“Yes, we must stay until he comes back, I think. We do not wish to get on his bad side. Charles would not be pleased.”
And six days after he had left, Mr. Darcy returned.
Elizabeth heard word from her maid that he had come back, and she waited for him to summon her or for him to come to find her, but hours and hours passed and he did not.
Where had he been?
What had he done?
And what did he have planned for her?
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
MR. DARCY SOUGHTout his sister Georgiana first. He had barely told her anything before he left, and this would all affect her, and she might wish to leave, to go and take refuge with one of their aunts somewhere while the storm of the scandal he was about to cause waned.
It would be survivable, of course, he knew that. It would be the worst for Elizabeth, truly, but she would weather it as well. They all would.
And Wickham being gone? Well, that did not displease him, he found.
Georgiana was in her bedchamber, and she would not come out to meet him in a sitting room, so he was obliged to go and seek her there.
He opened the door and came inside. “I’m sure you’re feeling out of sorts about all of this, and I wish to explain myself as best I can. You might be scandalized to think that I could have left her on her own for so long while she was carrying my child, but the truth is that I did not know—”
“Stop it, Fitz,” said Georgiana coldly. She was sitting on her bed with her back to him, looking out the window at the November landscape below. They were two stories up. Her room faced west. The late afternoon sun was coming in, golden but cold.
“Well, as I say, I know you may not think this is like me, but I cannot shirk my responsibility, surely you will agree with that.”
“I know that’s not your babe, and I knew that the moment you told me it was. I assumed you were so mad for her, you were simply happy that she would need your assistance, and you were willing to sacrifice the family inheritance just for a chance with that woman.”
“No, perhaps I can explain what I plan to—”
“But then, she tells me that it’s Mr. Wickham’s child,” said Georgiana.
“So, you understand why I have to, then.”
She turned to look at him. “You treated me like I was some diseased thing when there was a chance that I could be carrying hisissue.”
He swallowed. The diseased part was an exaggeration, he supposed, but there was truth in her accusation, in the end. He had been so horrified by it all that he had handled it badly. He moved across the room and went to her. “I am ever so sorry, Georgiana,” was all he said. He could have protested, he supposed, but getting into an argument about the degree of badness of his treatment of her was not going to help anything.
She lifted her chin. “And he… he must have actually done it.”
This was part of what had come to him when he was casting up his accounts all over the front of the dower house. He and his cousin Colonel Fitzwilliam and his sister, they had all spun it to themselves that Wickham was simply lying, that he’d said what he’d said because it was to his own advantage. Because his story, that Georgiana had gotten so drunk that she had blanked everything out, and that she had been willing and eager, that had been an obvious fiction.
Now, the truth was clear. Wickham had drugged his young sister, had his way with her while she slept, and then awakened there and demanded they marry.
“So, she told you the manner in which this was visited upon her?” said Mr. Darcy to his sister.
“She did, and that is when I realized what he must have done to me,” she said.
“I came to the same conclusion,” he said. “But you must realize that this is why I cannot condemn her to suffer for this man’s villainy. In many ways, leaving him free to harm her is my own fault. I should have stopped him then.”
“So, you marry her, then?” There was a great deal of ire in his sister’s voice. “You marry her, you rescue her, but what of me?”
He sat down next to her on the bed. “Yes, what of you? We did not do you a service, all of us pretending nothing had really happened to you, did we?”
“Are you going to marry her?” said Georgiana, her voice rising.
“Yes,” he said. “But this isn’t about her, is it?”