Chapter 18
Elizabeth Bennet
Lady Catherine had been very gracious in permitting Elizabeth to walk freely in the Rosings grounds whenever she wished.
Elizabeth thought about this every morning when she ducked through the rose arch, with the enjoyment she took in things that were both true and absurd at the same time.
As though the grounds required it. As though the hawthorn were waiting on Lady Catherine’s approval before it bloomed.
But the condescension had been extended with great magnanimity, and Elizabeth availed herself of it often.
The rose trellis was her favourite discovery in Kent.
It occupied a corner of the grounds where the formal garden gave up trying and the old climbing roses had been left to make their own arrangements for so long that they had created a proper room beneath them.
Cool in the mornings, deeply fragrant, and wonderfully enclosed and private.
There was a stone bench worn smooth by long use, and a view through the arch of roses toward the lower path.
On a fine morning with a good book, it was very nearly perfect.
She ducked under the arch and stopped short, for Georgiana Darcy was already there.
She was sitting very still with her hands folded in her lap, and Elizabeth could see at a glance that she had been crying.
Her eyes were red, and her face had the blankness of someone working very hard to look as though nothing was wrong, which had the usual effect of making everything more obvious rather than less.
When she saw Elizabeth, she tried to compose herself. “Miss Bennet.” Her voice held, but only just. “I did not think anyone came here in the mornings.”
“I am so sorry,” Elizabeth said, taking a step back toward the arch. “I shall leave you. I can read anywhere.”
“Please do not.” Georgiana moved along the bench, making room. “I was only sitting, and I should like some company.”
Elizabeth sat down beside her and set her book in her lap without opening it. She looked at the roses rather than at Georgiana, giving her a moment to let the quiet settle.
“You do not have to tell me anything,” she said after a little while. “But sometimes a thing is easier when you say it to someone else. Or so it seems to me. I am a very poor gossip, if that is useful to know.”
Georgiana was quiet. The bees moved through the roses. Beyond the garden wall, a bird called in the hedgerow and then went still. “I was reading a story,” Georgiana said at last, although there was no book anywhere in evidence. “About a foolish girl.”
“What did she do?”
“She allowed a wicked man to convince her that she was in love with him.” Her voice was carefully even. “She nearly eloped with him. If her brother had not come to visit her quite unexpectedly, just days before they were to go, she would have done it. She would have ruined herself.”
“I am glad the brother came in time,” Elizabeth said softly. “I hope he was not too angry with her.”
Georgiana turned toward her, and the evenness dropped entirely.
What came through instead was much more unguarded.
“He was not angry at all,” she said. “Not for one moment. He was so kind to her. She had done the most foolish thing she possibly could, and he never made her feel it, not once. He only thought about her and what she needed and what would help her.” She stopped, her hands pressing together in her lap.
“I do not know what the heroine would have done without him. I think she would have been quite lost.”
“He sounds like an extraordinary brother,” Elizabeth said.
“He is.” Georgiana’s voice was soft and certain. “The very best. I do not believe anyone loves his sister more entirely than he does.”
She said it with such simple conviction that Elizabeth felt the truth of it settle as an absolute fact. “Then the story does not sound so very dreadful to me,” Elizabeth said gently. “In fact, it sounds as though it has a happy ending. The heroine was saved, and her brother proved everything kind.”
Georgiana said nothing.
“Is that not so?” Elizabeth said gently.
“I suppose it is.” Georgiana looked down at her hands. “But I do not see how the heroine in my story can forgive herself. She knew this man. She had known him for years. She ought to have seen what he was long before it came to that.”
Elizabeth regarded her seriously. “Was she a grown woman, then? Someone with a great deal of experience of the world, who had met all sorts of people and knew how to read them?”
The faintest trace of a smile crossed Georgiana’s face, unhappy but real. “No. She was only a stupid girl of sixteen.”
“Then I think you are being very hard on her,” Elizabeth said.
