CHAPTER THREE
He had told himself, in the weeks since sending the letter, that the arrangement was a matter of simple discretion: a debt his father had incurred, a family that could not repay it, a solution that spared everyone the indignity of either public exposure or unwanted charity.
He had told himself this with the particular firmness of a man building a case he privately suspects will not survive close examination, and he had succeeded, mostly, in not examining it too closely, until the moment Elizabeth Bennet walked into his drawing room and every careful justification he had constructed collapsed at once, quietly, the way a house of cards collapses when someone finally opens the window it has been built beside.
He had wanted to see her again. That was the truth of it, stripped of all the language about ledgers and discretion and his father's good name, and he found the truth deeply unwelcome, because the last time he had permitted himself to want a woman's company with anything like this intensity, it had cost him a year of his life and very nearly his sister's safety along with it.
He thought of Anne Forster only rarely now, by design rather than accident, but the shape of that wound had never fully closed, only scarred over in a way that made him cautious of anything that pressed too near it.
She had been clever, and quick, and had seemed, for the better part of a season, to see something in him worth the seeing, until he had discovered, by the crudest possible accident, a letter she had written to her sister describing Pemberley's income in considerable and admiring detail and himself, in the same letter, with considerably less.
He had not told Georgiana the whole of it, even now.
He had certainly never told anyone how close he had come, in the aftermath, to mistrusting his own judgment so thoroughly that he had nearly failed to recognize what Wickham was attempting with Georgiana herself, because he had grown so practiced at assuming any apparent warmth directed at him concealed a calculation.
He had built, in the years since, a considerable and effective wall, and had found it served him well enough. Society took his reserve for arrogance, which suited him; arrogance discouraged approach far more efficiently than honest explanation ever could have.
And then, at an assembly in a Hertfordshire village he had not particularly wished to visit, he had watched a woman across a crowded room, sharp eyed and unimpressed by any of it, the dancing, the matchmaking mothers, himself, and had felt something in his careful architecture shift for the first time in years.
He had said something unforgivable to Bingley, loud enough, he now understood with considerable shame, for her to hear, because he had been startled by his own reaction and had reached, in his discomfort, for the same wall that had always served him before.
It had not occurred to him, in the moment, how badly it would land, or how long the consequence of it would follow him.
He had thought of her since, more than he wished to admit, and the trustees' letter regarding his father's estate had arrived at almost exactly the moment he had given up entirely on the prospect of seeing her again, and he had read the name Bennet in the old loan documents with a jolt that felt, even now, faintly disreputable to recall.
He had told himself the arrangement was discretion. It had, in fact, been opportunity, dressed in the clothing of obligation, and he was ashamed of himself for it, and was not at all certain the shame would stop him from being glad, every single morning of her residence, that he had done it.
"You are very quiet tonight," Georgiana observed, after Elizabeth had retired and brother and sister sat alone over the last of the wine, the fire burned low. "You were quiet the whole of dinner, in fact, whenever she spoke."
"I was attending."
"You were staring, Fitzwilliam, which is not quite the same thing, though I grant it can look similar from a distance.
" Georgiana said this with the particular fearlessness she had only recently begun to find with him again, in the slow months since Ramsgate, and he found he did not mind it, even when it was inconvenient. "Do you like her?"
"She is here to settle Father's ledgers."
"That was not my question."
He considered, for a moment, simply declining to answer, which had served him well in every other circumstance of his life involving questions he did not wish to examine.
But Georgiana was watching him with an expression that reminded him, uncomfortably, of their mother, and he found he did not have the heart to deflect her tonight.
"She does not like me," he said instead, which was, he thought, both true and a sufficient answer to a question he was not prepared to answer more fully.
"Does she not? I thought she seemed rather lively with you, at dinner. Livelier than with anyone else."
"That is not the same as liking, Georgiana.
Miss Bennet has formed a very settled opinion of my character, based, as far as I can tell, on a single unfortunate remark I made the first evening we met, and she has guarded that opinion since with considerably more diligence than most people guard anything of actual value. "
"Then perhaps," Georgiana said, with the casual cruelty of the very young, who have not yet learned to soften their observations for the comfort of their elders, "you ought to give her a reason to guard a different one."
He did not answer that, because he did not, in that moment, have an answer that did not frighten him slightly to consider.
He thought instead of the way Elizabeth Bennet had looked at him across the drawing room, sharp and unconvinced and entirely unimpressed by Pemberley's careful grandeur, the one woman in recent memory who had walked into his house and looked, first, at him, rather than at everything his house represented.
He thought he would very much like to give her that different reason. He thought it would very likely cost him a great deal to try, and that he was, despite every careful lesson of the last several years, already prepared to pay it.
He poured himself another half glass of wine he did not particularly want, and said nothing further on the subject, and Georgiana, with the wisdom of a girl who had recently learned a great deal about the cost of unspoken things, did not press him.
But she watched her brother's face in the firelight a while longer, and thought, privately, that whatever Miss Elizabeth Bennet had come to Pemberley to settle, it was very unlikely to be only the ledgers.