I did not pursue it. Some doors are not opened by pressure but by patience, and Georgiana had just offered me more than she had anyone in months, and I would not damage this confidence by demanding more.
“Shall we continue our walk?” I said instead, standing and stepping down from the stile. I extended my hand, and she took it, trusting.
We followed the orchard wall toward the western direction, and I purposely took a path toward the boundary stream, because even though Darcy had promised to fix the drainage, I needed the evidence of my own eyes. And indeed, as we strode down the western fields, we found three men with shovels filling the channel that would have directed the water toward Longbourn’s fields. The earth was being packed back into the trench, the gradient erased, and a new channel was being cut, exactly as Darcy had promised.
He had kept his word, riding out this very morning before I had even stirred from my slumber to oversee the correction.
“Elizabeth?” Georgiana had begun calling me Elizabeth in the orchard as though testing whether the name would hold. “The stream there—that is the boundary?”
“Yes, it marks the division between Netherfield’s grounds and Longbourn’s land.”
“My brother redirected the channel,” she noted. “He always keeps his word.”
“Like an owl? Who… Whoo.”
“Never forgets?” she finished, a smile tugging at her lips. “No, like an owl who invariably does what is right.”
I tucked the characterization away for future contemplation.While Bingley’s smiles might be insincere, Darcy’s would be genuine, which could explain their rarity.
“We are rather close to my home,” I said, aiming for casual. “Should you like to visit? My mother would be delighted to receive you.”
Georgiana fell silent. I could see her turning it over, weighing the propriety of arriving unannounced, the absence of her brother’s permission, and the fact that Caroline would never walk through a field to visit a family she considered beneath her notice.
“My mother’s biscuits are renowned throughout the county,” I added, which was no exaggeration—Mama’s biscuits were legendary in the county—and was also not an invitation but a piece of information placed in the path of a girl deciding whether to step beyond the boundary she had been taught to respect.
“I should like that very much,” she said finally, making her choice, “to see where you come from.”
We hitched up our skirts, and when we approached the stepping stones, Georgiana hesitated. I stepped across, urging her not to look down, but at her destination, and she haltingly picked her way across, looking proud when she accomplished the crossing. And then, we walked through Papa’s lower fields and up through the kitchen garden where the last runner beans dangled from their poles, and Mama’s herbs grew in tidy, domestic rows.
Georgiana slowed. She looked at Longbourn the way I imagine a traveller studies a foreign country—not with disdain, but with the thoughtful attention of someone who understands that she is seeing something private and important and does not wish to see it wrong.
“It is smaller than I imagined,” she said.
“It is exactly the right size. For a family of seven and more love than the walls can reasonably contain.”
I was about to suggest we enter through the kitchen—because the kitchen was my domain, and I wanted Georgiana to see Longbourn the way I saw it, from the inside out—whenthe back door opened, and my mother stepped into the garden with a basket of shelled walnuts.
“Elizabeth.” She set the basket on the garden table, wiped her hands on her apron, and turned the full warmth of her attention on the girl standing behind me with apple juice on her chin and uncertainty in her eyes. “And this must be Miss Darcy.”
I introduced them, and Mama smiled, warm and measuring, as she relieved us of our baskets. “Do come in, child. You look as though you could benefit from a cup of tea and a biscuit, and I have just this moment taken a batch from the oven.”
Georgiana looked to me for reassurance. I nodded, encouraging, and as we stepped through the doorway, Mama murmured so softly that only I could hear, “Well played, Lizzy. Well played indeed.”