“Sixteen years old and taken in by a man who had known her since she was a child and who understood exactly how to manipulate her. That is not stupidity. That is being young and trusting, and meeting someone who made a deliberate practice of exploiting both those things.” She paused.
“The fault belongs entirely to the villain, as far as I am concerned. Not a particle of it belongs to the girl.”
“He was dreadful,” Georgiana said, her voice low and suddenly fierce. “I shall never forgive George Wickham.”
The name landed between them like something dropped from a great height.
Elizabeth went very still. “I beg your pardon?”
Georgiana closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, her expression had changed. The embarrassment was there, but underneath it something that looked very much like relief.
“I knew I could not keep it up,” she said, in a different, quieter voice. “I never can. My brother always knows too, the moment I try.” She looked at Elizabeth directly. “But likely you knew from the beginning. I hope you do not think too ill of me, Miss Bennet.”
“I do not think ill of you in any degree,” Elizabeth said simply. It was not a kindness, for it was only the truth. “Not the smallest amount.”
She watched Georgiana’s shoulders come down with a long, slow release, and she felt, somewhere underneath the calm she was maintaining, a surge of anger toward George Wickham that she set carefully to one side. There would be time for that.
Her mind was working. George Wickham. The man who had sat beside her in Meryton and told her about Fitzwilliam Darcy with the patient dignity of someone who has been gravely wronged and is too decent to dwell on it.
The man she had believed without one careful question.
Whose account she had been carrying for months like established fact, even as increasing knowledge of Mr Darcy made her begin to doubt.
She kept her expression steady. “Miss Darcy,” she said, after a moment, “I know something about a quarrel between your brother and Mr Wickham. Something to do with a living, and money. Last winter, Mr Wickham told me his version of what had passed between them.” She chose her words carefully.
“I have wondered, since coming to Kent, whether there was more to the story than what he chose to tell me.”
Georgiana looked at her for a long moment. Elizabeth thought she understood precisely what was being asked, and why. “Yes,” she said. “I imagine there is a great deal more.”
She told the story plainly, which surprised Elizabeth. There was a steadiness in Georgiana when she spoke of her brother that had nothing shy or tentative about it. She had clearly gone over the facts many times and had them in order.
Mr Wickham had grown up at Pemberley. The late Mr Darcy had been genuinely fond of him, had paid for his education, had always hoped he would enter the church, and had set aside the living at Kympton with that intention. All this, Elizabeth already knew.
But when the question of the living arose after old Mr Darcy’s death, Mr Wickham had told the new master of Pemberley plainly that he had no wish to take orders.
He wanted to read the law instead. He would prefer to have the value of the living as soon as possible, in pounds sterling, rather than wait for a living in a profession he preferred not to enter.
“How much?” Elizabeth asked.
“Three thousand pounds.”
Elizabeth heard herself make a small, involuntary sound. Three thousand pounds. For a living not yet even vacant.
“He signed an agreement with my brother,” Georgiana continued.
“Everything was put in writing properly. He took the three thousand pounds, and the living was promised to someone else, and that was understood to settle the matter completely.” She paused.
“He spent it all. I do not know precisely how, but within a few years every penny was gone. And when the parson at Kympton died, and the living fell vacant, he wrote to my brother.”
Elizabeth stared. “Three thousand pounds gone in only a few years?”
“He said he had thought it over and changed his mind. He would enter the church after all, if the living were presented to him now.”
Elizabeth stared at the roses. “He spent three thousand pounds,” she said slowly, “and then asked for the living on top of it.”
“Yes.”
“Your brother refused.”
“He had to. The living had already been promised to another man, and he had paid Mr Wickham three thousand pounds so that it could be.” Georgiana’s voice was steady, but her hands had tightened. “Mr Wickham was furious. He blamed my brother entirely.”
A silence opened between them. In it, Elizabeth was quietly reassembling everything she thought she had known.
“Miss Darcy,” she said at last. “Do you think that had anything to do with the story you told me? With what he tried to do to you?”
