I stopped, because I was shaking, and the shaking was anger, but not the righteous satisfying kind. It was the trembling, helpless kind that comes when you warn a man about a fire and he tells you to mind your fireplace while his house burns.
Mama, however, had no use for anger, the righteous or the unrighteous kind. She asked, “Charlotte, dear, what has your mother said? To whom has she spoken?”
Charlotte exhaled. “This is why I came. My mother is willing to be discreet, but her discretion comes with a price. She saw my brother John dance with Miss Darcy, and Miss Bingley was particularly complimentary about John’s qualities during the tea. Mama has conceived a hope, not unreasonable, in her view, that if the Netherfield incident is handled discreetly, a connection between John and Miss Darcy might develop. She is willing to keep her silence if the possibility remains open.”
“Good God,” Mama said.
“I know.” Charlotte’s mouth thinned. “I told her it was mercenary and inappropriate and that the Lucases did not trade in silence, and she told me that I was nine-and-twenty and unmarried and had no standing to lecture her on the management of opportunities.”
“And Mrs. Long?” I asked.
“Mrs. Long has no such incentive. She has no unmarried sons and enjoys gossip the way other women enjoy needlework. However.” Charlotte paused. “My mother convinced her. For now. She presented it as a matter of propriety. That spreading rumors about a girl of Miss Darcy’s rank and connectionswould reflect badly on the neighborhood more than on Miss Darcy, and that Lady Lucas, as wife of a knight, had an obligation to protect the standards of Hertfordshire society.”
“How noble of her,” I said.
“Lizzy.” Charlotte’s voice held a note of reprimand. “Your anger is justified. But the situation is fragile, and your anger, while excellent in private, is unhelpful in practice. The question is not whether Miss Bingley is guilty—she is, and a child of six could see the maneuvering. The question is what happens now.”
Jane had been sitting very still, her hands folded in her lap, her face the careful mask she wore when she was either thinking deeply or preventing herself from crying.
“Jane?” I prompted.
“Mr. Bingley was innocent.” She said it without inflection. “I believe him entirely.”
“I concur,” Mama concluded. “Mr. Bingley is a good young man who was placed where his sister wished him to be, and Miss Darcy is a girl who was sent to collect her own sheet music in a house where the servants could have done it for her. The guilt is not Mr. Bingley’s, and it is not Georgiana’s. If anyone in this neighborhood suggests otherwise, I shall address it personally.”
“Mama—”
“I am not finished. Elizabeth, you warned Mr. Darcy, and he did not listen. What did he say, that she was harmless?”
“Tiresome but harmless.”
“Then Mr. Darcy has learned the price of underestimating a woman whose ambition exceeds her scruples. I shall not pretend to pity him, though I do pity that child.” Mama’s jaw tightened. “Georgiana has been in that woman’s care without Elizabeth or anyone who cared about the girl, rather than her connections.”
Thewithout Elizabethhung in the room like smoke, and I felt it in my chest, the tightening that was not sorrow but something sharper—the ache of having left the very person who needed me most.
“What I know,” I said, reining myself toward the practical, “isthat Georgiana is at Netherfield with a woman who engineered a false compromise, and her brother is too proud to admit he was warned. I should never have left her there with the wolves. I should have swallowed my pride and gone back?—”
A commotion in the corridor, bangs, and hurried footsteps announced Lydia and Kitty’s eventual entrance. Hill’s exclamations and Lydia’s shrieks signaled something out of the ordinary course of Bennet bustle.
Kitty’s voice came first, high and startled. “Mama! There is someone! A girl! She is soaking wet, and she came through the garden gate. “
Mrs. Hill’s voice sounded, “Good heavens, child, you’re soaked through.”
“It’s Miss Darcy!” Lydia’s voice, considerably louder. “It’s Georgie, and she is dripping everywhere and shaking like a rabbit!”
I was moving before the sentence finished. Down the corridor, through the door to the kitchen, where Georgiana Darcy stood with her grey cloak soaked, her grey muslin clinging to her skin, mud and water pooling beneath her ruined walking boots, and her hair plastered to her face. She was coughing and trembling from both the cold and something far worse, but she stood straight and tall, shoulders back the way I had taught her to stand, and that posture nearly broke me.
“Elizabeth.”
One word. My name in her mouth, notMiss Bennet, neverMiss Bennetfrom Georgiana, alwaysElizabethbecauseElizabethwas the name of a sister, and I had told her once that sisters used Christian names, and she had taken me at my word.
“Georgiana.” I crossed the kitchen in four steps and took her by the shoulders. “You are chilled. Did you walk here? Across the fields? In this?”
“I crossed the stream.” Her teeth were chattering. “The water was higher than I expected. I gathered my skirts, and I did not look down. You told me not to look down.”
“Mrs. Hill, hot water. A bath. Immediately,” I called out while guiding her toward the kitchen hearth.
Mama took charge, seeing only the girl who needed mothering, not calculation on her brother’s income or the number behind her dowry. “Jane, fetch Lydia’s flannel nightdress. Miss Darcy looks to be her height. Lydia, go to the kitchen and tell Cook to heat broth. Kitty, towels. Mary, start the fire in the guest room. And Lizzy, the bath first. Questions afterward.”
