Page 39 of Miss Bennet is Gone

Darcy nodded his agreement on that count.

“It galls me,” Richard said, turning his cup. “I will be honest with you, it galls me to the bone, that she sleeps tonight in a feather bed in Scotland and not on straw where she belongs. A soldier likes an account squared. It is not the justice I wanted. It is the justice that costs Elizabeth nothing. I have made my peace with the trade, and so must you.”

Darcy was quiet a moment. “I find I do not care, this morning, whether Catherine is on straw or down,” he said. “I wanted to take that house apart with my hands, and I sat all night in a chair, and somewhere in the night the wanting simply went out of me, because Elizabeth was sleeping and I was with my love at last. I found I had no room left in me for Catherine. Let her have the north. Elizabeth is in that bed. The two facts do not seem to me to be on the same scale at all.”

Richard stood and said his goodbyes to the men who had sat with him through the ordeal and Georgiana came in through the front door as he went out, her face flushed and eyes darting around for her brother.

“He is in the back parlour,” Richard said as he gave her a small hug, “Elizabeth is resting.”

“Brother must be at once the happiest and most exhausted man in all the kingdom,” she said.

“Indeed,” said the colonel, “go into him now before he nods off.”

As she came into the parlour, Darcy stood and welcomed his sister into his arms. “She is upstairs, and she is safe and whole,” Darcy said. "She is asleep. She is not hurt, or not in any way that will not mend, and you may see her when she wakes."

Georgiana held him tightly. Being alone with him at Darcy House she knew exactly the strain he had endured.

"And it was not an illness,” she said

"It was not an illness." Darcy knew what was coming.

"I have known that since the morning I asked you," she said. "I should like, if you please, to be told the rest of it now, all of it, and not the version that is fit for me."

So he told her, standing in a merchant's front parlour in another man's shirt, of the cordial and the room and the bar on the windows, and who had done it, and Georgiana heard the whole of it without sitting down.

When he came to their aunt’s visit on his ruined wedding day, she put her hand out to the back of a chair and held it.

"She came to me,” Darcy said. "The Tuesday. She sat in our drawing-room and drank our tea and took my hand and told me that Providence had been very kind to this family by putting off the wedding, and I thanked her for coming."

“How could you have known, how could any of us? She deeply disliked Elizabeth but this was beyond the pale, Brother. I wish that I had done more to help you find our Lizzy.”

"You did what I asked of you," Darcy said. "You lied to every caller in London and asked me nothing, and you were the only person I did not have to manage, and if you are looking for the part of this you are answerable for, you will not find it, because I have looked, and it is not there."

Georgiana was quiet a moment. Then, "I said to leave them nothing."

"We have left her the name," Darcy said. "She has gone north with Anne. They will not come south again, nor be told when Elizabeth and I marry."

Georgiana nodded once, and did not say that it was enough, because it was not, and they both knew it, and neither of them had the smallest wish to say so on the morning Elizabeth was asleep upstairs.

Then she took off her bonnet, at last, and sat down in the Gardiners' parlour to wait, and would not be persuaded home, and was still there in the afternoon when the house came awake.

Lady Matlock came in the early afternoon, and she and Mrs. Gardiner met in the hall and looked at one another, the countess and the merchant’s wife, ans went into one another’s arms and wept, openly, at last, the held tears of those days.

They wept, and were not ashamed, and were the better for it. Jane drew Mr. Bingley quietly into the next room and pulled the door to and left them to it, and stood there in the dim with her hand in his.

There was a thing to be said before the brooch, and Lady Matlock said it standing in the hall, because she had carried it a fortnight and would not carry it up any stairs.

"You told me, the morning after that terrible, lost wedding day, that somebody had meant that girl a kindness in her last easy hour, and that you would give a year of Sundays to find the woman and thank her."

She took Mrs. Gardiner's hands in both of hers. "There was no such woman. I never sent a cordial, nor a card, nor one word about my mother and my wedding, for I never had a mother at my wedding to write of. Anne wrote it. In my hand, with my love in it, because they knew that child would drink down anything at all that came to her from me."

Mrs. Gardiner stood very still. "Then it was not a kindness."

"It was not, and you urged her to drink it, and there is not a woman alive in that room or any other who would have done differently, because it came with my name on it and my name was safe."

Lady Matlock opened her reticule and took out a small, folded handkerchief, and from it the brooch.

“We took it back from her last night,” she said. “Off the chain at her waist, where she had been wearing it as though it were hers. It is going back to the young lady it was given to.”