“Miss Bennet is not an alliance. Miss Bennet is not a dowry or a connexion or a strategic acquisition of standing. Miss Bennet is a woman who tends a flame on a cliff because she was asked to tend it and because the task matters to more than herself. She does it with more competence and more courage than I ever brought to either Pemberley or the navy. If that is insufficient for a drawing room, the deficiency lies with the drawing room.”
He had said more in the last two minutes than he had said to any member of his family in five years, and it had cost him something—not composure, which held, but the careful neutrality he had maintained since entering the house. He had shown her what was underneath, and he could not take it back.
“Well,” she said. She picked up her cup. She drank. The gesture was a closing—not of the conversation but of the interrogation. What followed would be something else. “I have not heard you speak with that much conviction since you were eighteen and told your father you intended to join the navy. He could not stop you then, either. Bring her here when you are ready. When the autumn has done whatever the autumn is meant to do. Bring her here and let me form my own opinion.”
“She may not wish to come.”
“Then she is either a fool, or she has more sense than the rest of us. I suspect the latter.” Lady Matlock rose. “Georgiana is in the music room. Give her ten minutes. Then go to her. Do not expect warmth. Earn it.”
She left the room. He sat with his cold tea and the fire he had not built and the conversation he had survived and the knowledge that Lady Matlock had given him something he had not dared ask for—not approval, not permission, but the absence of prohibition, which in the Earl of Matlock’s household amounted to the same thing.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Themusicroomdoorwas closed.
He stood outside it for longer than ten minutes. He stood outside it because the girl on the other side of it was the person he had failed most completely, more than the estate, more than the tenants, more than the house—a child left with relatives at eleven because her brother could not endure the rooms she lived in, because her brother’s grief had swallowed his duty the way the sea swallows everything that is not bolted to the floor.
He knocked.
There was no answer at first. Then a faint, “Come in.”
Her voice was lower than he remembered. Of course it was. Five years. She had been a child when he left. Children’s voices change. Everything about children changes, which was precisely the point, precisely the thing he had missed.
He opened the door.
She was sitting at the pianoforte, a handsome Broadwood that caught the afternoon light from the south-facing windows.
She looked like their mother.
The resemblance struck him with a force he had not prepared for. The same dark hair, the same long, fine bones, the same quality of stillness that was not passivity but attention—a waiting that watched. She had grown tall. She wore a dress of pale blue that someone had chosen with care, and her posture at the instrument was the posture of a girl who had been well taught and who carried the teaching in her spine.
“Georgiana.”
“Brother.”
The word was correct. The word was also a wall. She used it without warmth, without coldness, with the precise neutrality of a person who has rehearsed this encounter and has decided in advance what she will and will not give.
He stood near the door, because the room was hers, and the entering of it further than she permitted would be a trespass he could not afford.
“You look well,” he said.
“I am well.”
“Our aunt tells me you have progressed considerably at the instrument.”
“I have had five years to practise.”
The sentence arrived without inflection. Just a fact—a date, a measurement, a number. But the number was the blade. Five years of scales and sonatas and études performed in rooms he was not in, for audiences that did not include him, the music unheard by the brother who should have sat in the chair by the window and listened and clapped and told her she was extraordinary.
“Yes,” he said softly. “You have.”
Her eyes were their father’s—dark, steady, entirely undecipherable until one learned the language they spoke. A language of withholding, of keeping the important thing behind the visible thing, of showing the composed surface and storing the rest where no one could reach it. He knew the language because it was his own.
“Will you play?” he asked. It was safer than asking her to speak.
She stared at him for three more seconds, exactly. Then she turned to the instrument, placed her hands, and played.
It was Mozart. The Sonata in A minor—K. 310, the one Mozart wrote after his mother’s death. She had chosen it deliberately. She must have chosen it deliberately, because no sixteen-year-old would select that piece for a reunion with an absent brother without understanding what the selection said.
