LVI The Visitor #2
“My dear, I cannot bear to distress you further at such a time, but you must hear the rest. The family is in very reduced circumstances. The father is dead, and the estate is lost. There has been one elopement already to a man who has since been arrested by the Crown, and Miss Elizabeth herself entered a marriage in Scotland of whom no one in London has ever heard, contracted in such haste that I cannot but suspect the necessity behind it. There were even reports — I should not repeat them in another house, but in your present circumstance I think you ought to know — reports that this very person eloped on the eve of her marriage, that the gentleman discovered her in some indiscretion and the affair was hastily patched up to spare the family further disgrace. I should not have spoken of it if I had not found her here, in your drawing room, calling herself by a title she has no business to.”
Georgiana’s colour had begun to rise. It climbed the side of her throat. “Miss Bingley — you are mistaken — if you will only — ”
“My dear, I am not mistaken. I had it directly from Mrs Long, who had it from her sister, who lives within fifteen miles of Longbourn and had it from the rector’s wife herself. Such things are not reported without foundation.”
“They are, however, reported without truth. Miss Bingley, if you will permit me to explain — ”
“I shall not need it explained, dearest. The case explains itself. I do not blame you for having been taken in — your generous heart would not suspect such a person — but you must allow me to be more worldly on your behalf. A woman of that family does not appear in a drawing room such as this one by any honest means.”
Georgiana drew breath to answer.
Miss Bingley, however, was not yet finished.
Her eye had been working while she spoke.
It had gone, in a small circuit, from Elizabeth’s face to the chaise behind her, and from the chaise to the small table at its side, and from the small table to the cup of broth and the dry biscuit and the basin beneath its cloth.
The eye returned to Elizabeth, and rested on the colour in her cheeks, and travelled — briefly, without disguise — down to her waist and back up.
Miss Bingley’s voice changed.
“My dear Miss Darcy. Forgive me. I had not appreciated the situation in full.” She did not lower the voice; she lifted it, as though she had at last understood a delicate matter and meant to spare Miss Darcy any further confusion.
“Miss Bennet — that is, the former Miss Bennet, for I do not know her present name — is plainly unwell. I do not know whether she has been brought into this house in the throes of some fever — in which case you must on no account remain alone with her, for there is illness in the streets at present that one cannot be too cautious of — or whether her condition is of a different kind altogether. In either case, my dear, you must not be left in such proximity. The risk to your own constitution is not to be considered, and the risk to your reputation, should the latter be the case, is — ”
“Miss Bingley!”
Elizabeth had not heard this voice before. This was no sweet entreaty, but the commanding voice of Darcy’s sister. Miss Bingley stopped speaking and gasped, settling a hand over her breast, plainly expecting to be apologised to.
“My uncle’s house is not the place in which you will say one more word of what you have been saying.
The lady at the window is my sister. She is married to my brother.
She is Mrs Darcy, and she is Lady Auchengray, wife of the Baron of Auchengray, which is a Scottish courtesy title my brother held since his birth under conditions that are not for you to know.
Every line you have spoken of her family is either false or so distorted by your wish to think ill that it might as well be.
And what you have just implied of her person is something for which my brother — were he in this room — would have you put out into the rain by the footmen and would never receive you in any house of his again.
He is not in this room, Miss Bingley. I shall have to do it for him. ”
She crossed to the bell-pull. She rang it once, hard.
“Whitford will see you out.”
Miss Bingley had gone very white. Her hand was still half-raised in the position it had been in when she was speaking.
“Miss Darcy! Pray, I must beg —”
“You may speak to me, Miss Bingley, on a day on which you have not insulted my brother’s wife in his uncle’s drawing room. That day is not today, and I do not foresee it will be soon.”
The door opened. Whitford was in it. He had, Elizabeth saw at once, been very near the door the entire time. His face was composed, but his colour was up.
“Whitford. Miss Bingley is leaving.”
“Yes, Miss Darcy.”
Miss Bingley made one more attempt — her mouth opened — but she did not find anything she trusted herself to say in the open.
She gathered her bonnet, her gloves, her pelisse, her affronted dignity, and made the long walk back across the rug.
The skirts swung. The bonnet ribbons trailed loose.
She had a fine flush of colour high in her cheeks that Elizabeth had never seen before.
Whitford held the door for her. She passed through it.
Whitford closed it, with a degree of pressure that was not quite a slam but very near it.
Georgiana stood at the bell-pull with her hand still on the rope. She did not move.
Elizabeth sagged into the seat and let her forehead rest once more against the cool of the window.
After a moment, Georgiana let the rope go and looked at Elizabeth, and her face changed all at once. Elizabeth rose swiftly and crossed the rug to her and caught her before she could collapse on the carpet. “There. Sit. Cry it out, I find that is the best sometimes.”
She lowered Georgiana to the small sofa by the fire and sat beside her with her arm round Georgiana’s shoulders. The girl was shaking with the after-tremor of having spoken in a voice she had not known she owned.
“Oh, Elizabeth, what have I done? My uncle said no one was to know. I named you, I said Mrs Darcy, I told her my brother held the title — she will be in Berkeley Square by the hour!”
“She will.”
“He will be so angry with me!”
“He will not. Be cross at the means, perhaps. Not at the meaning.”
“You cannot know that.”
“I can. The truth was never going to keep until the trial. Too many people knew me at Auchengray and it is only a matter of Providence that the knowledge has not yet made the London papers. Your uncle hoped for another week. Mr Pemberton was not even that optimistic. Sterling has been pressing to learn everything about where your brother has been and who he was with for the past nine months, and one way or another, it was going to be discovered.”
Georgiana lifted her face. “And you? What does it mean for you, Lizzy? Today, tomorrow?”
“It means by morning there will not be a household in London that does not know my husband has a wife. It means that if your uncle is correct about Sterling’s next move, the petition Mr Pemberton has been preparing in quiet must now be answered in public.
It means I shall be looked at. Written about.
It means we are in it, Georgiana. All of us. From this afternoon.”
Georgiana was quiet a moment. “I am sorry.”
“Do not be. You defended me, and I shall not forget the rest of my life that I had a sister-in-law who did so.”
Georgiana drew an unsteady breath and turned her face back into Elizabeth’s shoulder.
They sat together by the fire while the rain went on against the window at the far end of the room, and somewhere — perhaps already — a carriage was carrying Miss Bingley towards the first drawing room of her afternoon, and the news with her.
After a little while, Elizabeth lifted her head and looked towards the door.
“Whitford?”
He was in the doorway at once. He had not gone far.
“Yes, my lady?”
“Find his lordship, please, and tell him his niece and I should be most grateful if he could come up at his earliest convenience. There has been a development which he must hear of from us before he hears of it from anyone else.”
“At once, my lady.”
The door closed. Elizabeth tightened her arm round Georgiana’s shoulders and gathered, with what time was left to her, the words in which she would deliver to the Earl of Matlock the news that his careful week-long silence had ended in his own drawing room.