Georgiana was playing on the large piano he'd purchased for her when they moved here. The lovely lilting tune floated down the corridor lifting up Darcy’s heart. The piano had been an apology or a thank you gift. Darcy was not sure which. His illness had prevented her planned summer in Ramsgate from occurring, but Georgiana had never complained, and she devotedly stayed near him for those first few weeks of intense pain and difficulty — only leaving his bedside when the doctors asked for her absence during awkward medical moments and exams.
Darcy grimaced. He involuntarily relieved that awful sensation when the doctor stuck a thin silver tube up his male member to allow him to relieve himself during the beginning of his illness when the muscles of his bladder had been paralyzed.
The music was a piece by Herr Beethoven. When he reached the entrance to the drawing room, Darcy leaned his weight against the crutches, closed his eyes and listened carefully, nodding his head rhythmically in time with the music. There was a rising and falling rhythmic ostinato with brief flashes of a lovely melody.
Halfway through the piece Georgiana pressed the wrong note. She paused, and then restarted from what Darcy guessed had been the top of the page.
Suddenly the decision that had been playing in his mind made itself.
Darcy waited patiently for the piece to finish, then he opened the door and let himself into the drawing room. Georgiana leapt from the piano and ran to him. But she did not embrace him quite how she would have before his illness. Georgiana’s companion Mrs. Younge smiled at him as she sedately stood up from where she’d been seated turning the pages for Georgiana.
Georgiana pressed her hands together and stared at him, rocking a little back and forth, with an expression as though she were half ready to leap forward to try catching him as he fell. Darcy confidently swung himself from step to step with his crutches on his way to one of the chairs close to the piano, and he carefully lowered himself into it.
Darcy could not help but be alittleannoyed at the anxious lip-chewing way his sister watched him, as though hewasa cripple despite how mobile he was. More than six months now since his illness, she ought to have become used to the slightly odd, but fully functional way he moved.
“Georgie,” he said, “I’ve decided that I will accept Mr. Bingley’s invitation to spend a few weeks at his new estate in Hertfordshire.”
“But… you are still ill!”
“I am not ill at all. I have really, if I take everything into consideration, never been in better health.”
“I know. I know you… you insist…”
“In any case, the doctors are convinced my leg muscles are likely to never recover further. I would be a fool of the worst sort if I stayed in Bath, taking the waters for years in hopes that by some miraculous unlikelihood I might suddenly walk freely once more. Time for ordinary life to be resurrected — the question then is where doyouwant to go?”
“Me?” Georgiana looked down shyly. She sat on the edge of the Chesterfield next to Darcy and without looking up shrugged her shoulders up and down twice, bobbing her head a little. “What would you like, brother?”
Darcy took her hand. “Dear, dear sister. Do not be like that. You have been the best nurse I could have wished—”
“I’ve hardly done anything.” Georgiana flushed. “I was so terrified. It happened so fast, you had a fever that first day, and then by the third you could not walk. I thought you would die, or be…”
With a wave of a hand, Darcy dismissed the memory. “A frightening and difficult time for all of us. But that is past now. You were then eager to go to Ramsgate — would you still like the sea shore, even though the weather is not so pleasant? Or do you wish to come with me — would you rather spend the autumn with our uncle Matlock; in Kent with our aunt Catherine?”
Georgiana shuddered. “Not with Aunt Catherine.”
Darcy smirked. “No? She would have a great deal of advice for you.”
Georgiana giggled. “No, you know how she scares me.”
There had been too much advice sent to Darcy from that quarter as well of late. “Marry Anne. Marry Anne. Make your mother’s dearest wish true. By marrying Anne.”
And now Uncle Matlock had descended to make the same deuced demand. “Perhaps my dear fellow, you ought to marry Anne — her health is certainly looking up. Money kept in the family! Always one wishes money kept in the family! Now that you are a cripple, you can’t expect a remarkable society match.
Why you cannot even dance with one of those diamonds of the first water.”
What I expect is to do honor to the Darcy name.
In essentials he was the same. So long as he remained sound of mind, he would always remain the same in essentials. He would one day make his choice, and his choice would be supremely fortunate to have the blessed opportunity to accept his hand in marriage.
The hour to find the worthy candidate approached apace.
During those first exquisitely embarrassing and painful weeks when he could not even relieve himself, Darcy had been certain in his heart that he would never be able to father a child. But fortunately a direct heir to his father through the male line was still possible. The paralysis had left his legs far too weak to support his own weight, but there had been no long-term effect on the male capabilities required to have children.
The future was always uncertain. And Darcy now intended to secure the succession to Pemberley and the Darcy name.
“Well, Georgie? If not Aunt Cathy, then Uncle Matlock. Or do you wish to experiment with an establishment of your own for a few months?”
Mrs. Younge said to her with a smile, “My dear, we have talked recently again about how it would help you build your confidence to manage on your own.”
