Chapter Ten
Georgiana found the letter on a Tuesday, sorting through linens for the spring turning-out, her hand closing on paper where she expected only pillow ticking.
She almost didn't open it. The hand was her brother's, familiar as her own, and the seal, once broken by his own knife months ago and never resealed, told her he had meant to send it and had not. She should have taken it to him unread.
She read it anyway, standing in the cold nursery with dust motes turning in the window light, and by the third paragraph her hand had gone to her mouth.
I have been afraid, and there is a difference, though I grant I have given her little means of telling them apart.
She read it twice more. Then she went looking for her brother, and found him in his study, staring at nothing, a letter of his own half finished on the desk before him, addressed to Hargreave.
"You wrote to her," Georgiana said, without preamble, the pages still in her hand. "Months ago. You wrote to her and you never sent it."
Darcy's head came up sharply. "Where did you find that."
"Beneath my pillow. Where you left it, apparently, the week I was ill, and forgot." She crossed the room, set it on the desk in front of him, her voice shaking now with something between anger and disbelief. "Fitzwilliam. This was written in October. It is March."
"Georgiana."
"You told her you loved her. You told her everything, the trust, the committee, all of it, and then you simply left it here.
" She was crying now, though she did not seem to notice.
"Do you know what she has been told this winter?
Caroline Bingley has been writing to your aunt.
There are rumors, ugly ones, that you called her an obsession, that she called you a coward.
And this whole time you had already written the truth and you let it sit under a pillow because you forgot. "
Darcy had gone very white. "I did not forget. I meant to retrieve it once you were well enough that I could leave you. And then Lady Catherine came, and the committee, and I let myself believe."
"You let yourself believe whatever was easiest." Georgiana wiped her face with the back of her hand, fierce and furious in a way he had rarely seen from her. "I was ill for a fortnight, Fitzwilliam. I have been well for five months. What is your excuse for the other four and a half?"
He had no answer that did not sound, spoken aloud, exactly as damning as it was.
"I renounced the trust," he said finally. "This morning. I sent the letter to Hargreave not an hour ago."
Georgiana stared at him. "You did what?"
"I heard, or believed I heard, that she had called me a coward, that she wished the connection ended.
I could not see the use in fighting for a woman who did not want fought for, and I could not risk your inheritance any further on the strength of a feeling I no longer trusted her to share.
" He gestured at the unfinished letter on his desk. "I was writing to confirm the terms."
"You believed a rumor," Georgiana said, "over a letter you wrote yourself, in your own hand, that says everything true. Fitzwilliam. Listen to yourself."
He was listening. That was the trouble of it, hearing the whole shape of his own cowardice laid out by his sixteen-year-old sister with a clarity he had denied himself for a year.
"It is too late," he said. "I have already sent the renunciation."
"Then unsend it." Georgiana snatched the unfinished letter to Hargreave from the desk before he could stop her, and tore it cleanly in half.
"You are going to Longbourn. Today. Not next week, not once you have found some new reason to wait.
Today. And you are taking this with you.
" She thrust the October letter back into his hands.
"And if you come back here having said nothing to her again, I will never forgive you, and neither, I think, will she, when she finally learns the whole of it some other way. "
Darcy looked down at the pages in his hands, his own words, months old, still entirely true.
I do not ask you to wait for me. I ask only that you know I have not been indifferent.
"I will need a fresh horse," he said.
"You will need considerably more than that," Georgiana said, already moving toward the bell pull, "but it is a start."