Page 139 of Homeless

She folded the ring into the note, the brass band wrapped in her own words. Then, she took the marriage lines from the trunk and folded that paper in, too. Everything that made her Mrs Darcy, ready to be sent back to the man who had made her so. She pressed the seal down hard with the heel of her hand, as though she could press her whole heart flat enough to fit inside it. Then she set it aside, because if she kept looking at it, she would open it, and if she opened it, she would never send it at all.

She went to find the children, because she could not sit alone in that room with the sealed thing on the table one moment longer.

Marianne was in the nursery, as she nearly always was at that hour, and she looked up from her dolls. Her face brightened at Elizabeth’s arrival, and she demanded that Cousin Lizzy come and take tea, for the horse had been very rude and would not drink today, and someone sensible was wanted at the table.

So, Elizabeth sat down on the nursery floor and took the offered cup that had nothing in it, and admired the dolls and agreed that the horse had behaved abominably. It was a little thing, but it was all she had, to let the ordinary sweetness of the moment lay a cool hand on the burning thing in her chest, for a little while. Elizabeth held her cup correctly and was praised for it.

Marianne reached across to “refill” the cup with her empty pot, and took Elizabeth's hand to steady it. She stopped, turned her hand over, and studied her finger with a small frown.

“Cousin Lizzy, your finger isn't green anymore.”

Elizabeth looked down at it. The faint band was gone. She had scrubbed at it for days and it had not shifted, and then she had stopped thinking of it, and somewhere in the last week, it had faded. It was only an ordinary finger now, with no ghost of any ring on it at all. The last visible trace of her marriage, gone from her own hand, on the very morning she had sealed the ring itself away to send back, as though her own body were wiping her clean of him faster than she could bear to be unmade.

“So it is,” she managed, and her voice garbled a little. Marianne looked up at her, and she could not make the words come out cleanly, so she whispered them instead. “So it is, sweetheart. All gone.”

She set the little cup down carefully because her hands had begun to shake, and she kissed the top of Marianne's head and got herself out of the nursery and into the passage before the child could see her face come apart. She stood a moment against the wall with her hand over her mouth.

“Oh, God,” she sobbed in a hoarse rasp. “I cannot do this! I cannot lose him!” A thin squeak rose with her breath as she tried to choke it back, so she rushed towards her own room, meaning to shut the door, meaning to weep the rest of it out where no one would be frightened.

Before she had got three paces, the maid came up the stairs behind her, a little breathless. “Miss, there’s a caller below, come to see you particularly.”

Elizabeth's heart dropped. Copeland. It could only be Copeland, come back with something worse, some final word she did not think she could survive the hearing of on this of all mornings. And yet she would have to hear it, whatever it was.

She cleared her throat. “I will come directly. A moment only.”

She went into her room, shut the door and went to the glass to look at the wreck the day had so far made of her — the swollen eyes, the blotched cheeks, the evidence of an hour's weeping — and set about repairing it. She pressed the cool backs of her fingers to her eyelids. She pinched her cheeks to bring the colour up over the pallor. She wished, uselessly, that her eyes did not look so puffed, that grief did not leave such plain fingerprints, that she had one hour more before she had to go down and be composed and sensible and receive whatever new blow was waiting.

But she had not got that hour, and so she did what she could. When she had finished, she drew a breath, smoothed her gown, and went down to meet more bad news about the man she was breaking her own heart to save.

LV

Downhill

The girl in the parlour rose when Elizabeth came in, and turned, and there was not the smallest question in Elizabeth's mind who she was. She had Darcy's eyes.

She was tall and fair, eighteen at her last birthday, she remembered. Georgiana Darcy had a sweet, grave face gone shy under scrutiny, and a bearing that tried for composure and did not quite hide the eagerness underneath it. The eyes were not only the same shape as her brother's, but they flashed quickly over her, dark and direct and searching, so that Elizabeth stopped on the threshold as though she had walked into a wall. She had not been prepared, on this of all days, to encounter Fitzwilliam Darcy's eyes in the face of a stranger.

“Miss Bennet,” the girl said, and dropped a little curtsy, and then abandoned it halfway and simply stood there twisting her gloves, plainly having rehearsed something and lost it entirely. “I — forgive me, I ought to have sent word. My brother said I need not, but I feel now that I… oh, may I call you Elizabeth? I dare not say…” She glanced round the room, towards the half-open parlour door, put her finger to her lips, and whispered the rest. “I told my brother I would not say, and I have not, but I cannot truthfully call you Miss Bennet, can I?”

That part made Elizabeth’s mouth pull a little. “I suppose not.”

“Oh, splendid!” Georgiana drew near with her hands extended. “I have wanted to meet you for the longest time, and my brother kept putting me off. And this morning, he finally said I might come, and I would not have waited a moment longer than it took to change my gown, but he said I ought not to come so early, so he made me wait until afternoon.”

She let Georgiana take her hands, but could make no reply in kind. How could she? The sister she had longed for, who had plainly ached to meet her, standing in her aunt's parlour with her whole open heart held out in both hands, on the very morning Elizabeth had sealed away everything that made them sisters.

She could not weep. That was the one thing she absolutely could not do. She had come down with her face repaired and her composure gathered, and she must, whatever it cost, hold both, because this girl did not deserve her grief. That had been the point of the sacrifice in the first place. That only they two would suffer for it, and not the rest of his world. She had broken one Darcy heart today, and she would not break another if she could help it.

“I am very glad to meet you, Georgiana,” she said warmly. “I should have known you anywhere. You have his eyes, do you know that?”

Georgiana’s smile widened, if that were indeed possible. “My father’s eyes, everyone says. You will see when you come to the house, there are paintings. I think we favour our mother, personally, but you shall be able to judge for yourself. Her likeness hangs in the mistress’s… oh!” She glanced over her shoulder again. “I hope I do not say too much. You must tell me if I am apt to run on and say something I ought not.”

“No fear. The maid is not in the habit of listening at the door, and my aunt is… my aunt is indisposed. She has not come down from her room since this morning.”

“Oh. Oh, that is very well. You are very beautiful, you know.”

Elizabeth’s first instinct was to laugh, but to do so made a mockery of the girl’s sincerity, so she stifled it. “You have been listening to your brother too much, I think.”

“He is worth listening to, because he is nearly always right. He reminded me that he had known you in Hertfordshire, some years ago, and I went and found the letters he wrote then. Did you know he wrote of you on four different occasions? A lady he had not known a fortnight, and he was already writing to me about your stay at Netherfield, how kind you had been to nurse your sister, how you laughed when Miss Bingley tried to embarrass you about reading — you know that was a high compliment from him, of course. I am not at all astonished that he liked you then, and even less that he loves you now.”