Page 89 of When Elizabeth's Cat Chose Darcy
Fitzwilliam stood very still. He was in a state of profound discomposure; she could see the distress evident in his countenance, the same look of consternation he had worn at Ramsgate. His mind was clearly racing, assessing the extent of the scandal and estimating how swiftly the gossip would spread from Lady Lucas’s drawing room to every parlor in Meryton. The gravity of the situation was clearly making him ill.
“Georgiana. Go to your room.”
“Brother—”
“Now.”
She went. She carried the torn page of Haydn in her hand because she would not leave it for Carolineto dispose of. She climbed the stairs with the posture Elizabeth had taught her, back straight and chin up. Entering her room, she closed the door and stood with her back against it, breathing hard.
She was trapped without Elizabeth and her brother in distress. Caroline had been arranging this for weeks. The page-turning, the public dancing with Bingley, the London departure announcement, and now this, found compromised in the library underneath a table with her brother’s best friend, along with the hideous implications of Ramsgate, that Bingley was the man who had harmed her, not the wicked George Wickham.
It was all very clever. Innuendo, rumors, and now, a manufactured situation witnessed by the two women in Meryton most likely to talk. And the narrative was clear: she and Bingley would be forced to marry. Jane Bennet’s heart would be broken, and Miss Bingley would steer herself into the title of Mrs. Darcy by virtue of the tarnishing of the Darcy name amongst theton.
Georgiana sat on the bed. The rain had begun—a thin, persistent drizzle that blurred the window glass and turned the November afternoon grey. Across the fields, invisible behind the weather, Longbourn waited.
Elizabeth had once told her that the difference between a gilded cage and a home was that in a home, someone held the door open for you to leave.
Georgiana had thought she understood it as a metaphor. Now, she knew it as a trap. Except she would not allow it. Not after Ramsgate, where Wickham had used one of her brother’s youthful indiscretions to compel her to converse with him—her curiosity of salacious details and youthful trust betraying her.
She put on her walking boots, still caked with dried mud, pulled her cloak from the wardrobe, and left her room without closing the door behind her, because closing it would make a sound. And the sound would cause her brother to make the best bad decision—marry Bingley, the easy way out, and it would not be her choice.
Georgiana ducked down the servant’s stairway—the passagewayElizabeth had shown her as a way of bypassing the drawing room and the corridors her brother frequented. Through the kitchen to the stillroom, past the scullery where Mrs. Jolliffe was scrubbing pots with her back to the door, and out to freedom.
The rain was heavier than it had looked from the window. It struck her face and soaked through to her shoulders within three steps, and she did not care, because the rain was honest and Netherfield was not.
She retraced the steps she had taken with Elizabeth, crossed the stile, over the muddy meadow toward the boundary stream, now swollen and brown with rainwater. She gathered her skirts and stepped over the stone, and the water was cold enough to make her gasp, and she kept walking because the other side was Longbourn, and Longbourn was where Elizabeth was, and Elizabeth was the elder sister she had chosen.
The choice was hers. Elizabeth had told her so. And Georgiana, for the first time in two years, believed it.