Georgiana looked out through the arch at the lower path for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice was quiet and completely controlled, the control of someone who has thought about a thing until it had lost some part of its power to devastate.
“I think it had a great deal to do with it,” she said.
“Mostly he wanted my fortune. Thirty thousand pounds is thirty thousand pounds, and I do not think that ever stopped being the main consideration.” She said it with the flatness of a fact she had long since accepted.
“But some part of it was about my brother. He wanted to injure him, and I was the way to do it. Hurt Fitzwilliam through his sister, and get thirty thousand pounds at the same time.” She looked at her hands.
“I was never part of the consideration. He did not love me. I understand that now. I do not think he even liked me. He simply knew what it would do.”
Her eyes had filled again. She pressed her lips together and fell silent, trying to blink away the tears.
Elizabeth reached over and took her hand.
She did not say anything immediately. There was nothing that would help in the immediate moment, and she knew better than to rush at it.
After a long moment, she took a deep breath and said, “I am deeply angry on your behalf. He is a dreadful man, and everything that happened was his doing. The fault belongs to him alone. Not to you. Not any part of it.”
Georgiana turned her hand over and held on briefly. “My brother says exactly the same.”
“Your brother is right.”
“Are you worried?” Georgiana asked her after a time. “You mentioned that your family is acquainted with Mr Wickham. Please, you must not use my name, but I should understand if you wished to warn your sisters.”
Elizabeth shook her head. “I promise you I will protect your secret. For now, I cannot think it necessary to warn my sisters. You see, we have no fortune to speak of. There would be nothing in it for him.” She laughed a little.
“At least there is something to be glad of in having a dowry of only a thousand pounds!”
Georgiana laughed with her. When they had quieted, she turned to Elizabeth. “Miss Bennet, you know what I have never told anyone other than my guardians. And I like you so very much! Might you call me Georgiana?”
“I should like nothing better, and you must call me Elizabeth.”
It was remarkably pleasant to sit quietly under the arbour with a friend.
The roses nodded in the light breeze. The bees went about their work.
Slowly, by degrees, Georgiana began to look more like herself, the weight still present but carried differently, the way things shift when they have been shared with someone else.
Sitting side by side on the worn stone bench, they talked about easier things.
About Pemberley in the summer, about Mrs Annesley’s visit to her niece and her anticipated return.
About a piece of music Georgiana had been working on for weeks.
About novels, this time real ones. All the while, the morning light moved through the arch of roses, and the garden went peacefully about its business around them.
Elizabeth walked back to the parsonage afterward with a great deal turning over in her mind.
She had believed Wickham without question, and she knew why.
She had believed him because he was charming and because his story had made a very neat picture out of things she had already decided.
She had taken the word of a stranger and believed what he told her about the character of another man, because the result told her what she had wanted to hear.
That was not good judgment. It was bad judgment dressed up to look like good judgment, and she was heartily ashamed of it.
She thought about Mr Darcy. The three thousand pounds given in good faith and spent heedlessly by a wastrel.
The living refused because there was no living left to give.
The years of Wickham’s grievance, carefully maintained and retold, that were Wickham’s own invention and nobody else’s.
She thought about the morning lane and the way Mr Darcy listened and the thing she had seen in his face when he watched Georgiana laugh at something in the hedgerow.
She liked him. She had been telling herself the feeling was confusion, uncertainty, the natural complexity of a man who was difficult to read. It was none of those things. She knew exactly what it was. She had known for some time and had been refusing to look at it directly.
Elizabeth pushed open the parsonage gate.
Charlotte was inside at her work. She looked up when Elizabeth came in, studied her face for a moment with that careful attention she had, and said nothing, which was a considerably mercy.
Elizabeth sat down. She picked up her book. She read the same page three times and took none of it in.
The revelations confirmed everything she had begun to believe of him during an abrupt carriage ride to London, and had deepened during walks and conversations and quiet, unhurried mornings on a country lane.
It made her like him, she thought, considerably more than was wise.