PROLOGUE
July 1810
Ramsgate.
Darcy
"How could you consent to such a thing?" Fitzwilliam Darcy paced the small drawing room, his hand raking through his hair. "How could you trust him?"
He had ridden eight hours from London with his fury carefully assembled, certain at least of one satisfaction — that he would face Wickham directly and settle the matter as it deserved. He had been denied even that. Wickham was gone. How he had known to leave, Darcy could not determine. What he found instead was Mrs. Younge, Georgiana's governess, standing in the hallway entirely unrepentant. When pressed, she had not dissembled. She confirmed every suspicion Darcy possessed and informed him, without apparent regret, that Mr. Wickham had quitted Ramsgate that very morning. Darcy had dismissed her on the spot. She had left without a word of protest, which told him everything he needed to know about her complicity in the affair.
So there was only this: a small drawing room by the sea, his sister standing in the middle of it, and eight hours of anger with nowhere left to go.
She was looking at him as though she did not know whether he had come to save her or condemn her.
"Sit down," he said.
She sat. He did not.
He crossed to the window and stood with his back to her. It was a bright afternoon, indecently so. Gulls moved in slow arcs above the shore. The sea went on in every direction, pale and glittering — unbothered and boundless and of no use to him whatsoever. He could not look at it for long.
Wickham.
Darcy had known for years precisely what George Wickham was. He had grown up beside the man. Had watched his character take shape by slow degrees. Had understood, by the time they were both old enough to know better, exactly what he was capable of. And still he had not placed Georgiana beyond his reach. He had believed distance sufficient. He had believed a respectable companion sufficient. He had been wrong on both counts.
"Fitzwilliam."
Darcy turned.
Georgiana sat with her hands folded in her lap, her eyes red, her posture effortfully composed. She was fifteen years old. She looked, at this moment, considerably younger. She looked, in fact, very much as she had at their mother's funeral, standing beside him in the Pemberley chapel, not quite understanding she was permitted to cry.
The sight of her did not lessen his anger. It merely reminded him that some portion of the blame was his.
"Tell me what happened," Darcy said. "All of it."
She told him. Her voice was low and careful. She did not look away from him as she spoke. She told him how Wickham had sought her out, how his attentions had seemed at first no different from ordinary civility. How gradually it had become something else. How she had been flattered, and thenpersuaded, and by the time she understood what she had been persuaded of, it was already too late to see clearly.
"He spoke about Mama," she said at the tail end of her confession.
A coldness settled along Darcy's spine that owed nothing to the sea breeze drifting through the window. It rooted him where he stood.
"He told me I would go deaf." She did not soften it. He understood she was reporting his exact words. "He said to look at my family. That Mama had lost her hearing entirely. That our cousin Anne de Bourgh had never known a day of full health." She paused. "He said Lady Catherine had simply been the lucky one. The one who escaped it. And that luck of that kind did not pass down twice."
"He called it a curse," Darcy said quietly.
"Yes." Her hands tightened in her lap. "He said it was coming for me next. That I was nearly sixteen. That I had better make my peace with it sooner rather than later." A tear slipped down her cheek. "And then he said he had already made his peace with it. That if I accepted him, whatever happened to me, he would remain."
Darcy turned back to the window. He did not trust what his face was doing.
Of course Wickham had known. He had spent most of his boyhood at Pemberley. Had eaten at their table, ridden their horses, moved through their house as though it were his own. He had watched Lady Anne's hearing fail by degrees. Had seen what the household quietly adapted to. Had filed every detail away with those patient eyes that missed very little and forgot even less.
Darcy remembered a hot afternoon in the stable yard. He had been eleven, perhaps twelve. They were waiting for their horses. His mother came across the yard and he called out toher. She did not turn. She did not hear him. She walked on with her usual unhurried grace and nearly reached the gate before she glanced back and saw them.
Wickham had said nothing at the time. He had waited until they were riding, out beyond the park where no one could hear them. Then he said, lightly, as though remarking on the weather, that it must be rather embarrassing. Having a mother who could not hear herself being called. That people would talk. That they probably already did.
Darcy had told him to be quiet. Wickham had smiled and never raised it again directly. But the knowledge had stayed in his eyes from that day forward. Present and patient. Waiting for a use. Fifteen years he had carried it, and saved it for a fifteen-year-old girl alone by the sea.
"He said it kindly," Georgiana said. "That was the worst of it. He said only that most gentlemen would not willingly take on a lady with such a prospect. That society would not be forgiving. That I ought to understand my situation plainly." She paused. "I thought he was only telling me the truth."
