Page 29 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

She also knew, from twenty years of watching her mother fall out with Mrs Hill, that a new mistress who came in and turned everything upside down to prove she could would have a miserable house and deserve it.

"Mrs Dawes," she said, "I will be honest with you, because I think you would find me out in a week if I were not. I have never run a house like this. I do not know how. I should very much like you to teach me."

The housekeeper's shrewd eyes went very still.

"I do not mean to change anything that works," Elizabeth went on. "From what I have seen, that is everything. I should like to learn how it all goes, and then, when I know enough not to be foolish, I may have a few thoughts. And I should like you to tell me frankly, always, when I am being foolish. My husband tells me you have never been afraid of him. I hope you will not be afraid of me."

There was a long pause. Then Mrs Dawes unhooked the great ring of keys from her waist, and weighed it in her hand a moment, and held it out.

"The late mistress used to say much the same, madam," she said, "when she first came here as a bride. She was nineteen. I was a kitchen maid." Her voice was quite steady, but her eyes were bright. "She would have liked you. I can tell you that for nothing."

Elizabeth took the keys. They were heavy and cold and she had no idea which one opened anything. She did not care. She felt as though she had been handed a crown.

They spent two hours over the books. By the end of it Elizabeth's head was spinning with the price of sea-coal and the bad habits of the fishmonger in Brook Street, and she and Mrs Dawes had discovered a shared contempt for waste and a shared weakness for Bath buns, and she thought they would do very well.

In the afternoon, she went to find Georgiana.

She found her, as she had expected, in the music room at the back of the house, sitting at the great pianoforte with her hands in her lap, not playing. The March light came in grey through the tall windows and made her look very young and very alone.

"Will you play me the sonata?" said Elizabeth from the doorway. "The one you played at Longbourn?"

Georgiana jumped, and flushed, and began at once to apologise, and then to play, and then stopped after twelve bars and put her hands over her face.

"I cannot," she said. "I am sorry. I have not been able to play properly for months. Not since—" She stopped.

Elizabeth came and sat down beside her on the long stool, close enough that their shoulders touched, and waited.

"Aunt Matlock says I am to be presented at the April Drawing Room," said Georgiana at last, into her hands. "At court. In front of the Queen. And then there will be balls, and I shall have to dance with strangers, and talk to them, and they will all look at me and say, that is Miss Darcy, with thirty thousand pounds. And I shall think, every single time, that one of them might be—" She could not finish.

"Might be another Mr Wickham," said Elizabeth gently.

Georgiana nodded without lifting her head.

"Then you shall have me beside you," said Elizabeth, "at every ball, every single one, and I shall look at every man who asks you to dance, and I shall tell you afterwards exactly what I think of him. I was very quick about Mr Wickham, you know. I knew him for a liar in ten minutes."

Georgiana looked up, startled, with wet eyes. "Did you?"

"I did. I do not say it to boast. I say it because you need not be afraid of being alone. You will not be alone. Not ever again. That is what sisters are for."

Georgiana stared at her. Then, slowly, she leant her head against Elizabeth's shoulder, and stayed there, and Elizabeth put an arm round her and let her cry a little.

After a while, Georgiana said, in a small damp voice, "Everyone always thought I would have a different sister, you know. Aunt Matlock thought so. Lady Theodosia is her goddaughter. She is very beautiful and very kind and she was always at Matlock House. Everybody said Fitzwilliam would marry her in the end, and I should have her for a sister." She sniffed. "I liked her very much. But I think I like you better."

"Lady Theodosia," said Elizabeth thoughtfully. "Did your brother like her?"

"Oh, he never noticed her at all. He never noticed anybody. That was why everybody was so astonished about you." Georgiana sat up, and wiped her eyes, and for the first time since Elizabeth had come into the room, she smiled. "Shall I try the sonata again? I think I could, now."

She played it all the way through. She was not perfect. But she did not stop.

#

Darcy came home from his man of business at six, cold and tired and in a bad temper about a lease in Derbyshire, and heard the pianoforte from the hall.

He stood still at the foot of the stairs with his hat in his hand and listened. It was the sonata. Georgiana's sonata, the one she had been failing to play since the summer. She was playing it now, all the way through, not perfectly, but with a kind of shy steady courage that he had not heard in her playing for a very long time. When it ended, he heard Elizabeth's voice say something, and his sister laugh.

Pearce took his hat. Darcy did not notice him do it.

He had been afraid, a little, of this. He had not admitted it to anyone, least of all to himself. He had wanted so badly for them to love each other, his wife and his sister, the two people in the world he would have died for, that he had not dared to hope it would happen so easily. And it had not been easy. He had seen Georgiana's white face at Longbourn, and he knew what it had cost Elizabeth to be so patient, so gentle, so endlessly careful with a girl who flinched at a kind word. She had simply done it anyway, as she did everything, without fuss, and made it look like nothing.