CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Georgiana Darcy came to Lambton two mornings later, brought by her brother in a curricle that arrived at the inn with a promptness Elizabeth suspected owed more to eagerness than to good manners.
She was shy at first, painfully so, but warmed within the half hour under Elizabeth's easy questioning, and by the time Bingley arrived close behind them, the small parlor had filled with a warmth that felt, to Elizabeth, entirely unlike any gathering she had attended at Rosings.
She watched Darcy across the room, attentive to his sister without hovering, easy with Mr. Gardiner in a way he had never once managed with Sir William Lucas, and found the sight settling something in her chest she had not known was still unsettled.
He crossed to her once the others had drawn into their own conversations, and stood near enough that she caught the faint smell of horse and leather still clinging to his coat from the ride.
"You are good for her," he said, low. "I have not seen Georgiana speak so freely to a stranger in longer than I care to admit."
"She is not difficult to draw out, once she believes no one is waiting to judge the drawing."
"No." He looked at her a moment too long. "I am beginning to understand that a great many things are easier, once a person believes they are not being judged first and loved second."
She did not have an answer ready for that, which had become, she noticed, an increasingly frequent occurrence in his company, and was saved from needing one by Bingley's voice carrying across the room, inviting the whole party to dine at Pemberley the following day.
They walked the grounds after breakfast the next morning while the elder Gardiners fished with Mr. Bingley some distance downstream, and Darcy led her, without announcing his intention, along a path that curved away from the house toward a narrower stretch of the river where the trees closed in overhead and the ordinary world fell briefly out of sight.
"I have been wanting to show you this since the day you arrived," he said, "and could not find an excuse that did not sound absurd."
The path opened onto a small stone bridge, older and plainer than the grand one nearer the house, moss softening its edges, the water beneath running clear and fast over pale stones.
He stopped at its center and she stopped beside him, close enough that their sleeves nearly touched, and neither of them moved to close the last inch of distance.
"My mother used to bring me here," he said, "before she died. She said a man who could not stand still by running water had not yet learned how to think properly."
"And can you? Stand still?"
"I am discovering I can, in the right company." He turned to face her fully. "Elizabeth."
Her name, unadorned, no Miss Bennet to guard it, landed somewhere beneath her ribs.
"I have answered five items of six," he said, "and told you honestly I cannot answer the sixth except to say I no longer believe it true. I find I cannot stand here another moment without asking you plainly, without a single figure attached to the asking, whether there is any hope left for me."
She looked up at him, at the careful, unguarded want in his face, so unlike the cold precision she had first known him by, and felt her own breath go shallow.
His hand found hers where it rested on the stone parapet, not taking it exactly, only covering it, warm and slightly unsteady, and she did not pull away.
"There is hope," she said, very quietly.
He lifted her hand and pressed his mouth briefly, deliberately, to her knuckles, his eyes on hers the whole time, and she felt the touch travel the full length of her arm and settle somewhere she had no ready name for.
Neither of them spoke. The river ran on beneath them, indifferent, and for one suspended moment the whole of Derbyshire seemed to hold its breath alongside them.
He was still holding her hand, had begun, slowly, to draw her half a step closer, when the sound of hooves reached them from the direction of the house, fast and urgent, entirely wrong for the leisurely pace of a summer morning.
A servant, breathless, appeared at the head of the path. "Miss Bennet. A letter has come, express, from Longbourn. Mrs. Gardiner begs you return to the house at once."
Elizabeth's hand slipped from Darcy's before either of them had chosen to let go.
She did not remember, afterward, the walk back to the house, only the growing weight in her chest with every step, some certainty arriving ahead of the actual news the way dread sometimes outran fact.
She found Mrs. Gardiner waiting in the small parlor, two letters in her hand, her face already prepared with the particular gentleness people reserve for delivering news they cannot soften.
"Jane wrote yesterday, and again this morning," Mrs. Gardiner said. "Lydia has gone off. With one of the officers. They are believed to have left Brighton together, and there is fear they are not gone to Scotland at all."
The room tilted, very slightly. Elizabeth heard herself ask which officer, though some part of her already knew before the name was spoken.
"Mr. Wickham."
She sat down hard, the letters trembling in her own hand once Mrs. Gardiner passed them over, and read Jane's careful, frightened handwriting twice through before a single word of it settled properly.
Ten days since Lydia had left Brighton. No word since.
Their father gone to London to search, their mother taken to her bed, the whole household in an uproar that Jane's steady prose could not quite disguise the full horror of.
She did not hear Darcy enter. She became aware of him only when she looked up, blindly, needing to say the words aloud to make them real, and found him already standing in the doorway, his face gone very pale, watching her with an intensity that cut through even her own panic.
"What has happened?"
"My youngest sister." Her voice did not sound like her own.
"She has run off with Mr. Wickham. They left Brighton together and no one knows where they have gone, and my father cannot find her, and she has no money, no connections, nothing to recommend her to a man like that beyond her own foolishness, and I fear, I fear she is lost."
She said the words and heard, even through her own grief, the terrible irony of them: the very failing he had once listed against her, her family's want of conduct, made flesh in the worst possible way, at the worst possible moment, in front of the one man who had already catalogued it once and might now, with perfect justice, believe himself entirely vindicated.
"I must go to Mr. Gardiner at once," she said, rising, her legs unsteady beneath her. "I have not a moment to lose."
She moved past him toward the door, and he caught her hand once, briefly, the same hand he had kissed not a quarter hour before.
"Elizabeth."
She could not stop, could not trust herself to stop, and pulled free without looking at him, hurrying toward the passage where she could already hear her uncle's voice, low and urgent, demanding a carriage readied within the hour.