Chapter 8
The post arrived, as it generally did, while the household was still at breakfast, and the table had settled, by that hour, into its usual easy disorder of toast and conversation — Fitzwilliam relating some piece of regimental news to Bingley with considerable embellishment, Miss Beaumont and Mrs. Sutcliffe comparing notes on a mutual acquaintance's new carriage, Georgiana quietly attentive beside her brother, who was reading something in the newspaper with the particular frown he reserved for matters of agricultural price.
Elizabeth received two letters from Jane along with the rest of the morning's correspondence — one evidently delayed somewhere upon the road, for it bore an earlier date than the second, and she opened the earlier of the two first, out of nothing more than habit, and read it with the easy, half-attentive pleasure of a woman expecting nothing beyond the ordinary business of home.
It contained nothing beyond the usual small news of home.
Their mother's nerves; an account of a dinner at the Lucases'; a passing mention that Kitty had taken a cold and recovered from it within the week; news that Lydia, gone to Brighton with the regiment some weeks past under Mrs. Forster's nominal care, wrote home in excellent spirits and seemed to be enjoying herself a great deal, by all accounts rather more than the rest of the family found entirely comfortable to hear, though Jane, as was her way, recorded this with no particular alarm of her own, only the gentle observation that she hoped Lydia would not grow careless of her conduct so far from home, and trusted that Colonel and Mrs. Forster would exercise the necessary supervision.
Elizabeth read this with mild concern, of the ordinary, familiar variety she had been feeling about Lydia's conduct for some years now, and set the letter aside to open the second.
The second letter was shorter, and had evidently been written in some haste, for Jane's hand, usually so neat, ran rather more quickly across the page than was her habit, and the opening lines apologized for the brevity, explaining that she wrote chiefly to add a small piece of intelligence to her previous letter, which she did not think of any great consequence, but which she thought Elizabeth might like to know regardless, since Elizabeth took, Jane said, rather more interest in such things than she did herself.
*Lydia writes that she has made a number of pleasant acquaintances among the officers,* the letter continued, *and mentions one in particular with whom she seems a good deal taken — a Mr. Wickham, who she says joined Colonel Forster's regiment some months past, and who she describes as the most agreeable man she has met in all her life, which you will allow is rather a large claim from our Lydia, who makes it, I think, about one young man in three.
I confess I did not at first connect the name with anyone of our acquaintance, until Mama remarked that it must surely be the same Mr. Wickham who was once so great a favourite at Meryton, and who left so suddenly, and on terms I never properly understood, though you may know more of the particulars than I do.
I write only because I thought you would wish to be told, and because I could not, on reflection, think of any reason for alarm in it — Lydia has admired a great many young men this twelvemonth and forgotten each in his turn within a fortnight, and I do not suppose this instance will prove any different.
But you have always had a clearer head than I do in such matters, and I thought it right that you should have the intelligence, to make of it whatever you think proper. *
Elizabeth read the paragraph twice. She read it a third time, more slowly, as though a slower reading might somehow alter its contents, and found that it did not, and that the words sat on the page exactly as they had the first time, plain and unremarkable to anyone who did not know what she now knew of the name Wickham, and entirely, urgently alarming to anyone who did.
She set the letter down on her lap and did not, for a moment, trust herself to pick up her cup.
She had spent a week now in a house that bore that name like a wound it had only partly healed.
She had stood in Georgiana's company and felt the careful, deliberate way the girl steered around certain subjects, the stillness that had not fully left her since some unnamed trouble Elizabeth had not yet been told the shape of.
She had watched Mr. Darcy's face, on the single occasion she had heard the name mentioned in his hearing — not by herself, but by Mrs. Sutcliffe, in some idle remark about the militia generally — close over, briefly and completely, before he recovered himself and answered some unrelated question with perfect composure.
She did not know the particulars. She suspected, now, reading her sister's careless paragraph with her hands gone unaccountably cold, that she was about to need to know them rather urgently, and that the knowing would not come cheaply to anyone concerned.
She looked up from the letter to find Georgiana watching her from across the table, with an expression Elizabeth had not noticed settling there, but which had evidently been in place for some little while.
Mr. Darcy, too, she noticed, had looked up from his newspaper, though he said nothing, and returned his attention to it a moment later with the careful, deliberate air of a man who has noticed something and decided, for the present, not to remark upon it.
"Miss Bennet. Are you quite well? You have gone rather pale."
"I am perfectly well, thank you. Only a little tired this morning."
