Page 59 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

Georgiana was quiet for a long time. Then she said, very low, "She came today. Pearce told me. She begged to see me. She cried in the hall." A pause. "And I was glad that he sent her away. I do not know why. I have never been glad not to see Theo before in my life."

She fell asleep soon after that, with her head on Elizabeth's shoulder and her hand still clutching a fold of the wrapper. Elizabeth did not move. She sat against the headboard in the dark, with her arm going numb and her sister-in-law's soft breath on her neck, and watched the square outside the window go grey, and then pale, and thought about a girl with a candle, sitting on another girl's bed at Matlock in October, promising on her mother's grave.

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Wednesday, 8th April

Darcy had not slept either. He had sat in the green room all night with the door open onto the passage, so that he would hear if he was needed, and he had not been needed, and it had been the longest night of his life.

At six he could bear it no longer. He went down the passage in his shirtsleeves and opened his sister's door very softly.

They were both asleep. Elizabeth was sitting up against the headboard with her head tipped back and her mouth a little open, still in the wrapper she had been wearing when she knocked on this door twenty-four hours before. Georgiana lay curled against her side with her fair head on Elizabeth's shoulder and her fist closed tight on a fold of dark blue silk, the way she had used to hold the edge of their mother's shawl when she was very small.

He stood in the doorway and looked at them, and something in his chest gave way that he had been holding shut, he thought, since the day of his father's funeral.

Elizabeth opened her eyes. She did not move. She only looked at him across the dim room, and smiled a little, and then looked down at Georgiana, and back at him, and he understood that she was telling him it was his turn.

Very carefully, so as not to wake either of them, she eased her shoulder out from under his sister's head, and slid off the bed, and stood up, stiff, rubbing her numb arm. She put her hand on his chest as she passed him in the doorway, flat, over his heart, for one moment. Then she went out, and he heard her go along the passage to the green room, and the door close softly.

He sat down on the edge of the bed.

Georgiana stirred, and reached out in her sleep for the shoulder that was no longer there, and woke. She blinked up at him in the grey light, and her face went through confusion and then fear and then something else, as she understood who it was.

"Fitzwilliam," she whispered.

"Good morning, sweetheart."

She sat up, slowly, clutching the counterpane. Her eyes were red and swollen. She looked about twelve years old.

"I am sorry," she began. "I am so—"

"No," said Darcy. "No. Let me speak first. I have been waiting nine months to say this, and I have been too much of a coward to say it, and I am not going to wait any longer."

She stared at him.

"I do not despise you," he said. "I never have. Not for one moment. Not at Ramsgate, not since. I have despised myself. I chose Mrs Younge. I let you go to the sea without me because I had business in town, and business was easier than a sad little sister who did not know how to talk to me. When you told me what you had meant to do, I was so frightened, and so angry, that I could not speak. And I have been not speaking ever since. I let you think the silence was about you. It was never about you." His voice cracked. He let it. "You are my sister. I love you more than anything in the world except my wife. And I am more ashamed than I can tell you that it took her to show me how to say so."

Georgiana's face crumpled. She put out her arms like a child, and he gathered her up, and she cried against his shirt, and he found that he was crying too, which he had not done since he was eleven. He did not care. He held her, and rocked her a little, and said her name over and over, and whatever else came into his head.

When at last she was quiet, she said, into his shirt, "I cannot go on Thursday. To the Drawing Room."

"Then you shall not go."

"Aunt Catherine says if I do not go, everyone will think it is true."

"It is true," said Darcy. "Or part of it is. You were deceived, and you nearly made a mistake, and you did not make it. That is the truth. I am not ashamed of it. Let them think what they like." He smoothed her hair. "There will be another Drawing Room. In May, or June. You will go when you are ready, with your head up, and with Elizabeth beside you, and with me. And by then, I promise you, everybody in London will know who wrote those paragraphs, and why."

She lifted her head. "Do you know? Already?"

He did not answer. She looked at his face, and whatever she saw there made her go very still.

"Theo," she whispered. "You think it was Theo."

"I think," said Darcy carefully, "that I will not say anybody's name until I can prove it. Not to you, not to Aunt Matlock, not to anyone. I have been wrong once already this month. I will not be wrong about this."

Georgiana looked at him for a long time. Then she nodded slowly, and put her head back on his shoulder, and closed her eyes.

At eight o'clock, while Georgiana was eating bread and butter in bed for the first time in a day, under Hannah's eye, there was a clatter of hooves in the square, and a lathered horse pulled up at the blue door with a groom on its back in the de Bourgh livery. He had ridden from Kent through the night. He carried a small, iron-bound, very old dispatch box, and he would give it into no hands but her ladyship's own.