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Elizabeth took the flowers as though nobody had ever given her anything finer. She held them to her face for a moment. Then she looked at Georgiana over the top of them, with a warmth he had never seen her turn on him.

“They are lovely. And I like them all the better for being squashed, because I know how it happened. Shall I tell you a secret, Miss Darcy? I have been frightened all the way from Hertfordshire that you would not like me.”

“Not like you!” Georgiana caught her free hand. “Oh, but you must call me Georgiana, since we are sisters now. Do come in. I have so much to tell you, and I have made a list.”

“A list,” said Elizabeth, quite seriously, as she let herself be led up the steps. “Then I am in very good hands.”

Darcy followed them into the house with his hat still in his hand. Nobody needed him for the next half hour.

He sat down in a chair by the drawing room door, and they forgot he was there. Georgiana's list ran to two sheets, written close on both sides. It said which rooms at Pemberley had been got ready for Elizabeth, and which had not yet been aired. It gave the names of all the principal servants, with a note on each. Mrs Reynolds was very kind, but must never be told the house was too big. The head gardener would be Elizabeth's friend for life if she admired his strawberries in summer. There was a map of the walks, drawn first in pencil and then gone over in ink, with the stream coloured in blue. A whole page was given to their aunt, Lady Catherine, and it consisted mostly of subjects Elizabeth was not to raise with her. Georgiana had also found the best chair in the music room for the afternoon light. She wondered whether they might learn a duet together, if Elizabeth would not find her playing too dull.

“Too dull! I play very badly myself. It is you who will need the patience.”

“Then I shall be the most patient creature alive. And you will tell me about your sisters, won't you? All four of them? I should so like to know them a little before we meet, so that I do not say anything foolish.”

Elizabeth laughed then, properly and without any guard on it. Darcy had not heard that laugh since before the cellar. He was not sure he had heard it since Kent. He sat very still in his chair and did not want to do anything that might stop it.

“You may say anything you please to my sisters. Kitty will ask you about bonnets and Lydia about officers. Mary will lend you a book of sermons whether you want one or not. And Jane will love you the moment she sees you.”

“Then I shall love her back.” Georgiana looked from Elizabeth to her brother, and a pleased, innocent look came over her face that Darcy did not trust at all. “I feel as if I know you already, you see. Fitzwilliam wrote to me about you so often when he was in Kent in the spring. Letter after letter. I thought it very strange at the time, because he never writes to me about ladies.”

Elizabeth's hand went still on the list.

She turned her head and looked at him down the length of the room. The question was plain in her face, but she did not ask it aloud.

Darcy could not have answered it if his life had depended on it.

Chapter Nineteen

Elizabeth

“Iwas not quite six when Mama died. I remember her mostly as a smell of orange-flower water and a blue silk gown.”

Georgiana said it in the voice another girl might use to remark on the frost. Then she walked on a few paces without saying anything more, and Elizabeth let her.

They had come into Hyde Park by the Grosvenor Gate a little after ten. At that hour the fashionable world was still in bed, and the paths were left to nursemaids, small dogs and the odd elderly gentleman walking briskly. The grass was white where the trees kept the sun off it. The Serpentine lay flat and grey beyond the elms. A footman followed some way behind, carrying a spare shawl that neither of them had asked for.

Georgiana had suggested the walk at breakfast, with a quick glance at her brother, as if she expected to be told no. Mr Darcy had only said that they should keep to the gravel and come home before their feet froze.

“Papa I remember very well. I was eleven when he died. Fitzwilliam was only two-and-twenty, and all at once he had Pemberley to manage.” Georgiana pushed her hands deeper into her muff. “But he came up to the schoolroom every evening, however late it was. He heard my French and sat through my scales, which was very good of him, because I played them dreadfully. When I had the measles he read Evelina to me for a whole week. He did Madame Duval in a French accent, and it was so bad that I laughed until Nurse sent him away. He has been a brother to me and a father too, and I never heard him grumble about it.”

“He does not seem to me a man who grumbles.”

“No. When something troubles him he goes quiet and stares at the fire.” Georgiana smiled. “I am very lucky in him. I know that.”

Elizabeth turned this over as they passed under the bare elms. It was possible that Mr Darcy kept one face for his sister and another for everyone else. Most people did, more or less. Her own mother was all smiles to Lady Lucas and all opinions once the door had shut. But it would take a great deal of patience to keep up an act through years of French verbs and bad scales. Elizabeth had never thought patience one of his virtues.

“He is the same with everyone he loves,” Georgiana went on.

“And the rest of your family? Are they all so fortunate?”

“Oh, no. There is our cousin Gerald, Richard's elder brother. He will be Lord Matlock one day, and my brother can hardly stand to be in a room with him.” She dropped her voice, though there was nobody within twenty yards but a spaniel. “Gerald is dreadfully high in the instep. He will not talk to anyone below a baronet if he can help it. He calls Richard 'the soldier', in the tone other people use for a bad cough.”

Elizabeth laughed before she could stop herself and tried to turn it into a cough of her own. It did not work.

Georgiana gave her a sideways look. “You need not spare me. You are thinking that my brother is high in the instep too.”

“I would never say so.”