Chapter 9
They walked some way before Georgiana spoke again, down past the rose border and along the gravel path that curved toward the water, and Elizabeth made no attempt to hurry her, understanding by now that this particular girl came to difficult subjects in her own time or not at all, and that the kindest thing a companion could offer was simply the patience to wait without appearing to wait.
"I was fifteen," Georgiana said at last, looking not at Elizabeth but at the path ahead of them, "the same age, I think, as your sister is now.
I had finished with my governess the year before, and my brother had taken a house at Ramsgate for the summer, by the sea, and engaged a companion for me — a Mrs. Younge, very respectable in appearance, very well recommended, or so my brother believed at the time, though he has told me since that he has never forgiven himself for not making more careful inquiries before he engaged her. "
She paused, and Elizabeth said nothing, only walked beside her and let the silence hold what it needed to hold.
"You will think it strange," Georgiana went on, after a moment, "that a girl raised with every advantage, every protection a fortune could purchase, should have been so easily taken in.
I have thought it strange myself, a great many times since, and have never entirely settled the question to my own satisfaction.
I think, perhaps, that advantages of that kind do not protect a person from loneliness, and I was lonely, Miss Bennet, in a way I did not have the words for at the time.
My mother died when I was very young. My father, though I loved him dearly and do not mean to speak against his memory, was not a man given to easy affection — he showed it, I believe, but rarely in words, and a girl of fifteen does not always know how to read affection that comes to her in any form but the spoken one.
My brother loved me, I know that now beyond any doubt, but he was ten years my senior, often from home on business, and I did not yet understand, at fifteen, the particular shape his love for me took.
I was, in short, a girl who wanted very much to be told that she mattered to someone, in plain and simple words, and Mr. Wickham understood that want better than anyone else of my acquaintance, and used the understanding precisely as he intended to. "
"Mr. Wickham came to Ramsgate that summer.
I did not know, then, that the visit was anything but accident — I had known him a little when I was a child, you understand, for he grew up on my father's estate, the son of my father's steward, and my father was very fond of him, and paid for his education, and I had always thought of him as a kind of elder brother, almost, in the years before I understood anything of the world beyond my own nursery.
He was charming to me at Ramsgate in precisely the way he had always been charming — attentive, and amusing, and full of small kindnesses that seemed, at the time, to mean a very great deal. "
"And Mrs. Younge?"
"Mrs. Younge, I have since learned, was in his confidence the whole time.
The position had been secured for her, I believe, with this very purpose in mind, though I did not understand that until it was nearly too late to matter.
She encouraged the acquaintance. She arranged that we should be much together, and unsupervised in ways that ought to have alarmed me and did not, because I was fifteen, and flattered, and entirely unused to a man of three-and-twenty paying me the kind of attention that felt, to a girl who had never received it before, very much like being loved. "
Elizabeth felt something tighten in her own chest, hearing this, and was careful to let none of it show in her face, because she understood, with the particular clarity of a person watching someone else perform a great act of courage, that the smallest flicker of pity or alarm might be enough to close the conversation before it had finished opening.
"He proposed an elopement," Georgiana said, and her voice, which had held steady through the whole of the account so far, caught very slightly on the word, though she did not stop.
"I believed myself in love with him. I believed it entirely, Miss Bennet, with the whole foolish certainty of a girl who has never been taught to distinguish between attention and affection, and I agreed to go with him, and we had fixed upon a day, and I had even begun, secretly, to imagine what my life would be afterward, married to a man I had known since childhood, which seemed to me, then, a very romantic sort of history to have. "
"What happened?"
"My brother came to Ramsgate a day before we were to go.
I do not know, to this day, what brought him — some matter of business, he says, that had nothing to do with suspicion, though I have sometimes wondered whether some instinct led him there regardless, some sense that I needed him before I knew I needed him myself.
I could not, when he arrived, conceal what was about to happen.
I had never been able to conceal anything from him, even as a small child, and I did not manage it then either, however much I might have wished to.
