Chapter Eighteen
Georgiana Darcy proved shy rather than proud, exactly the opposite of what Wickham's account had led Elizabeth to expect, and the two days that followed, filled with visits and small kindnesses and a dinner at Pemberley itself where Miss Bingley's barbed civility could not entirely disguise her dismay, passed in a warmth Elizabeth had not permitted herself to hope for.
She lay awake each of those nights turning over what she felt, and found the answer arriving with a clarity that startled her by how little resistance it met.
She had spent four months believing she hated him, and had discovered, somewhere between a letter in a Kentish grove and a portrait in a Derbyshire gallery, that what she had actually been carrying was something considerably more complicated, and considerably harder to walk away from.
The letter that ended this fragile happiness arrived on the third morning, two in Jane's hand, one opened and marked as having gone astray before reaching her.
She read the first with growing dread and the second with something closer to horror.
Lydia has gone off with one of the officers, gone from Brighton with Mr. Wickham himself, and there is no proof they are married, nor any strong reason to believe they will be. Come home, Lizzy, if you possibly can. Papa has gone to London to search for them, and I do not know what is to be done.
Elizabeth was on her feet before she had finished reading, the letter shaking in her hand, and it was in this state, white faced and half undone, that Darcy found her not five minutes later, arriving to walk with her and the Gardiners as had been arranged the night before.
"Miss Bennet. Good God, what is it?"
She could not, for a long moment, form the words at all.
When they came, they came in a rush, Lydia and Wickham and Brighton and her father in London with no notion where to look, and beneath all of it, the plain, unbearable truth that Wickham's character, which she alone among her family truly understood, made this catastrophe considerably worse than a simple foolish elopement.
Darcy's face, as she spoke, went through something she had never seen it do before, a kind of controlled, contained horror, and when she finished he was silent so long that she thought, with a fresh stab of grief on top of the first, that this was the moment her family's disgrace finally exceeded whatever regard he had built for her.
"I blame myself," he said, finally, low and rough. "Had I made Wickham's character known publicly, as I ought to have done after what passed with Georgiana, this could not have happened. My pride kept it private. Your sister has paid the price of my silence."
"This is not your doing, Mr. Darcy."
"It is partly mine. I will not pretend otherwise." He looked at her, and something in his face had gone entirely, terribly resolved. "You must go home at once. I will not detain you a moment longer than necessary."
She turned to find her uncle already summoning the carriage, and in the chaos of departure, trunks and hurried notes and Mrs. Gardiner's calm, practical management of it all, she caught Darcy's eyes one last time across the inn yard, and found in them something she could not name, grief and resolve tangled together, before the carriage door closed and Pemberley, and the man standing before it, disappeared behind them into the dust of the road.