Page 28 of Shipwrecked with Mr Darcy

“You wrote about your sister.”

He put down the stone he was carrying. The muscles in his arms relaxed, but his jaw remained tight.

“I wrote about Georgiana, yes.”

Elizabeth turned to face him. Her expression was open in a way he had not seen before on the island. She was neither challenging nor defensive; she had discarded the armour of her previous judgements. She sincerely wanted to know.

“Tell me,” she said. “Not in a letter. Not in the cautious sentences you selected when you wrote to an angered woman. Tell me what actually happened.”

He sat down on the sand. Elizabeth sat across from him, her knees drawn up, preparing to listen.

He told her.

He did not offer the version from the letter, which had been composed in anger and shame by a man rejected. That written account was accurate. The spoken version was truthful, capturing the raw emotion he had previously kept hidden.

He spoke of Georgiana at fifteen. She was shy in the way their mother had been—not from lack of feeling, but from too much of it. Their mother had died when Georgiana was three, and their father when she was eleven. Darcy had been twenty-two, newly master of Pemberley, and the sole guardian of a girl who expected him to know what he was doing.

He had not known what he was doing. He could manage an estate and adjudicate tenant disputes. He could not manage a sister who missed their father with an inexpressible grief. She compensated by playing the pianoforte for hours a day and speaking only when directly addressed, retreating entirely into silence.

He spoke of the companion he had hired on recommendation. The woman's credentials had been fabricated, her connection to Wickham expertly concealed. Darcy had been deceived. The failure of his own judgement remained an unhealed wound.

Then came Ramsgate. Wickham had courted Georgiana in secret for three months before Darcy arrived unexpectedly. He found his fifteen-year-old sister on the verge of elopement with a man who wanted only her thirty thousand pounds.

He told Elizabeth this part carefully. His sister was not there to choose what was shared, and the telling felt like a second failure of guardianship.

Elizabeth's face went through a series of changes: surprise, then recognition, then a tightening of anger around her mouth. The anger was directed at Wickham. Darcy noticed the distinction, and a tension he had been carrying since Hunsford loosened.

“She was fifteen,” Elizabeth said.

“Yes.”

“And he was, what, twenty-four? Twenty-five?”

“Twenty-five.”

She was quiet. Her arms tightened around her knees, and her gaze dropped to the sand. She sat very still, absorbing the full weight of it.

“I liked him,” she said.

The confession was entirely without decoration. She refused to soften it for his benefit or her own.

“He was charming and attentive, and told me exactly what I wished to hear. I believed every word. He claimed you had denied him the living at Kempston out of spite, and I believed it. He blamed your pride for every injustice he suffered. I believed him because I already wanted to think ill of you, and he gave me permission.”

She looked up with clear eyes, and the sharpness of her vision was worse than tears, because it meant she was seeing herself truthfully and not avoiding the view.

“I was vain,” she said. “That is the precise word. Not mistaken, or misled. I was vain. He flattered me, and the flattery clouded my judgement—the very judgement I have always prided myself upon. Believing myself too clever for vanity is the most humiliating discovery I have ever made.”

Darcy did not speak. The silence was deliberate. She was telling him something that cost her, and the least he could do was let the cost stand without rushing to diminish it.

“I owe you an apology,” she said. “I will not apologise for everything I said at Hunsford, for some of it was justified. But I must apologise for Wickham. I believed him without question. I took his word as evidence against you when I had nothing but his smile and my own willingness to be deceived. For that, I am truly sorry.”

She delivered the apology without performance or softening qualifications. She was sorry, she had said so, and now she waited.

“You had no reason to doubt him,” Darcy said. “He is practised at deception. He has been refining it since we were boys.”

“I had every reason to doubt him. I simply chose not to. Doubting him would have required acknowledging my own prejudice.”

They sat on the beach within the unfinished signal. The H and the E were complete, the L half-built.