CHAPTER NINE
They did not speak of it again on the ride back to Pemberley the following morning, the road still soft with the night's rain, the silence between them charged but not unkind, a silence that felt, to Elizabeth, less like avoidance than like two people carefully carrying something fragile between them, neither wanting to be the one who dropped it.
It was Georgiana, three days later, who broke a silence of her own.
She came to Elizabeth's room well after the household had gone quiet, in her nightclothes, her hair loose, looking younger than her sixteen years and considerably more frightened, and sat on the edge of Elizabeth's bed with her hands twisted together in her lap, the same gesture Elizabeth had noticed in the corridor weeks before.
"You said, before, that I might tell you. When I was ready."
Elizabeth set down the book she had not actually been reading and gave the girl her full attention. "I did. And I meant it."
"It is about Mr. Wickham." Georgiana's voice had gone very small. "You have heard the name, I think. My brother does not speak of him kindly, and I do not imagine he has reason to, after what happened."
"I know a little of him. I do not know what happened between you."
Georgiana was quiet for a long moment, her eyes fixed on her own hands.
"Last summer, at Ramsgate. I was there with my companion, a Mrs. Younge, who I have since learned was not nearly so trustworthy as my brother believed her to be.
Mr. Wickham came, as though by accident, though I understand now it was nothing of the kind, and he was so very kind to me, so attentive, in a way no one had been since our father died.
I thought myself in love with him. I agreed, when he proposed it, to elope.
" Her voice cracked slightly. "I was fifteen.
I did not understand, until my brother arrived unexpectedly and the whole scheme collapsed around us, that it was never about me at all.
It was about my fortune, and about wounding my brother, who Mr. Wickham has hated, I think, for a very long time, for reasons that are not entirely his fault and not entirely my brother's either. "
Elizabeth reached for the girl's hand and held it, saying nothing, understanding instinctively that the story needed room to finish itself before it needed any response.
"My brother has never blamed me for it, not once, not even when I have blamed myself rather a great deal.
But I think it changed him. I think he has been more careful, since, more closed, with everyone, even with me sometimes, as though he has decided that wanting anything too openly is how a person gets hurt.
" Georgiana looked up, her eyes bright with unshed tears.
"I have never told anyone the whole of it.
Not even Caroline, though she has guessed enough to use it against me sometimes, in small unkind ways, hints she thinks I do not notice. "
"Is that what she meant," Elizabeth said slowly, "when she spoke of stories traveling before anyone could question their truth."
Georgiana nodded, miserable. "She knows enough to make trouble with it, if she ever chose to. I do not think she has, not yet, not the worst of it, but I have lived this past year rather afraid of what she might say, if she ever decided I had displeased her sufficiently to deserve it."
Elizabeth sat with this a long moment, turning it over, fitting it alongside everything else she had observed of Caroline Bingley's careful cruelties, the comment in the study, the gossip at Lambton, and felt something harden in her, a protective fierceness she had not entirely expected to feel on Georgiana's behalf, given how briefly she had known the girl.
"You did nothing wrong," she said finally. "You were fifteen, and grieving your father, and a grown man took advantage of that grief with considerable skill. None of the shame in that story belongs to you, Georgiana, whatever Caroline Bingley might wish you to believe."
"My brother says something very like that. I do not always believe him, when he says it. I think, perhaps, I might believe it, coming from you."
Elizabeth held the girl while she finally allowed herself to cry, the particular release of a confidence held too long and too carefully, and thought, with a clarity that startled her, of how much she had misjudged the architecture of this house when she first arrived: not a fortress of cold pride, as she had assumed, but a structure built entirely out of careful people protecting each other's wounds, sometimes so thoroughly that the protecting itself became its own kind of cage.
She thought of Mr. Darcy's face in the firelight, three nights past, saying I think it frightens you rather as much as it frightens me, and understood, with sudden and uncomfortable force, precisely what kind of fear he had meant, and how thoroughly she now shared it.