It was not, she knew even as she said it, a remark Georgiana was likely to accept at face value, and she was proved right within the half hour, when Georgiana found her alone in the small sitting room adjoining the library, ostensibly in search of a book she had left there the previous evening, and lingered, once the book was found, with the particular deliberate hesitation of someone who has come for a purpose other than the one stated.
"Is it about Mr. Wickham?"
Elizabeth set down the letter she had not realized she was still holding, and looked at Georgiana properly, with something between alarm and a kind of wary respect for the directness of the question.
"Why would you ask that?"
"Because you read something this morning that worried you very much, and you have been a different sort of quiet since, the kind that means you are turning something over rather than simply enjoying the silence.
And because, when Mrs. Sutcliffe mentioned the militia at dinner three nights ago, you looked at my brother's face when you thought no one could see you doing it, and I do not think you would have looked at him in quite that way for any ordinary remark. "
Elizabeth was silent for a long moment, weighing what she owed this girl — who had, after all, told her almost nothing of her own history with the name in question, only enough to suggest that a history existed and that it had cost her something considerable — against what she had no right to disclose on her sister's behalf, in a letter not addressed to anyone but herself.
"My youngest sister," she said at last, choosing her words with the particular care she generally reserved for matters she had not yet fully settled in her own mind, "is presently in Brighton, under the nominal care of a colonel's wife, and has formed what my elder sister describes as a particular regard for an officer recently arrived in that regiment. The officer's name is Mr. Wickham."
Georgiana went very still. It was not, Elizabeth thought, the stillness of a girl shocked by unexpected news; it was something closer to the stillness of a person hearing confirmed a fear she had been carrying, quietly, for rather longer than this single conversation.
"How old is your sister?"
"Fifteen."
Something moved across Georgiana's face that Elizabeth could not entirely name, though she recognized its general shape: a kind of grief, sharpened by recognition, the particular pain of watching a danger one knows intimately approach someone who has not yet been warned of it.
"You must write to her," Georgiana said, with a quiet urgency that surprised Elizabeth a good deal, coming from a girl who had spent the whole of their previous acquaintance choosing her words with such evident caution.
"You must write to her today, Miss Bennet, and tell her — I do not know what you ought to tell her, precisely, that would not require explaining a great deal more than either of us has any right to explain in a letter, but you must write to her, and warn her, in whatever terms you can manage, that Mr. Wickham is not — that he is not what he appears to be, however agreeable he has made himself appear. "
"Georgiana." Elizabeth said the name gently, and reached out, without entirely deciding to do so, and took the girl's hand in both of hers. "What do you know of him, that frightens you so much on my sister's account?"
Georgiana looked at her for a long moment, and Elizabeth watched something move behind her eyes — a calculation, perhaps, of how much could safely be told, and to whom, and at what cost to herself in the telling.
"I know a great deal," she said finally, very quietly.
"More than I have told anyone outside my own family, and more than I have ever told a friend of so short an acquaintance as yourself.
But I think — " She stopped, and seemed to gather something in herself before continuing.
"I think I should like to tell you, Miss Bennet, if you are willing to hear it, because I do not believe your sister's danger can be properly understood without it, and because I find, rather to my own surprise, that I trust you to hear it without thinking less of me for what happened. "
"I should never think less of you for what was done to you, whatever it was. I hope you know that already."
"I am beginning to," Georgiana said, and the smallest, saddest ghost of a smile moved across her face. "Will you walk with me? I find this is not a story I can tell sitting still, in a room with doors that might open."
Elizabeth rose at once, and they went out together into the garden, where the morning had turned soft and overcast, the kind of grey, gentle light that asks nothing of the people walking beneath it.
It was the first moment since opening Jane's letter in which Elizabeth felt anything like gratitude — grateful that whatever was about to be told to her would be told in the open air, where a girl who had spent two years guarding a secret might find it a little easier, at last, to set it down.
She thought, as they crossed the terrace and started down toward the water, of her own letter still unwritten upstairs, and of the hours that must yet pass before it could be sent, and of Lydia somewhere in Brighton, laughing at something Mr. Wickham had said, entirely unaware that two women in a Derbyshire garden were, at that very moment, preparing to speak of him in terms that would have astonished her to hear.
She put the thought aside, gently, for the present.
There would be time enough, this afternoon, to write what needed writing.
For now, there was only the path before her, and Georgiana's hand still loosely held in her own, and the particular quiet courage of a girl about to do something difficult because she had decided, finally, that the difficulty was worth bearing for someone else's sake.