Page 13 of Dragons of the Great Wyves: Fire and Song
That was too much. I freed my hand. Surely holding hands was not normal business practice. And he called me Mary! Was I supposed to call him Fitzwilliam?
In that silence, he said, “You love Georgiana.”
The warmth returned to my heart. “I do.”
“Then protect her for me. This is no more than the rights you would have if the law were just.”
I could think of no counterargument. I nodded.
Mr. Darcy inked a pen and signed the document. He passed it to Lord Wellington, who signed as well.
Now I had thought of fifty arguments. “This is beyond me. I will not sign these.”
Thoughtfully, Mr. Darcy leaned back in his chair. “If you wish, I will tear up the documents. But Pemberley is not beyond you. You would wield her resources to great effect—for you, and for Georgiana. For whatever cause you feel is just.”
That was the seduction of property and power: accept it to protect those you love. Tearing down the aristocracy would be awkward if I were one of them. But I had stared poverty in the face when we were about to lose Longbourn, and, for better or from cowardice, I was a pragmatic moralist. Better to live and do good than perish on principle.
“I would protect Georgiana,” I said. “You and I would not agree on much else.”
“You might be surprised.” He stacked the papers.
“Should I not sign?”
He smiled wryly. “A woman’s signature would be ruled invalid by a court. You see what I mean about English law?”
5
REACQUAINTANCE
EMMA
“Miss Woodhouse?”Lucy asked.
I looked up from hovering my gloved fingers over the stone bench’s mossy armrest. Lucy curtsied. “Mr. Darcy regrets that he will be unable to attend today.”
That was expected, with Mary and Georgiana returned. I thanked her, and she hurried back to the house, shoulders square with duty to her absent mistress.
I did not regret the solitude. Pemberley’s north garden was alive with cheeps and bobbing branches. It was a relaxing setting, chosen by Mr. Darcy for our… I thought of them as lessons, but he preferred to give our meetings businesslike names. “Our discussions.” “Our joint endeavor.”
Well, today’s lesson was just me, now. An independent endeavor of Miss Woodhouse.
I settled myself on the bench, drew off my long gloves, and lay them on the seat beside me. That was too easy, so I scrunched them into a crumpled stack of satin bumps and folds.
Mr. Darcy’s mother had kept a journal describing how she confronted her compulsive habits. She found that constant practice weakened their grip on her mind. Mr. Darcy was very much in favor of practice.
Mr. Darcy also droned on about patience and the hazards of testing myself.Fortunately, he was occupied. So, I poked the scrunched cloth with my fingernail, adding ugly kinks and rumples.
Images of illness did not fill my mind. Trickles of miasma did not fill the shadows.
I liked practicing. It was active, a project to reclaim my life. Last night, secretly, I had dumped half my wardrobe in a mess on the bed and watched it while the house creaked and cooled, the candle melted to a stub, and owls hooted in the night.
Practice was healthy. The other projects that had consumed my life were not. Perfecting my clothes, perfecting Hartfield’s decor, perfecting Harriet’s life—those were dangerous because, no matter how carefully I performed my rituals, flaws crept in. Then, when illness or injury struck, my flawed rituals became the cause. Fear and compulsion falsely coupled in my mind, dragging me in rutted circles.
The frustrating part was that, in quiet moments like this, the notion that an unfastened button caused illness was obvious nonsense. So, how did the cycle begin? Mr. Darcy insisted thathowandwhywere irrelevant, a distraction, but I wanted to know. I wanted to blame something. I had drowned in this nightmare for years.
A test, then. An investigation by the Woodhouse independent endeavor. When had my habits turned to compulsion?
Even when I was little, Papa had obsessed about sickness, perhaps because of my mother’s premature death. But I did not remember my mother, so that did not affect me, and I had no obsessive symptoms as a child. My first hints of fixation started when I was a young woman—the same age they had afflicted Lady Anne Darcy and, according to Mr. Darcy’s research, Queen Mary.
