Chapter 17
Taught to Hope
There was nothing more to be said on the matter that was not either awkward or painful and thus, when a knock on the door interrupted the exchange, neither man was disappointed. Fitzwilliam looked at it expectantly. Darcy looked at Fitzwilliam and waited for him to notice, raising an eyebrow when he eventually turned a puzzled expression his way.
“Oh, yes! Forgive me, I quite forgot!” On Darcy’s behalf, Fitzwilliam barked, “Come!”
The door inched open and around it peered such a heartwarming sight as cheered Darcy considerably. “Georgiana!”
His sister opened the door fully and came in, though his muteness evidently disturbed her, for she cast an anxious glance at Fitzwilliam rather than reply to him.
“It is well, Georgiana,” her cousin assured her. “Your brother has not yet recovered his voice, but he is much improved.”
Darcy held out his arm and gestured for her to come to him, which she did, whilst simultaneously beginning to weep.He put one arm about her and cradled her head against his shoulder. With his free hand, he scooped up his notes from his nightstand and held them out for Fitzwilliam to dispose of. There was no need for Georgiana to learn that her misadventures had been disclosed to anyone.
“We were so worried!” his sister sobbed. “Morby told us you were not an hour behind him when he set out.”
“This is true, he did,” Fitzwilliam said with a cynical tone. “And had you stayed on the Great North Road, you would have had no trouble, for they had men working to keep it clear for the stagecoaches all week. You gave us a rum chase searching for you in every ditch between here and Cooper’s Corner. We never thought to look for you along Ermine Street. Indeed, there was no plausible reason for you to go that way.”
Darcy grimaced apologetically at his cousin, then gently moved his sister away from his shoulder and mouthed an apology to her. She squinted at his lips, and he did his best to conceal his exasperation that even such a simple phrase should be incomprehensible. “Sorry,” he tried again.
“Oh, you do not need to apologise. I am only relieved you are home and well. You cannot imagine our relief when we received your letter. Though it was tempered by Miss Bennet’s account of your condition.”
He frowned at her in query and, when she did not take his cue, at his cousin.
“Miss Bennet added her own note to yours,” Fitzwilliam explained. “She felt you had not done justice to the severity of your injury and urged us to do all we could to reach you with haste.”
Darcy smiled, recalling wistfully Elizabeth’s teasing while they composed his letter together and loving her all the more for not concerning him with her clandestine plea for urgency. “And still you mistrusted her?” he mouthed.
Fitzwilliam peered closely at him, muttering, “Still…mistrust…still I mistrusted her? Of course! More so, after that, for you would be no good to a self-seeker dead, would you!”
Georgiana gasped loudly. “Miss Bennet would take advantage of you? That cannot be!”
Darcy snarled in vexation at his cousin and twisted to the nightstand to dash off a few lines on a new sheet of paper.
Miss Bennet absolutely didnotattempt to exploit me.
To ease Georgiana’s mind, and in no way to exculpate anybody else, he added,
It is only that none of our family was acquainted with her. Prudence demanded that they were wary.
He passed the note to his sister.
“They ought to have asked me,” she said upon reading it. “I could have told them of the favourable reports you gave her in your letters to me from Netherfield last autumn. It is the same Miss Bennet, is it not? It was quite near her home in Hertfordshire that the accident happened.”
Darcy pretended not to notice the way Fitzwilliam was looking at him, and mouthed, “Yes, somewhere near there.”
“And she was so kind to me. I could never believe she would take advantage of anybody.”
The incongruity of such a remark did not go unnoticed by either gentleman, and while Fitzwilliam frowned over it, Darcy wrote,
When has Miss Bennet had the opportunity to be kind to you?
“The night you were brought home. You looked so very ill, I thought you must be about to die, but everybody was running about, shouting, and I had no idea what was happening. I do not blame anybody for attending to you—I should have been dismayed had they not, only I was very frightened. And Miss Bennet comforted me.”
“She is very caring,” he mouthed.“I am glad you liked her.”
Georgiana shook her head, obviously unable to understand him, and continued as though he had not spoken. “She assured me that you were not going to die.”
