Page 150 of Faceless

“Alive.”

“You have — you have seen him. Spoken with him! Touched his hand. He is —”

“I have. He is.”

That undid her entirely.

Georgiana was off the piano bench in the next moment, and her arms went round Elizabeth’s neck without permission or preface, and she wept — not delicately, not in the polite manner of receiving difficult news, but open, ragged weeping.

Elizabeth held her. She did not know what else to do. She had never held a sister-in-law before, had not been a sister-in-law at any moment of her life until perhaps five minutes ago, and the girl in her arms was crying with such complete trust against her shoulder that the whole strange ascendancy of her new position came down on her at once. She put her hand against the back of Georgiana’s head and let her cry.

After a little while, Georgiana drew back and looked at her — close, searching, her face wet and unashamed — and her hands stayed at Elizabeth’s elbows as though she were not yet prepared to let go entirely.

“Is he — truly? He is truly alive! You have been with him?”

“I have been with him every day since our wedding in late July until he was taken from me in Scotland.”

“Oh, God.” Georgiana pressed her hand to her mouth again. “Wedding! Oh, God, oh, God. I —” She caught one breath, then another. “How — how can you have come here? How can he have — Elizabeth, how —”

“May I tell you sitting down?”

“Yes. Yes, of course. Here.” She drew Elizabeth to the small sofa by the window and sat beside her and did not relinquish her hand. “Tell me. Tell me anything. Tell me how he is. Tell me where he is. Tell me how he came to know you again — for he must have known you, he must have — Elizabeth Bennet! He wrote your name eleven times in one letter from Netherfield, did you know that? I counted.”

Elizabeth laughed once, broken, and her own eyes filled at last. “I did not know that.”

“He spoke of you to no one, but he wrote your name to me as though it cost him nothing to write it. I wondered for a year what had happened. He would not tell me when I asked. And now you are here, and you say you married him! Tell me how, Elizabeth. Tell me everything.”

So, Elizabeth told her.

Not all of it — not the dark months at Auchengray, not what passed between her and Darcy under a roof neither of them had been able to claim by daylight, not the night at the inn and the colonel’s hand on her mouth — but the shape of it. That Darcy had not died in April. That he had gone north. That an offer had been put to her family which she had not been at liberty to refuse, and which had brought her to Scotland under conditions she had not fully understood until very recently. That she had been his wife since the twenty-third of July. That she loved him entirely and would do whatever was now required to bring him home.

Georgiana listened without interrupting, her hand tight in Elizabeth’s, her wet face turned half against Elizabeth’s shoulder by the end of it, the tears still arriving silently. When Elizabeth had finished, she did not speak for a moment. Then she sat up and wiped her face with both hands, like a child, and looked at Elizabeth with eyes that were red and entirely steady.

“Did you know who he was when you married him?”

“No. I knew only that he was not what I had first feared, and that whatever else he might be, he was worth trusting.” Her voice softened. “By the time I learned his name, I had already decided he was worth keeping.”

Georgiana looked at her for so long that Elizabeth’s own hands, her own travelling gown, the stains still faint upon her cuffs from the packet, all came forward at once. Then the younger woman wrapped her arms about Elizabeth’s shoulders and fell on her neck with a sob that was somewhere between grief and joy.

The gesture was so unguarded and so immediate that for an instant Elizabeth could not answer it at all.

“Then we will get him back?”

“God willing.”

Georgiana pulled back and held her shoulders, staring her in the face with a look so like her brother’s, it made Elizabeth’s heart squeeze. “Whatever is required. Whatever it costs. I shall do whatever you, my uncle, and Richard require of me. Tell me what to do.”

“I do not know yet. Your uncle and cousin are making the plans.”

“Then I shall do whatever he asks me. And I shall do whatever you ask me.” Her chin came up. It was Darcy’s chin exactly. “You are my sister now.”

Elizabeth could not answer that at once. She had been received in this house for less than an hour and had not expected to be claimed.

She lifted Georgiana’s hand and pressed it briefly to her own cheek.

“Bless you.”

The cutter put him ashore at the Tower wharf an hour before dawn.