“I do not object to history,” Elizabeth said. “I object to being improved against my will.”
“Then we are exactly agreed.”
They spoke first of books, because books asked little and revealed much. Then of rooms, because illness had made both of them students of rooms whether they wished it or no. Georgiana preferred south light in winter because it promised indulgence. Elizabeth preferred west light because it made even the commonest chamber look, for an hour, as if it kept a secret worth learning. From there they came, almost without noticing it,to the smaller things confinement sharpened into consequence—what one missed most when shut indoors, whether silence comforted or oppressed, how much of a house one could know merely by hearing it rather than entering it.
“I used to think,” Georgiana said softly, “that what I missed most was music. It is not. It is hearing life continue just beyond the door and knowing one may join it if one has strength enough.”
Elizabeth frowned thoughtfully.
“When I was worst in October,” Georgiana went on, her eyes lowered now to the tassel on her shawl, “I asked Nan to leave my door unlatched so I could hear the servants crossing the landing. It made the house seem less like a place in which one had been put aside to die.”
The plainness of it did not strike Elizabeth as morbidity. It struck her as accuracy. “I understand that perfectly.”
Georgiana looked up. No fever now. No mediation by note or sister or brother. Only recognition.
Before either could speak again, a footstep sounded in the passage and Darcy came in.
He stopped.
The whole of his reaction crossed his face too quickly for anyone but a sister, perhaps, to have read it from beginning to end. First concern—immediate, involuntary, absolute—for Georgiana downstairs, out of her own chamber, beyond the strict borders illness had laid about her. Then assessment—her colour, posture, the distance from the stairs, the chair, the signs of calm or strain. Then, beneath both, something else at the sight of Georgiana beside Elizabeth’s bed, the room holding them together as if no one had thought until this instant how naturally that might occur.
“Georgiana?”
He said only her name, but it contained enquiry, care, caution, and the self-command Elizabeth had begun to recognize as peculiarly his.
Georgiana looked up without alarm. “I am in a chair, Fitzwilliam. This is generally thought the least rash of all possible undertakings.”
“But… you are downstairs.”
“The staircase survived me. I did not descend it unaided, so you are spared the gratification of horror.”
He came farther in. The afternoon had been cold and damp outdoors. It clung to him still in the darker tone of his coat and the clear colour at his cheek. Papers in one hand had been wholly forgotten upon his finding them thus.
“Mrs Hadley permitted this?”
“Mrs Hadley permitted nothing,” Georgiana said. “Nan assisted me, and Mrs Reeves was diverted elsewhere, which proves only that households are imperfectly governed.”
Darcy looked from one woman to the other and found, Elizabeth suspected, not the scene he had expected on entering his own house.
“Then the failure lies in the house’s arrangements,” he said at last. “I shall have to speak very severely to the staff.”
“Do,” said Georgiana. “They will enjoy it.”
His mouth altered, very slightly. It was not quite surrender, not quite amusement, but something near both. “How long have you been here?”
“Ten minutes,” Georgiana said.
“Fifteen,” Elizabeth said at the same instant.
Georgiana turned to her with sudden interest. “You see, Fitzwilliam? We are already intimate enough to contradict one another.”
Darcy looked at Elizabeth, and beneath the brother’s care was astonished amusement close to her own. “I perceive I have entered an alliance already formed against me.”
“Not against you,” Elizabeth said. “Only beyond your management.”
The answer was dangerous the instant it left her. And Georgiana, by the small still alteration of her face, had heard it too—not as jest and not, perhaps, as anything she could yet have named, but with the alertness of a sister who had been kept indoors too long this winter and had lately begun to mark what her brother did not say.
Jane came in then with the tea tray, saw Georgiana in the chair beside the bed, and stopped so abruptly the spoon rang faintly against the cup.
