Page 58 of One Night with Mr. Darcy
But no,wasit wrong? Why was she acting like a crazy woman? “I’m sorry, sir. I realized I have something to see to and it can’t possibly wait. I hate to leave you, but there are books there on the shelf.” She pointed. “Or, if you’d like a solitary game of cards, there should be a deck in that drawer.” She nodded at it. “Please excuse me. I’m so very sorry.”
She got out of there as quickly as she could.
She rushed up the stairs and nearly smacked into Georgiana Darcy.
Oh, Lord.
Wait a moment, what had Mr. Darcy said to her last night?He’s the vicar there. He’s doing inappropriate things with young women, my sister included.
She clutched her chest. Well, nowonderhe had made her so terribly out of sorts. He was the monster, and he was here!
Georgiana was swathed in three blankets. She was wide eyed and gaunt and wan and pale. “I thought I’d look in on Mr. Wickham. He’s alone in the sitting room downstairs.”
“You will do absolutely no such thing,” said Elizabeth. “You will stay away from him and go directly back to your room. Where is your cousin, the colonel?”
“Oh, my brother has talked to you, too!” said Georgiana. “My brother doesn’t know what he says when he accuses Mr. Wickham. Why, it’s not like that. Mr. Wickham, he is—we are—I have known him my whole life, and he is like a brother to me.”
“Mmm, well, I don’t think I’d want a brother like that,” said Elizabeth. “He’s like Lucifer himself, fair to look at and rotten in the core of him.”
Georgiana drew back, shaking her head. “I have to see him.”
“No,” said Elizabeth. She put her arm around the girl. “We shall seek Colonel Fitzwilliam together, then.”
Georgiana shied away, trembling. “P-please, I can’t bear it if you t-touch me.”
Elizabeth looked the girl over. “All right.” Truthfully, it had been untoward for her to have done such a thing at all. But she had only felt that she must keep Georgiana from that man downstairs by any means necessary. If she must do it bodily, well very then, she would. “But you will accompany me.”
Georgiana cowered. “But I have to see him. I’m the reason he’s here.”
“You sent for him?”
“My brother is going to do something awful to him, and it will break my heart, and I love him, and I must stop it.” Georgiana’s voice had grown shrill. She was wringing out her hands, quite overwrought.
Elizabeth blinked, thinking of the way Mr. Darcy had left them the previous morning. Oh, dear. Oh, had he been going to… do violence to Mr. Wickham? She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. She nodded. “Yes, I see. Well, no harm will befall him under my roof. We shall conduct ourselves better than beasts, my dear.” She shook her head. “Men,” she muttered under her breath.
Georgiana gave her a hopeful smile. “Oh, thank you.”
“Yes,” said Elizabeth. “I shall hear your side of it, if you wish to tell me it. You say you love him?”
Georgiana nodded.
“Well, let us walk, and you will talk to me of it as we do.”And I shall look for the colonel at the same time.
“I…” Georgiana tugged the blankets closer around her shoulders. “Well, when I was younger, a few years ago, he came to me, and he said he’d been in love with me for some time, but that he knew I was not ready for him then, but that now I was old enough, and he wanted us to be married.”
“I see,” said Elizabeth.
“But we couldn’t. He’s not of the right birth, you see, and my family wouldn’t like it. So, we would have to elope. And we would have, but…”
“But?”
“It was my fault! I wrote to Fitz. We were in Ramsgate, and we were to leave in days for Scotland, and I simply… I worried about doing something my brother wouldn’t like, and I thought he’d give us his blessing, because I thought he and One were friends.”
“One?”
“We have always been thus. He is Georgie One and I am Georgie Two.”
Elizabeth nodded. “Oh, I see. Go on, then.”
