Chapter Four
Georgiana had grown, in the fortnight since their conversation in the music room, into a quieter observer of her brother than Darcy had entirely accustomed himself to.
She watched him now with an attentiveness that felt, at times, uncomfortably like being studied, and though he understood the impulse behind it, a girl of sixteen trying to reconcile the brother she loved with the man the servants whispered of, he found himself unequal, some mornings, to bearing the weight of her scrutiny across the breakfast table.
It was on one such morning that she set down her cup with more deliberation than the gesture required and said, "You have not spoken her name to me, Fitzwilliam.
Not once, in all this time. I have heard you call her only 'the lady,' as though naming her might do her some further harm, and I begin to think you believe it might. "
Darcy did not look up from his letters. "It might."
"Then how am I to understand any of it? You tell me you behaved unkindly to a lady you now believe you love, and that the whole of London is discussing the matter without knowing her name, and you will not tell me even that much, though I am your sister and have never in my life repeated a confidence you asked me to keep. "
He set down his pen at last, because she deserved, he thought, more honesty than he had yet given her, even if the full truth remained more than he could safely share.
"Her name is Miss Elizabeth Bennet," he said.
"She is the daughter of a gentleman in Hertfordshire, of modest fortune, and she possesses more wit and more honesty than any person of my acquaintance, myself very much included.
I tell you her name now because I trust you to guard it more carefully than I have managed to guard it myself, but I ask you, Georgiana, to speak it to no one beyond this room.
If it becomes generally known that she is the lady in question, the damage to her will be considerable, and it will fall upon her far more heavily than it falls upon me, because the world has always been readier to forgive a man his failures than a woman hers. "
Georgiana absorbed this with the particular seriousness she brought to every confidence he had ever entrusted her with. "That does not seem just."
"It is not just. It is, nonetheless, the way of things, and I have spent enough of my life benefiting from that injustice without objection that I can hardly complain of it now, when it threatens someone I have come to value more than my own comfort.
" He paused, choosing his next words with care.
"I would ask something further of you, if you are willing to hear it. "
"Anything, Fitzwilliam."
"If you should ever meet her, and I hope very much that you shall, I would ask that you judge her by what you find in her, and not by anything you have heard whispered of this business beforehand.
She deserves to be met plainly, as herself, not as the shape of a scandal that has attached itself to her without her consent. "
"I think," Georgiana said, with a small, unexpected smile, "that I should like that very much.
To meet the lady who managed to make my brother reconsider the whole of his own character.
I confess I am curious what manner of woman accomplishes such a thing, when I have watched a great many others try and fail. "
Darcy found himself, despite everything, almost smiling in return. "She would tell you it was no great accomplishment, only the ordinary business of refusing to flatter a man who required considerably less flattery than he had grown accustomed to receiving."
"I like her already," Georgiana said, and returned to her tea with the satisfied air of a girl who had, in some private accounting of her own, decided the matter settled in Elizabeth's favour before ever laying eyes on her.
The reprieve of that small domestic comfort did not survive the arrival of Fitzwilliam an hour later, whose face, upon entering the breakfast room, told Darcy the news before a single word had been spoken.
"You had better hear it from me," Fitzwilliam said, once Georgiana had been persuaded, with some reluctance, to leave them, "before you hear it from anyone with less reason to be gentle in the telling."
"Say it."
"Caroline Bingley has all but named her.
Not outright, not yet, she is too careful for that, knowing the risk of a false accusation, but she has made her suspicions plain enough to Mrs. Fenwick, and to anyone else who cared to listen at a card party two nights past, that a Miss Bennet, newly arrived from Hertfordshire and lodging with an aunt in Cheapside, was very likely the lady in question. "
Darcy felt something in his chest go entirely cold, a stillness that was not calm but its opposite, a fury so complete it had passed beyond heat into something closer to ice.
"Miss Bennet is in London."
"She is. Has been these several days, I understand, visiting her aunt and uncle. I do not know if she is yet aware of what Miss Bingley has said of her, but I should think it a matter of days, at most, before the connection is generally assumed if not confirmed."
Darcy rose from the table with a violence of motion that sent his chair scraping back across the floor, and stood a moment, hands braced against the table's edge, working to master an anger that had nowhere useful to direct itself.
"I will call on Bingley," he said, at last. "Not to threaten his sister, though God knows the temptation, but to make plain to him what her carelessness threatens, and to ask that he restrain her, if restraining her is within his power, which I confess I have begun to doubt."
"And Miss Bennet herself? Will you call on her?"
Darcy was quiet a long moment, the question sitting before him with a weight he had not expected it to carry.
He had not seen her since Hunsford. He had thought of little else in the weeks between, had composed and discarded a dozen imagined conversations in which he explained himself more fully, more gently, than he had managed in his letter, and had told himself, each time, that the imagining was indulgence rather than plan, because he had no right to seek her out again until he had become, in fact rather than intention, the man his letter had promised he was trying to be.
But she was in London now, exposed to a danger his own past conduct had made possible, and the old excuse, that he had no right to approach her, felt suddenly like cowardice dressed as propriety.
"Not yet," he said. "Not until I know what Bingley can do about his sister, and not until I have some clearer sense of how to protect her without making the very connection Caroline hopes to confirm.
But Fitzwilliam, I promise you this: I will not let her bear the whole weight of my failure alone, whatever it costs me to prevent it. "