Page 97

You said you have no means of knowing which of the things I say are true. I understand. I took that from you. I cannot give it back by saying so. I can only tell you what I know, and leave you to judge.

The proposal I gave you at your bedside, the one I invented, was the proposal I wished you had made. Every word of it. I sat in your aunt's bedchamber with your hand in mine and gave you the words I wanted to hear, because I could not bear to give you the ones you had really said. And then, day by day, you said them anyway. Not those words. But you said them. You have been saying them ever since, in everything you did.

I made up a man who would rather be laughed at by me than admired by the whole world.

And then I found out he was real.

I put the letter down.

I cannot see it. Something is wrong with my eyes. I put my hand over them and sit very still in my father's chair, and I hear Georgiana get up from the window seat and come across the carpet, and feel her hand, small and cold and frightened, on my shoulder.

"Brother," she whispers. "Are you crying?"

"No," I say.

She does not believe me. She does not say so. She only keeps her hand on my shoulder, the way our mother used to, and waits.

"Georgiana," I say at last, when I can.

"Yes, Brother?"

"You asked me if it was from her."

She sits down on the arm of my chair, very carefully, as though it might break. "The lady you wrote you were to marry. Is it?"

"Yes."

"Brother, what happened? You came home looking as though someone had died. You have not said one word in ten days. Mrs. Reynolds thinks you are ill. Cook has made you a calf's foot jelly every day this week, and you have not touched one."

I look down at the letter in my lap.

"She refused me," I say. "In April. In Kent. I made her a very bad offer, and she refused it, and told me exactly why."

Georgiana's mouth falls open.

"And the next morning I fell off my horse, and forgot that she had. I woke up telling everyone we were engaged. And she let me believe it, for six weeks, because the apothecary said the truth might do me harm. And then I remembered." I stop. "And I said unforgivable things to her, and came home."

"Oh, Brother."

"Georgiana. She knows about Ramsgate."

My sister goes white to the lips. "You told her?"

"In April. In a letter, before any of this. She had believed Wickham. I could not let her go on believing him." I look up at her. "She has known for six weeks. And I would stake Pemberley that she has never breathed a word of it to anyone. Not even to me. When I tried to tell her myself, on a walk at Rosings, she stopped me. She said I might tell her someday, when it did not cost me so much."

Georgiana is very quiet. Her eyes have filled.

"Then I think," she says slowly, "that I like her very much."

"So do I."

"Then, Brother," says Georgiana, and her voice is shaking but her chin is up, the way Anne lifts hers, "why are you still sitting in Papa's chair?"

***

There is one more page.

It is shorter than the others. The writing is different. Larger. Steadier. As though it were written at a different time, in a different frame of mind, by someone who had stopped being frightened.