabeth’s mouth gaped as wide as her eyes. “Is this what the servants are saying?”
“Oh, no, they would never dare speak so freely.” Georgiana glanced over her shoulder at the stern-faced portraits. “But my brother George wrote me.”