On the rail itself, a thread of muslin clung to a splinter, and I recognized the weave as Georgiana’s morning dress. My sister, an earl’s granddaughter, had perched on this rough-hewn stile like a farmer’s daughter. Incredible.
Beyond, the stream glinted in the midday light, and there, pressed into the soft mud of the bank, the two sets of footprints headed toward Longbourn’s fields.
A surge of indignation and alarm rose in my chest—immediate and achingly familiar—the same protective instinct that had driven me to Ramsgate, that had birthed the programme, that governed every decision I made regarding my sister’s welfare. She was unprotected, in a house I had not inspected, with people I had not approved, and exposed to influences I could not manage.
And yet. The footprints told a story. Two girls walking side by side, close enough that their steps overlapped at the stream crossing, one guiding and one trusting. Nobody had been dragged anywhere. Nobody had been coerced. The cautious footprints had chosen each stone deliberately, and the choosing was visible in the mud.
“Darcy!” Bingley chased after me with his long strides, as if out on an excursion rather than pursuing my sister’s propriety. Any excuse that placed him in proximity to Longbourn was welcome in his mind. “Mrs. Nicholls tells me you are looking for Miss Darcy. I believe she’s gone visiting with Miss Elizabeth. Shall we ride over? Mrs. Bennet makes extraordinary biscuits.”
“This is not a social call, Bingley.”
“Assuredly not. You’re retrieving your sister from a neighbor’s field. I am merely providing moral support.” He grinned. “And perhaps paying my respects to the family. It has been several days, what with the gig and Caroline’s ankle, and I confess I have been meaning to call.”
His suggestion to take the horses was sensible, rather than two gentlemen tramping over meadow and field to appear muddied and brambled at Longbourn’s back door. En route to the stables, I scooped up Cinnamon, who permitted this liberty with the regal tolerance of a monarch being conveyed by sedan chair. She nestled into the crook of my arm, her purr vibrating against my ribs.
“You are bringing the cat?” Bingley asked.
“A lost cat provides grounds for our intrusion without the benefit of calling cards,” I explained the manner of gentry to a boy with coal dust still smudged on his cheeks. Bingley, and especially Caroline and Mrs. Hurst, had expressed the wish of their father for them to enter the gentry, or at least buy their way out from their trade background, and so, I provided whatever improvement programme I could.
The ride to Longbourn took twenty minutes, during which Bingley talked without pause about the fineness of the day, the beauty of the countryside, the kindness of Mrs. Bennet, the excellence of Hertfordshire generally and one Hertfordshire household specifically, and I sat on my horse with a cat in the crook of my arm and a green ribbon in my pocket and a speech forming in my mind that I would deliver to Elizabeth Bennet about the proper protocol for removing my sister from a house without her guardian’s knowledge.
As we approached, the strains of Haydn’s F major sonata, Number 23, floated in the air, and I recognized Georgiana’s playing as surely as a man knows his own handwriting. But this was not the Haydn I knew, technical and vacant. This Haydn possessed a warmth and a life I had never before heard in her playing—wilder with feeling occupying the space between the notes.
We dismounted, and a boy took charge of our horses, regarding Cinnamon with the ease of having witnessed this cat arrive from multiple directions on numerous occasions.
“She’ll want her dish,” the boy said, nodding at the cat. “Kitchen door’s round theside.”
Cinnamon did not wait for me to find the kitchen door. She leaped from my arms and trotted around the corner of the house because she knew exactly where she was going. I followed the cat, which meant that Fitzwilliam Darcy, master of Pemberley and grandson of an earl, entered Longbourn for the first time through the kitchen, in the wake of a cat.
The kitchen was warm and smelled of baking and something savory—rabbit, if I was not mistaken, and I was rarely mistaken about food, having employed one of the finest cooks in Derbyshire. Cinnamon crossed the flagstones and settled before a dish near the hearth. It was earthenware, glazed in a blue-brown that spoke of local craft rather than London manufacture, and scratched into the glaze in careful, deliberate letters was a single word:Cinnamon.
The letters were uneven, pressed into wet clay by a hand more accustomed to holding a pen than a potter’s tool, and the care visible in each stroke suggested that the person who had made it considered the cat worthy of a permanent place at this hearth.
Bingley, possessing the social instincts I lacked, had found the front door. I could hear his voice in the hallway—cheerful, loud, already being welcomed by a woman whose voice carried the brisk warmth of a competent hostess. I straightened my coat, brushed the cat hair from my waistcoat, and stepped from the kitchen into the corridor.
The drawing room contained more Bennets than I had believed the room could accommodate.
Georgiana sat at a pianoforte that was old and scarred and half a tone flat, beside one of Elizabeth’s sisters, Mary, if I remembered correctly. My sister’s hair was in a country plait, loose and unsophisticated, the sort of thing a milkmaid might wear. There were biscuit crumbs on her bodice and a flush in her cheeks that I had not seen since she was fourteen years old and happy.
She did not see me at first. She was counting the other girl in, “One, two, and—” and the other girl attacked the keys with the determination of a student who believed that if she played thepassage often enough, the notes would eventually surrender. Elizabeth stood at the doorway with a pensive expression, completely relaxed and at home as our gazes met—charged with a tension I was ill-equipped to analyze.
Then Georgiana looked up, and everything I had ridden here to say—every reprimand, every reminder about programmes and permissions and the protocols governing a young woman’s movements, collided with the sight of my sister’s face, which was open and bright and alive, which Elizabeth Bennet had apparently accomplished with her unusual programme.
“Fitzwilliam!” Georgiana stood, and the plait swung. “You have found us.”
Elizabeth’s gaze was neither hostile nor apologetic, but steady, measuring, the look of a woman who had calculated the risk of bringing my sister here and had decided the benefit outweighed whatever I was about to say. I held her gaze long enough to communicate that we would discuss this later, and she held mine long enough to communicate that she would win that discussion, and between us passed the sort of understanding that required no words.
“So I see.” I surveyed my sister’s glowing face and moderated my tone. “You might have left word.”
“We were walking, and the path?—”
“Paths do not make decisions, Georgiana.”
“No,” she said firmly, “I do.” And the words were so simple and so unexpected that I had no immediate reply.
Bingley crossed the room from Jane Bennet’s side to the pianoforte. “Miss Darcy, I must hear everything. Caroline tells me you have been climbing trees, assaulting ducks, and digging garlic with your bare hands—is it true? All of it?”
“Most of it.” The corners of Georgiana’s mouth lifted. “The ducks were not so much assaulted as fed.”
