Page 91 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

"That is not a crime, my love," she said. "Not seeing someone. It is only very sad. What she did with it: that is the crime. And that was hers, not yours. Every word." She stroked his hair. "You did not make her write that note about Georgiana. You did not make her send Wickham to the ice house. She chose it, every week, for two months. With good paper and a steady hand."

He did not answer. But he turned his face into her wrapper, and she felt him let out a long, long breath, and some of the stone under his breastbone went with it.

#

Thursday, 30th April

They took Wickham away the next morning at nine, in Mr Fenwick's closed carriage, with a constable on either side of him, to Derby gaol, where he would wait for an escort from Horse Guards.

Elizabeth was in the hall when they brought him through. She had not meant to be. She had meant to stay upstairs, out of the way, and let it be done. But Georgiana had come to her room at half past eight, dressed, in her grey pelisse, with her bonnet in her hand and her face very pale and very set, and had said, "I want to see him go. Will you come with me?" And Elizabeth had looked at her, and understood, and said yes.

So they stood together at the foot of the great staircase, the two of them, while the constables brought him along the passage from the room where he had slept, under guard, and across the marble floor towards the door.

He had been allowed to shave and wash, and somebody had brushed his blue coat. He looked more like himself. He walked between the constables with his head up and his bound hands in front of him, and he was very nearly smiling, the old easy smile, as though he were being escorted to a ball.

Then he saw Georgiana, and stopped.

The constables stopped with him. Across the hall, by the window, Elizabeth saw her husband turn from where he had been speaking to Mr Fenwick, and go very still.

Georgiana did not move. She stood at the foot of the stairs in her grey pelisse with her bonnet in her hands and looked at George Wickham, and he looked at her, and for a long moment nobody in the hall said anything at all.

Elizabeth had thought, lying awake, about what the girl might say. She had thought she might cry, or be angry, or not be able to say anything. She had been prepared to take her arm and lead her away.

She had not been prepared for what Georgiana did.

She walked across the hall, quite slowly, until she was standing in front of him. Close enough to touch, if either of them had wanted to. Neither of them did.

"Mr Wickham," she said. Her voice was quiet, and it shook a little, and she did not let it stop her. "I wanted to tell you something before you go. Because you are going very far away, my brother says, and I do not suppose I shall ever see you again."

Wickham looked down at her. The smile had gone.

"When I was fifteen," said Georgiana, "I thought I was in love with you. I thought you were the kindest, handsomest, most wonderful person in the world. And when my brother came to Ramsgate, and you laughed, I thought it was my fault. I thought there must be something wrong with me, something wicked, that you could laugh like that. I have thought it every single day for a year."

She drew a breath.

"It was not my fault," she said. "I know that now. My sister told me, and my brother. It was yours. You were a grown man and I was a child, and you knew exactly what you were doing, and you did it anyway. And last night, you would have done it again." Her chin came up. "I am not a child any more, Mr Wickham. And I am not afraid of you. I wanted you to know that. That is all."

There was a silence in the great hall of Pemberley that seemed to go on for a very long time.

Elizabeth watched George Wickham's face. She had seen it charming and wary and ugly and tired and, once, through the ice-house grille, almost honest. She had never seen it look like this. For one moment, standing in the hall of the house where he had grown up, in front of the girl he had tried to ruin twice, he looked quite simply ashamed.

He opened his mouth. He did not seem to be able to find anything to say. For the first time in his life, Elizabeth thought, George Wickham had no words.

Then he bowed. It was a small, stiff, awkward bow, with his bound hands in front of him. But it was a real one.

"Miss Darcy," he said, very low. That was all.

The constables took his arms again, and led him out through the great door into the bright morning, and down the steps to Mr Fenwick's carriage. Georgiana did not watch him go. She turned round and walked back across the hall to Elizabeth, and when she got there, she put her face in Elizabeth's shoulder and began, at last, to shake.

Elizabeth held her. Over her fair head, she saw Darcy crossing the hall towards them, and his face was wet, and he did not seem to know it.

He put his arms round both of them, as he had on the morning he came home, and the three of them stood together at the foot of the stairs while, outside, the carriage wheels crunched away down the drive, and round the curve by the water, and up through the wood, and over the top of the rise, and were gone.

#

That evening, after dinner, when Georgiana had gone up and Anne was asleep in her chair by the fire with her mouth a little open and her fourth shawl slipping off, they sat together in the window seat of the blue room, Darcy and Elizabeth, with his mother's Cowper between them and the long light going gold on the lake.

"We go back on Monday," he said. "To London. With the letters, and the confession, and Hobb's statement, and Miss Bingley's box. And we take it to my aunt Matlock. First. Before anyone." He was quiet a moment. "It will break her heart."