“I would never tell anyone,” Georgiana whispered.
“You must swear it. Not just to Elizabeth. To me. Because I have spent my whole life protecting this secret, and I need to know that you understand what it costs.”
“I swear it,” Georgiana said, and her voice was small but steady.
“Your brother cannot know.” Kitty’s grip on Georgiana’s hands tightened. “I know that is hard to hear. He is your brother and you love him and you do not like keeping things from him. But he cannot know. Not now. Perhaps not ever.”
“Kitty,” Elizabeth said quietly.
“No, Lizzy. She needs to hear this.” Kitty did not look away from Georgiana. “Men do not understand things like this. Even good men. Even the best of them. He would think she was ill. He would try to help, and his help would be the very thing that destroyed her. He would bring in doctors. He would tell his uncle, who is an earl and has the power to act on it. He would do it out of love, and it would ruin her, and I will not let that happen.”
Georgiana looked stricken, but she did not pull away. “You truly believe he would not accept it?”
“I believe the risk is too great to find out. We have kept this secret for twenty years. Jane knows. Papa knows. Mama knows, though she pretends she does not, because that is how Mama manages things she cannot control. Mary knows. Even Lydia knows, though Papa had to threaten her into silence. Every one of us has kept it, because the alternative is unthinkable.” Kitty’s voice softened, but only slightly. “Some families have a cousin who drinks. We have Elizabeth. We love her, and we protect her, and we do not talk about it to anyone outside the family. You are the first person outside the Bennets to ever learn of it.”
The weight of that settled over the room.
“I will tell you how we manage it,” Kitty continued, releasing Georgiana’s hands and sitting back on her heels. “If she goes still at dinner, I knock over a glass. If she starts to look at something nobody else can see, I ask a loud question about the weather. If she needs to leave a room, I invent a reason. I have been doing it since I was old enough to understand what was happening, and I am very good at it. You will need to learn to do the same.”
“She is good at it,” Elizabeth confirmed. “Better than Jane, in some ways. Jane’s instinct is to comfort. Kitty’s instinct is to distract, which is more useful in company.”
“Papa is the worst,” Kitty said, and a ghost of her usual warmth crept back. “He forgets himself and makes remarks. He once told Mr Collins that Elizabeth had a particular talent for conversing with the unseen, and Mr Collins took it as a compliment to her prayer life and talked about it for half an hour.”
Georgiana’s mouth fell open. Then she laughed, a shaky, startled sound, and Kitty allowed herself a small smile.
The room was quiet for a moment. Nana, in her chair, was watching Kitty with an expression Elizabeth had not seen on her face before. It looked remarkably like respect.
Georgiana straightened, and for a moment Elizabeth saw the steel that ran through the Darcy line, the same steel she had seen in Darcy himself when he was certain of his course. “I will not let anyone hurt you,” Georgiana said, with a ferocity that took Elizabeth by surprise. “You are my sister now. Your secrets are mine. And I will not tell my brother. I promise.”
Kitty studied her for a moment, then nodded. “Good.”
“Well,” Nana observed from her chair, in a tone of grudging satisfaction. “The girl has spine after all.”
Elizabeth did not relay this, but she smiled. Kitty caught the smile, raised an eyebrow; Elizabeth shook her head. The old language of glances that the Bennet sisters had spoken since childhood expanded, just slightly, to make room for one more.
Later, after Georgiana had gone to dress for dinner and Nana had drifted away to inspect something she considered substandard, Elizabeth sat alone in her parlour and felt the quiet settle around her like cooling water.
She had been happy. That was the unsettling thing. In these past days at Pemberley, learning the house, meeting its ghosts, finding her footing with Nana, she had begun to believe she could do this. That the secret could be carried here as it hadbeen carried at Longbourn, with care and cleverness and the right people watching her back. She had begun, without quite realising it, to relax.
Kitty’s face, white and fierce in front of Georgiana, had cured her of that.
They would call her mad. They would have her locked away.Kitty had not been exaggerating. Kitty, who knew better than anyone how close Elizabeth had come over the years; the near-misses, the moments where a wrong word or a stray glance might have unravelled everything. Kitty was afraid because Kitty understood exactly what was at stake, and hearing that fear spoken aloud, in this house, had stripped away the gentle illusion Elizabeth had been building for herself: that Pemberley might be different. That she might, here, be safe.
She was not safe. She had never been safe. She had simply been lucky, and luck was not a strategy, and the more people who knew her secret, the thinner the luck stretched.
Elizabeth pressed her hands flat on the desk and breathed, and the stone in her chest, which had lightened over these first weeks at Pemberley, settled back into its familiar weight.
Chapter Eight
Fromherparlourwindow,Elizabeth could see the rose garden, and in it, two girls on their knees in the October mud, careless of their gowns.
Georgiana had taken to the restoration project with an enthusiasm that bordered on ferocity. She had commandeered a pair of old gloves from the garden shed, tied back her hair with a ribbon that was already coming loose, and was pulling bindweed from the base of a damask rose as though it had personally offended her. Kitty worked beside her, less methodical butequally determined, her bonnet abandoned on the stone bench where Lady Margaret sat smiling at roses that were, for the first time in years, being freed from the weeds that choked them.
It had been Nana’s idea, or rather Nana’s command, which amounted to the same thing. She had taken Elizabeth, Georgiana, and Kitty to the long gallery two mornings ago and pointed at the portrait of Lady Margaret Darcy. It was a fine painting, Elizabethan in style, formal and richly coloured, and behind the seated figure the artist had rendered the rose garden in careful detail: the beds laid out in a geometric pattern, the climbing roses trained along the south wall, the stone bench positioned beneath what appeared to be an especially magnificent specimen of old damask climbing a wrought-iron arch.
“That,” Nana had said, “is how it should look. That is how it looked when Margaret planted it, and when my mother-by-law tended it, and when I kept it after her. The current state of affairs is a disgrace.”
Elizabeth had relayed this to Georgiana, who had studied the portrait with the intensity she usually reserved for difficult pieces of music, and said, with quiet certainty, “My mother loved the rose garden. Mrs Reynolds told me once that she spent whole mornings there.” She had looked at Elizabeth. “May I help?”
