The weight of her attention on me, with that bright smile, squeezed my breath from my chest, and I raised the newspaper higher to sequester myself behind it. The report of a man hanged at Newgate wasn’t usually something I would linger on, but I read each word intently just to focus on something other than the freckles across Kitty’s nose.
“Charlotte writes from Hunsford,” Elizabeth said.
When I peeked over the top of the paper, I found her reading a letter of her own. Charlotte was one of the people who wrote to Elizabeth the most, a friend from when she’d lived in Meryton who had married the Bennets’ reportedly rather trying cousin.
“How is she?” Kitty asked, genuine interest in her voice and eyes.
As if she could sense me looking, she turned back to me. I ducked behind the paper again, my cheeks burning like I’d been caught doing something wrong.
“She’s with child again,” Elizabeth said. “I’m not sure staying at home is doing her much good. I ought to go and visit her.”
From what I knew of Charlotte Collins, she lived far too near my aunt for me to voluntarily offer to accompany Elizabeth as I otherwise might. Journeying close to Rosings seemed too dangerous a trip if I wanted to return home unmarried.
“Is there anything of interest to report?” Darcy asked me, prompting me to lower the paper. This felt familiar, our usual breakfast routine of swapping opinions about the military’s actions on the Continent or the latest law to be passed into effect.
“Debates over tax increases in Parliament,” I summarised, knowing Darcy cared little for the gossip columns on the actions of the Prince Regent.
He sighed. “They might as well reprint the same article every day.”
“Can I see the newspaper, when you’ve finished with it?” Kitty asked.
I blinked at her, surprised. She hadn’t struck me as the kind of person who would be interested in politics. I handed over the paper, unable to stop myself from watching her as she turned to the ship logs and scanned down the reports of what vessels were arriving into and leaving from the ports.If she was looking for something in particular, she didn’t seem to find it, but she lingered over each entry. Her fingertip picked up a dark smudge as she skimmed it over the text.
Once Elizabeth had refolded her letter from Charlotte and returned her attention to the table, Kitty passed the newspaper back to Darcy and started up another conversation with her sister. There appeared to be a lot of gossip to catch Kitty up on, with endless tales of betrothals or babies from within the walls of the estate and amongst the tenants of its lands. She surprised me by taking a genuine interest, recognising names from previous trips and making enquiries of her own after those she’d befriended.
She expressed joy at the good news and sorrow at the bad, her compassion evident. It was strange to think she had connections to Pemberley that I knew nothing about, and it unsettled me to see her fit so easily into the picture. This Kitty Bennet was not the one from Elizabeth’s stories of her two youngest sisters, but I liked her all the better for it.
The deeper into the gossip the two Bennet sisters delved, the less respectable the subject matter became. It was impossible to be certain of the veracity of a tale so much retold that no one could remember the original teller, so I trusted the stories no more than I trusted the pages of my novels. That did not, however, mean they weren’t just as enthralling, and I found myself leaning closer over the table to listen in.
Darcy tolerated local gossip more than he actively participated in it, and I never quite felt qualified to join in, with nothing to contribute myself, so it was usually an uncommonactivity. But knowing her new audience well, Elizabeth spun a more lurid tale. So divorced from its source that it came without names, she launched into the story of a local family suffering from the scandal of their youngest son, who ought to have been courting respectable ladies, caught with a servant girl from the kitchens.
It was the kind of story that probably wasn’t true. I suspected perhaps that the anonymity was why she chose it, with no one to actually be hurt by its telling. There were no details, no recognisable figures, no known consequences. It could have happened in any town from Land’s End to Gretna Green. Yet I still felt my face burn.
The way Elizabeth told it, how the clandestine couple had been caught trying to steal some time alone, it was all too familiar. There were several key differences, of course, but the room they had thought locked and the bursting in of someone who was never meant to see… I tried not to make connections to what remained the most terrifying moment of my life. The squeak of a door hinge and the sadistic tutting of someone who knew the power of the information they’d just gained—it still haunted my nightmares. I’d sworn to forget the whole thing, even if it meant brushing the good aside with the bad, the two inextricable.
But did anyone ever truly forget their first love?
My brother professed he had married his, although I questioned what he’d been doing with his life to have gotten to the age of eight and twenty and not found himself drawn to a woman. Elizabeth had likewise confided in me Darcy wasthe first man she’d truly loved, but to say otherwise would be too improper to consider. I could not have been the only person to have felt the clench of my heart before I was even truly supposed to be seeking a partner.
It had happened so easily and so quickly that I’d wondered if I was mistaking one feeling for another, but it was not something I could speak to Elizabeth about, as much as I’d come to trust her. Not when the object of my heart’s desires had been my best friend and a fellow student of my governess. Well-behaved young ladies did not fall in love with other girls. That particular rule wasn’t in the etiquette guides, but I daresay only because it was such a scandalous thought to begin with that there was no need to even suggest otherwise.
My head found itself in such a spiral at Elizabeth’s story that I didn’t notice I’d stopped eating and was staring at my hands in my lap. My blush had spread across my cheeks and down my neck, burning a gentle heat at the memory of soft fingers that had once, and only once, traced the same path.
“Mrs. Darcy, I fear your sense of impropriety is scandalising my sister,” Darcy said, giving Elizabeth a warning look as he misunderstood the source of my emotions.
Elizabeth just laughed. “Oh, Georgiana doesn’t mind, do you?”
In truth, it gave me a thrill to be included, to be treated like another of Elizabeth’s sisters rather than a child. There was simply no question of me admitting the reason for my blush, but I didn’t want the present company to believe me so naive that one story of misplaced affection could unsettle me.
“Not at all,” I promised, trying my best at a look that read unruffled.
Elizabeth’s resulting smile was directed at my brother, self-satisfied and victorious. More a smirk than anything else. But Kitty’s look was reserved for me, and she beamed. Her surprise was painfully evident, but I had given her little reason to think me anything other than an innocent little mouse of a thing who hid from company and never had anything to say. I could not be blamed that it was always far more interesting to listen.
Perhaps it was simply the way Kitty’s grin lit up her face, unabashed and unrestrained, or maybe the intrigue in her eye as she looked at me—I couldn’t be sure—but it pulled at something in my stomach. A tug that entreated me to follow after it, after Kitty, to see where it led.
It was a feeling I knew all too well, and one I swore I would not give in to again.
Darcy disappeared to his office and his financial ledgers to ensure the estate kept running as it should, but Elizabeth, Kitty, and I retired from breakfast to the front parlour to make the most of the morning’s light. I had unearthed a book from the sofa cushions, settling in to continue the tale, when the footman appeared in the doorway.
