Page 66 of The Servants’ Matchmaking

"I want you to know it. There is a difference."

Elizabeth held his gaze, steady. "Then tell me when it can be told without exposing Miss Darcy to company."

At Longbourn, Mr. Bennet took them both into the library. Jane stayed behind with Bingley and Mrs. Bennet, a small act of sisterly tact Darcy would be grateful for the rest of his life.

Georgiana's reply had arrived that morning: if Wickham approached Elizabeth, Darcy might tell her and her father the whole account, and no one else. With that permission, Darcy told the history in full. His father's affection for Wickham, which had never once wavered no matter what it cost. The living Wickham had refused, exchanged instead for three thousand pounds at his own request. The money spent inside two years. The later demand for more. Ramsgate. Georgiana at fifteen, lonely, flattered, persuaded toward an elopement that had nothing to do with love and everything to do with her thirty thousand pounds. His own arrival, by luck more than judgement, in time to stop it.

He kept his voice level all the way through until he reached the part where Georgiana had believed, for weeks afterward, that she had disappointed him. There his composure gave out. His voice cracked on the word disappointed, and he had to stop and start the sentence again. Elizabeth did not interrupt him. She sat very still and let him finish.

"She was a child," Elizabeth said, when he had.

"She believed herself old enough to decide."

"Children often do. The adult who used that belief against her bears the guilt for it — not her."

Mr. Bennet removed his spectacles and set them down with unusual care. "You have my confidence, Mr. Darcy. I will restrict Wickham's acquaintance with my younger daughters as far as our public circumstances will allow."

"Thank you."

"I should have watched them more closely, even before your warning. That failure is mine to correct, not yours."

Darcy had expected wit from him, some dry deflection to smooth the moment over. Mr. Bennet's plain seriousness commanded a great deal more respect than a joke would have.

They settled the boundaries they could enforce. Wickham would not be received at Longbourn; Bingley had already excluded him from Netherfield. Darcy would give Colonel Forster a factual warning about Wickham's debts and repeated attempts to obtain money by deceit, without naming Georgiana. It did not make Wickham harmless. It ensured he would no longer move among them unobserved.

Mr. Bennet left them a few minutes later, remarking that a library ought not to become a courtship parlour, but that the door might reasonably stay open for five minutes, and not one minute more.

Elizabeth stood beside the desk. "Why did you tell me now?"

"Because I watched Wickham walk toward you today and realised my silence had become just another decision made for you, without your consent. I could not do that to you again."

"You had already told me enough."

"Enough for caution. Not enough for trust."

"You trusted me with Georgiana's pain the moment you started speaking."

"Yes."

The words pressed under his ribs. He understood, perhaps for the first time, that composure had never once made the telling of a hard thing painless. It only made it look that way from the outside.

Elizabeth came closer. She did not touch him. The distance she kept felt deliberate, and somehow more tender for being deliberate.

"I will tell no one," she said. "Not even Jane."

"I know."

"You could not have known that before today."

"I did."

Something in her eyes went soft at that. "Then perhaps the trust came before the explaining."

"Perhaps it did."

Mrs. Bennet's voice called for Elizabeth from the drawing room, bright and oblivious. Five minutes had ended.

Before she left, Elizabeth stopped in the doorway. "Fitzwilliam."