“What happened to his mother?” Elizabeth asked. “His birth mother, I mean. Martha.”
Georgiana’s face clouded. “I do not know much. Mrs. Reynolds never spoke of her, except to say that she was very young and very frightened, and that she did what she thought was best for George. She married Father’s steward—the elder Mr. Wickham—so George would have a legal father and a name. But she could not… she did not wish to raise him herself. So Mamma took him in.”
Took him in. Lady Anne had raised another woman’s child as her own. Had loved him, nursed him through fevers, called himher second son—all while knowing he was the living evidence of her husband’s infidelity.
Elizabeth thought of the journals upstairs in her bedchamber—Lady Anne’s private history, which she had discovered on her first day at Pemberley and read only in fragments. She had been looking for guidance on raising a stubborn boy, not for insight into the family she had married into. But perhaps the two were not so different.
“I can imagine,” Georgiana continued, “how George must have felt. Growing up at Pemberley, loved by Mother, treated as a brother by Fitzwilliam—and yet always knowing he was not quite legitimate. Not quite belonging. When Father died, George received his bequest, a fraction of the worth of Pemberley. Father expected him to make his own way.”
“As a second son would,” Elizabeth noted.
“Yes, but it was never enough for George.”
“And when Fitzwilliam asked him to sign a registry for a child that was not his,” Elizabeth suggested. “George saw the opportunity to…”
“I do not excuse what George did.” Georgiana’s voice cracked. “But I understand why he did it.”
Elizabeth said nothing. She was thinking of a man with sunshine in his smile, standing in a London alley, giving cheap signet rings to naïve young ladies, and of Jane’s letter.
Wickham had not signed out of brotherly affection. He had signed because Darcy paid him. And now Darcy was hunting him, preparing to demand yet another signature.
What would Wickham demand in return? What secrets might he trade for money, or for spite?
“I should go,” Elizabeth said abruptly, rising from the table. “I have… correspondence to attend to.”
Georgiana looked up, startled. “Elizabeth, are you well? You have gone quite pale.”
“Perfectly well.” The lie came easily. “I simply need some time alone to think.”
She did not wait for a response, but gathered her skirts and fled—there was no other word for it—back up the stairs, past the family portraits and the silent servants, until she reached the sanctuary of her bedchamber and closed the door firmly behind her.
The room was hushed, the fire reduced to embers. Elizabeth leaned against the door and drew breath after breath, until the panic ebbed to a tolerable misery.Wickham is coming.Soon.
He would be brought to Pemberley to sign his confession, and he would see Elizabeth, the woman from Cheapside who had let him kiss her in an alley and wondered, for weeks afterward, whether a kiss could make her with child.
And what might he do with such knowledge? Barter it for coin, wield it against Darcy, or simply savor the power he held over the new Mrs. Darcy—now mistress of the strongroom and the silver vault.
Elizabeth crossed to her dressing table and sat heavily on the bench, her legs unsteady beneath her. She reached for Lady Anne’s journals, held on the shelf above.
She searched the spines for the proper year—1784—and turned the pages until she found the entry for his christening.
He is a squalling, red-faced creature who wanted nothing but milk and comfort and had no notion that his very existence was a scandal. He will always bear the shame of my husband’s indiscretion, but I cannot turn him away. My husband covered it well, forcing his mother to marry his elderly steward to give him a name and a place. And I have loved him since the day Martha placed him in my arms. I chose to call him a son. The world sees only birth and inheritance, and no amount of maternal devotion can change what the law declares him to be. But I wish I could make him understand that the love I bearhim is not obligation—it is as fierce and whole as any I feel for Fitzwilliam. A mother’s love is not a ledger—that there is no finite supply to be divided, no portion that diminishes when shared.
Elizabeth closed her eyes, grasping at the pain in Lady Anne’s voice. George was younger than Fitzwilliam. The betrayal came after their marriage, and yet, her heart was large enough.
She reached for a later volume, dated from the years when both boys were older. When the fault lines between them might have begun to show.
George asked again why he could not go to Cambridge with Fitzwilliam. I explained, as gently as I could, that the circumstances are different—that Fitzwilliam is the heir and must be educated accordingly, while George’s path lies elsewhere. He listened politely and said nothing improper, but I saw his eyes, and they held a question I could not answer: Why am I less?
He is not less. Although the world sees him so. Without a birthright, he has subsisted on charm, without an anchor of faith or the assurance of his place in the world. He takes after his birth mother—a restlessness that reaches too high. My husband dotes on him, and that makes it difficult, as he is forever resentful of Fitzwilliam, who cannot quite believe in a love he did not earn.
Elizabeth read this entry a second time. Was Lady Anne referring to Wickham or Darcy, who did not believe in a love he did not earn?
Both had been boys once. Both were raised at Pemberley to be gentlemen. One was the heir, made responsible for the Darcy name, the legacy, and all that he was entitled to. The other was raised by a woman who was not his mother, in a house that was not quite his home. He had watched Fitzwilliam ride offto Cambridge while he remained behind, and wondered why he was less.
Had this made a boy of charm into a man who jilted innocents, signed false registries, and laughed at debts?
Elizabeth could not say. Yet she suspected the answer mattered—that to comprehend Wickham might be the only way to weather what was to come.
