Page 2 of Miss Bennet is Gone

She wished to know, over the soup and again over the fish, at which seminary Miss Bennet had been finished as though the first answer had merely been mislaid between courses.

"I was not finished anywhere, ma'am," Elizabeth said pleasantly, the second time. "Mr. Darcy has undertaken to manage the deficiency himself."

Lady Matlock set down her glass. "She was educated at home, Eleanor, by a father who taught her to think, which I have found answers a great deal better than Bath ever did."

She then turned the talk to the prospects of the Season so smoothly that Mrs. Henderson never learned she had been handled.

Georgiana Darcy had attached herself to Elizabeth before the soup and stayed there, narrating in a happy undertone the history of a volume she had run to ground at Hatchard's after a fortnight of searching.

She was seventeen and had not yet learned to hide what pleased her, which Elizabeth found restful beyond description. There was so little in this family one could take at face value, and here was a girl who was precisely herself.

I always wanted a sister who enjoyed reading as I do, Elizabeth thought, and did not say, because Georgiana would have colored to the roots of her hair.

Once, when the talk had risen loud enough to cover them, Georgiana leaned close. "I have been practicing something," she confided, with the gravity of a girl entrusting a great secret. "I should like to call you Lizzy, as your family does, if you will allow it. I have said it to myself a great many times, so that I should not lose my nerve when the moment came."

Having brought it out at last, she lost her nerve entirely and could not lift her eyes from her plate. Elizabeth, who had wished for a sister who read and found she was to be given one who also rehearsed her affections in private like lines for a play, pressed the girl's hand beneath the cloth and told her she might begin that very moment.

Georgiana, too pleased to manage the whole of the word, got as far as "Liz—" and there ran aground, and the two of them agreed, without a word and very kindly, that she had finished.

When the men withdrew to the library and the ladies rose for the parlor, Lady Matlock's hand came to rest on Elizabeth's wrist. A light pressure. Stay.

The others moved ahead through the doors, and the two of them were left in the long room with the candles guttering low and the fire settling, and Lady Matlock drew her toward the window as though they had a small conspiracy between them.

"I have something for you," she said. "I had meant to wait for the morning of the wedding, and then I decided I am too old to manage surprises, and that I would rather watch your face now, while it is only the two of us."

She opened her hand. In it lay a brooch of gold, set with a single dark stone that took the candlelight and held it.

"It was Anne's," Lady Matlock said. "Lady Anne Darcy. My husband's sister, and the best of that whole proud family, which I may say now that they are all of them past contradicting me. She wore it the first season she was mistress of Pemberley. It is not a grand thing. I have grander I might have given you, and I daresay everyone will expect me to have done."

She pressed it into Elizabeth's palm and closed Elizabeth's fingers over it with both her hands. "But the grand things are for the world. This was hers."

Elizabeth looked down at the small weight in her hand. She was not, as a rule, a woman who wept over jewelry, and she did not now; but she could not immediately speak, which was the more unusual condition in her, and the harder to disguise.

"You came into this family," Lady Matlock went on, more quietly, "and I think you believed you would have to make yourself smaller to fit the door of it. I have watched you. I wanted you to know that, and that it was never required, whatever anyone may have let you think." She released Elizabeth's hand. "Fitzwilliam has never been an easy man to love. You have done it without being asked to be anyone other than who you are. That is not a small thing. It is, in fact, the whole of it."

"Thank you," Elizabeth said. It was not effusive. She had found, in a life of ready words, that the words came hardest exactly where they mattered most, and that the people worth saying them to could tell the difference between what was meant and what was merely produced. "I will wear it," she added, "and not only for the world."

Lady Matlock looked at her a moment longer, and nodded once, satisfied. Then she turned them both toward the parlor and the lamplight and the sound of Georgiana playing for them.

Darcy handed Elizabeth up into his carriage himself, though the footman stood ready, and took the seat across from her rather than beside. The lamps were lit along the pavement, and on these short drives he liked to be able to look at her, which he could not do at all well sitting beside her.

She kept worrying at something small in her gloved hand, half hidden in the folds of her cloak. He did not ask.

Darcy had seen his aunt draw her apart as the ladies left the table, and he had come to understand the patience that loving Elizabeth required. She would tell him what she wished him to know, in her own hour, and was never the worse for being let alone until then.

It was Elizabeth who gave way first. "Your aunt gave me this." She opened her hand. The brooch lay in her palm, the dark stone waking and dimming in the carriage lamp. "She said it had been your mother's."

He did not answer at once. He had not seen it in years and the sight of it in another woman's hand undid something in his chest he had believed long since put away and set on a high shelf.

His mother had worn it at the collar of a pale rose morning gown. He remembered the gown more clearly than he could now remember her face, which was its own small grief, and not one he had looked at squarely in some time.

"It was hers," he said. His voice was not entirely steady, and he did not trouble to make it so for there was no one in the carriage he needed to be steady for.

"I had thought it gone. Sold, or lost, or carried off to Rosings with everything else of hers my Aunt Catherine took it into her head to keep." He looked up from the brooch to her face. "I am glad it is yours. I find I am a great deal gladder than I know how to say."

"Then do not try to say it now." She opened her reticule and gently placed the brooch inside and reached across the narrow space between the seats, and laid that same hand against his, warm through her glove. "Say it some other day, when we are not being jostled half out of our seats. I shall hold you to it."

He turned his hand beneath hers and held it, and they rode the rest of the way so, not speaking. It was something he had once believed himself unable to do, and now suspected he preferred to almost any conversation in London.