I told him everything, because I could not bear to deceive him, even in the midst of believing myself entirely in love with someone else, and he — "
She stopped walking, and Elizabeth stopped beside her, and waited.
"He did not rage at me," Georgiana said, very quietly.
"I had expected him to. I had expected, I think, that whatever affection he felt for me would not survive the discovery of what I had nearly done, and that he would be entitled to withdraw it, and that I should deserve the withdrawal.
He did not withdraw it. He was angry — I do not mean to suggest otherwise, he was very angry, though almost none of it, I came to understand later, was directed at me.
He sent Mrs. Younge away within the hour.
He wrote to Mr. Wickham himself, I believe, though I was never told what was said, and Mr. Wickham left Ramsgate before I saw him again, and I have not seen him since, nor wished to. "
"And your brother?"
"My brother told me, that same evening, that he loved me precisely as much as he had loved me the day before, and that nothing I had done, or nearly done, could alter that, though he hoped very much that I had learned something from it that I would carry with me afterward.
I did not believe him, at first. I thought it the kind of thing an elder brother says to a foolish younger sister, out of duty rather than conviction, and I spent a long while afterward waiting for the moment when his patience would run out and the disappointment would show itself properly.
It has not happened. It has been nearly two years, Miss Bennet, and it has not happened, and I have only lately begun to believe that it is not going to. "
Elizabeth found, listening to this, that she could not entirely trust her own voice, and took a moment before attempting to use it.
"You were fifteen, Georgiana. You were deceived by two people who had made deception their particular business, and who chose you, deliberately, because you were young, and unguarded, and had been given no reason to doubt either of them.
There is no shame in having been deceived under those circumstances.
The shame, if there is any to be assigned, belongs entirely to the people who did the deceiving. "
"I have told myself that. I have had two years to tell myself that, and I am not certain I have ever fully believed it, until this moment, hearing you say it.
" Georgiana looked at her then, properly, for the first time since they had begun walking, and Elizabeth saw, in her face, something that had not been there a quarter of an hour before — not relief, exactly, but the particular lightness of a burden that has been shared, and found, in the sharing, to weigh less than it had alone.
"You are braver than you know."
Georgiana shook her head, a small, automatic gesture, the reflex of someone unused to being told such things and not yet certain how to receive them.
"You told me. That is brave. It is one thing to carry a wound quietly, and quite another to set it down in front of someone who might, for all you knew when you began, have judged you for it.
You did not know, when you began this morning, that I would not judge you.
You told me regardless. I do not think there is a better definition of courage than that. "
Georgiana looked at her for a long moment, and something in her face settled — Elizabeth could find no better word for it than that, the way a thing settles when it has been turning over for a long while and finally comes to rest in its right place.
"I am glad you came to Pemberley, Miss Bennet.
I do not think I have said that properly yet, and I should like to say it now. "
"I am glad of it too," Elizabeth said, and found, saying it, that she meant it a great deal more thoroughly than the simple courtesy of the words alone would suggest.
They stood for a while longer by the water, neither speaking, and Elizabeth thought of Lydia, fifteen years old and presently somewhere in Brighton, laughing at the same charm that had once nearly undone the girl standing beside her, and felt the particular cold dread of a danger she now understood far too well to dismiss as ordinary foolishness.
She thought, too, of Mr. Darcy, who had absorbed the whole of this — Mrs. Younge dismissed, the letter to Wickham, the two years of patient, unspoken forgiveness offered to a sister who had not yet learned to fully accept it — without once making himself the subject of his own account, without once, as far as Elizabeth could discover, allowing his sister to feel that she had cost him anything at all.
She did not know, walking back toward the house with Georgiana's arm now linked easily through her own, how she was meant to set this new knowledge beside everything else she had learned of him this week.
She knew only that the structure she had once built so confidently, of a man too proud to trouble himself with anyone's feelings but his own, had been dismantled now beyond any hope of repair, and that whatever remained in its place was something she had not yet found the courage to examine as closely as it plainly deserved.