27. The Keys to Pemberley #2
“But I have his letters,” Georgiana said, brightening slightly. “Would you like to see them? He writes so vividly—elephants and bazaars and the most extraordinary heat. He promised to bring me a Kashmiri shawl, red and gold. Quite bold, I know, but George always said I was too timid in my dress.”
She rose before Elizabeth could respond and crossed to the sideboard, where a small stack of correspondence sat tucked beneath a vase of wilting daffodils. She returned with three letters, their pages soft from repeated reading, and pressed them into Elizabeth’s hands.
“This one is my favorite. He describes a temple with carvings so intricate that—”
But Elizabeth was not listening. She was staring at the letter’s direction, at the date penned in George Wickham’s confident hand: April 3rd, from Bombay.
She had read enough sea adventure novels—and endured enough of her father’s geography lectures—to know the distances involved.
A ship from Portsmouth to India took months.
Lady Amelia had died in March, before Easter, and if Wickham had sailed at the end of March, he would scarcely have cleared the Bay of Biscay.
He would not reach Bombay until August at the earliest.
“Georgiana.” Her voice came out strange. “When did this letter arrive?”
“Last week. The ship letter stamp is from Plymouth—see?” Georgiana pointed to the faded marking. “George said the East India Company packets are wonderfully efficient.”
“Oh, I see.” Elizabeth scanned the hurried scribbles. Wonderfully efficient indeed to deliver a letter from a man who had not yet arrived at his destination. Elizabeth handed the letters back, her fingers numb. “They are very vivid. Your brother has quite a gift for description.”
Georgiana beamed, oblivious to the icy dread settling in Elizabeth’s stomach. “Oh, he will have such a healthy tan when I next see him.”
“Yes, he will.” Her voice emerged level, which was a minor miracle. “And when your brother locates Mr. Wickham? What then?”
“George must sign papers. Give up any claim to Thomas. Swear that he signed the registry fraudulently.” Georgiana’s chin lifted with sudden defiance—a gesture so like her brother’s that Elizabeth’s heart flinched.
“But George is not wicked, whatever Fitzwilliam believes. He is simply lost. Mother always said he had too much charm and not enough anchor. She loved him, you know. As much as she loved Fitzwilliam.”
“Did she?”
“Mrs. Reynolds told me, on those nights when I was too young to know she would never return. She told me to think about my mother sitting by my bedside, the way she sat with George—for three days, refusing to sleep, until the fever broke.” Georgiana’s voice softened. “She called him her second son.”
Elizabeth thought of the registry she had examined—the christening entry for George Thomas Wickham, with Martha Wickham listed as his mother.
Not Lady Anne. Martha. The woman who had married the steward for legitimacy’s sake, then apparently left her infant son at the great house and vanished from the family history entirely.
“What happened to his mother?” Elizabeth asked. “His birth mother, I mean. Martha.”
Georgiana’s face clouded. “I do not know much. Mrs. Reynolds never spoke of her, except to say that she was very young and very frightened, and that she did what she thought was best for George. She married Father’s steward—the elder Mr. Wickham—so George would have a legal father and a name.
But she could not… she did not wish to raise him herself. So Mamma took him in.”
Took him in. Lady Anne had raised another woman’s child as her own. Had loved him, nursed him through fevers, called him her second son—all while knowing he was the living evidence of her husband’s infidelity.
Elizabeth thought of the journals upstairs in her bedchamber—Lady Anne’s private history, which she had discovered on her first day at Pemberley and read only in fragments.
She had been looking for guidance on raising a stubborn boy, not for insight into the family she had married into.
But perhaps the two were not so different.
“I can imagine,” Georgiana continued, “how George must have felt. Growing up at Pemberley, loved by Mother, treated as a brother by Fitzwilliam—and yet always knowing he was not quite legitimate. Not quite belonging. When Father died, George received his bequest, a fraction of the worth of Pemberley. Father expected him to make his own way.”
“As a second son would,” Elizabeth noted.
“Yes, but it was never enough for George.”
“And when Fitzwilliam asked him to sign a registry for a child that was not his,” Elizabeth suggested. “George saw the opportunity to…”
“I do not excuse what George did.” Georgiana’s voice cracked. “But I understand why he did it.”
Elizabeth said nothing. She was thinking of a man with sunshine in his smile, standing in a London alley, giving cheap signet rings to na?ve young ladies, and of Jane’s letter.
Wickham had not signed out of brotherly affection. He had signed because Darcy paid him. And now Darcy was hunting him, preparing to demand yet another signature.
What would Wickham demand in return? What secrets might he trade for money, or for spite?
“I should go,” Elizabeth said abruptly, rising from the table. “I have… correspondence to attend to.”
Georgiana looked up, startled. “Elizabeth, are you well? You have gone quite pale.”
“Perfectly well.” The lie came easily. “I simply need some time alone to think.”
She did not wait for a response, but gathered her skirts and fled—there was no other word for it—back up the stairs, past the family portraits and the silent servants, until she reached the sanctuary of her bedchamber and closed the door firmly behind her.
The room was hushed, the fire reduced to embers. Elizabeth leaned against the door and drew breath after breath, until the panic ebbed to a tolerable misery. Wickham is coming. Soon.
He would be brought to Pemberley to sign his confession, and he would see Elizabeth, the woman from Cheapside who had let him kiss her in an alley and wondered, for weeks afterward, whether a kiss could make her with child.
And what might he do with such knowledge? Barter it for coin, wield it against Darcy, or simply savor the power he held over the new Mrs. Darcy—now mistress of the strongroom and the silver vault.