Page 58 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

"Georgiana is not at home, aunt," said Darcy. "To anyone. Pearce, tell her ladyship that my sister is resting, on the doctor's orders, and can see no one. Thank her for her concern."

Pearce went out. Through the half-open door Darcy heard, very faintly, a soft voice in the hall: distressed, beautiful, pleading. Then the front door closing.

He looked up, and found his aunt Matlock staring at him with an expression of pure bewilderment, and something beginning to harden behind it that was very like offence.

And behind her, in the doorway, Lady Catherine de Bourgh was looking at him too. She said nothing. But her grey eyes had narrowed to slits, and he saw her lips move, very slightly, as though she were forming a single word, and then putting it away.

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Georgiana would not eat. She would not dress. She would not see her aunt Matlock, nor Anne, nor Lady Catherine, who came to the door at noon and stood outside it for some time and then went away again without knocking. She lay curled on her bed in her petticoat with her face to the wall and the curtains drawn, and every now and then her shoulders shook, and she made no sound.

Elizabeth stayed with her.

She did not talk much at first. She sat in the chair by the bed, and held Georgiana's hand when it was held out to her, and let it go when it was drawn away. She had Hannah bring up tea, and bread and butter, and a basin of warm water and a cloth, and washed the tear-stains from Georgiana's face as her mother had never once done for her, and brushed out the fair hair that had been half pinned since six o'clock that morning. She sent Darcy away, gently, when he came to the door for the fourth time. She let the afternoon go by, and the light fade, and the fire burn down, and did not light the candles.

It was full dark before Georgiana spoke.

"The Drawing Room," she said, into the pillow. "I cannot. Elizabeth. I cannot go. Everybody will look at me and think of it. The Queen will look at me and think of it."

"Then you shall not go."

"Aunt Catherine will be angry. She says I must."

"Your brother says you shall do as you choose, and not one word to be said to you about it by anybody," said Elizabeth. "He told them both so this morning, in the study, in a voice that made your aunt Catherine sit down. I heard it from Pearce. The whole servants' hall heard it."

Georgiana turned over, very slowly, and looked at her in the dark.

"He did?"

"He did."

A long silence. Then, in a tiny voice: "He must despise me now. Worse than before."

Elizabeth was quiet for a moment. She thought of her husband on his knees on the blue carpet at dawn, holding his sister against him, saying no, sweetheart, no in a voice she had never heard from him. She thought of what she had been going to say, and decided to say something else instead.

"Shall I tell you something," she said, "that I have never told anybody? Not even Jane?"

Georgiana's eyes were very wide in the dark.

"When I was twelve," said Elizabeth, "Mary was ten, and she had just begun to play the pianoforte. She was very bad at it. She played loudly and badly and too fast, and she was so proud of it, and she wanted so much for someone to listen. And one evening, when my aunt Phillips and the Lucases were at Longbourn, she played a sonata for the company, and she made a dreadful mess of it. And I made a joke. A very clever joke, I thought. I said it was a good thing Handel was dead, or he would have died of it." She paused. "Everybody laughed. Lady Lucas laughed so hard she had to be patted on the back. My father laughed. And Mary sat on the stool with her hands in her lap, and did not cry, and did not say anything. And she did not touch the pianoforte again for a year."

Georgiana made a small sound.

"I was proud of that joke for a week," said Elizabeth. "Then I saw her one afternoon, alone in the parlour, standing by the pianoforte with her hand on the lid, not opening it. And I understood what I had done. And I have been ashamed of it every day since. She plays loudly now because nobody listened to her softly. Because I taught her that if she was quiet, she would be laughed at." She drew a breath. "When your brother asked her about her Handel, that first morning at Longbourn, and listened, and meant it, I think that was the moment I began to love him. Because he did the thing I should have done, eight years before, and did not."

There was a long silence in the dark.

"You were twelve," said Georgiana at last, very softly.

"And you were fifteen," said Elizabeth. "And a man who had been your friend since you were in the nursery, and your father's godson, and a woman your brother had hired to take care of you, set out on purpose to deceive you. They were very good at it. They had done it before. You were a child, and you trusted people, because you had always been able to trust the people around you." She took Georgiana's hand. "That is not wickedness, dearest. That is only what it is to be young and to have been loved. And the day you found out, you told the truth. To the brother you were most afraid of. Do you know how brave that was? I do not think I could have done it at fifteen."

Georgiana began to cry again. But it was different now: softer, easier, the crying of someone who has put down something very heavy. Elizabeth moved from the chair to the bed and took her in her arms, and Georgiana cried into her shoulder for a long time, and then less, and then not at all.

At some point, much later, with her face still pressed into Elizabeth's wrapper, she said, in a muffled voice, "You think it was Theo. Do you not? You and Fitzwilliam. I saw your faces this morning when I said her name."

Elizabeth did not answer at once. She had promised no secrets to her husband. She found she could not lie to his sister either.

"I do not know," she said. "I truly do not know. I hope with all my heart that it was not. For your sake."