CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The regiment arrived in the neighborhood on a bright Friday morning, which Elizabeth registered distantly over breakfast through the window, the flash of red coats along the Lambton road, and thought nothing further of it until she saw Georgiana's face.
The girl had come down in good spirits, her cold resolved, color back in her cheeks, chattering to Elizabeth about a new piece of music she wished to attempt, and then she had glanced toward the window, following Elizabeth's gaze without thinking, and gone entirely still, the color draining from her face with a speed that Elizabeth found, in retrospect, she ought to have understood immediately.
"Georgiana."
"It is nothing." The girl looked down at her plate. "I am only a little tired still, I think, from the cold."
Elizabeth said nothing further, but she watched, and by the afternoon she had her answer.
A note arrived for Georgiana, hand delivered by a soldier whose insignia Elizabeth did not immediately recognize, and which Georgiana read in the entrance hall, unaware that Elizabeth was descending the stairs above and could see, without being seen herself, the way the girl's hands shook as she held the paper.
She intercepted Georgiana before she could retreat to her rooms.
"Who is it from."
Georgiana looked up, startled, and then her face did something complicated and frightened, the particular expression of a person who has been caught and is not entirely sorry to be.
"You know who it is from," Elizabeth said, more gently.
"He is quartered at Lambton." Georgiana's voice had gone very thin.
"He writes to say he wishes to renew our acquaintance.
He writes that he has a great many fond memories of last summer, and that he hopes I have the same, and that he trusts I will not have been so indelicate as to share those memories with anyone who might misunderstand them.
" She stopped. "It is a threat, is it not. Not a very subtle one, but a threat."
"Yes," Elizabeth said. "It is."
She read the note herself, with Georgiana looking on with hollow eyes, and felt her jaw tighten with every line.
It was skillfully done, she would give Wickham that: nothing explicit, nothing that could not be explained away as the innocent correspondence of an old acquaintance, and yet the implication could not have been clearer if he had written it in capital letters.
He had enough to damage Georgiana's reputation badly if he chose to use it.
He was not asking for much, the note implied, only that they remain on cordial terms, and that Georgiana not see fit to burden her brother with its contents.
The price of silence, for the present, was simply silence.
"He will want money," Elizabeth said, when she had finished. "This is not the whole of it, this letter. This is the opening move."
"Yes." Georgiana sank onto the bench in the entrance hall as though her legs had simply given way. "He has done it before, I have since understood. With others. He finds what a person cannot bear to have exposed and he offers, never directly, to keep it private. For a consideration."
"Does your brother know he is in the regiment? That he is quartered nearby?"
Georgiana shook her head. "He would not have said, at breakfast, if he had."
Elizabeth sat beside the girl and thought, quickly and carefully, the way she had learned, over years in a household of noise and chaos, to think: through the immediate alarm to the actual problem beneath it, and from the problem to the shape of what needed to be done.
Her first instinct was to go to Mr. Darcy.
It was the obvious course, the sensible course, the course that would remove the problem from her hands and place it in those of a man with both the resources and the authority to handle George Wickham far more efficiently than anyone else in the county.
She recognized the instinct and set it aside with deliberate firmness, because she recognized equally that it was, in part, the instinct of a woman who had been rather badly shaken the night before in a music room and wished, for reasons not entirely strategic, to put herself in the way of a man's protection.
She was not that woman. Or rather, she was trying, with some difficulty, not to be.
"Tell me everything," she said to Georgiana. "Every particular you can remember, from Ramsgate, and every particular you know of Mr. Wickham generally. Who his friends are. What he owes and to whom. What he fears, if you know it."
Georgiana looked at her with an expression that mingled relief and apprehension in equal measure. "What are you going to do."
"I am going to find out what he wants, and I am going to find out what we have with which to answer him, and then I am going to make certain he understands that the calculation he has made, in coming here, is a great deal less favorable to him than he imagines.
" Elizabeth took the girl's hand. "I am not going to do anything foolish, Georgiana.
But I am also not going to allow George Wickham to spend the next month holding the threat of this over your head while we wait for someone else to act.
You are worth more than that, and so, I find, is my own irritation. "
Georgiana almost smiled, a pale and uncertain thing, but present. "My brother will be furious, when he finds out. With Wickham, I mean. And possibly with me, for not telling him immediately."
"Your brother," Elizabeth said, "will not find out until I have had the chance to remove whatever advantage Wickham thinks he currently holds, at which point there will be considerably less for him to be furious about, and considerably more reason for him to simply be relieved."
She did not add what she was privately thinking, which was that Fitzwilliam Darcy's fury, however well founded, was exactly the reaction Wickham would be counting on, and that fury in a proud man was never the most useful tool against a man whose primary weapon was other people's desperate desire to protect what they loved.