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“You are very kind to think of my walking.”

“Miss Bingley spoke of little else for a week at Netherfield.”

“I remember.” She smoothed the rug over her knees. “I do not think my petticoat has ever been so famous, before or since.”

He very nearly smiled. For a moment he thought she might, too. Then she turned back to the window, and the moment was gone.

“The library at Pemberley has been the work of many generations,” he said. “You are fond of books. I think you would like it. If there is anything it wants, you need only tell me, and I will send for it.”

“That is very generous.” She folded her hands in her lap. “But you forget, Mr Darcy, that I have heard a great deal about Pemberley already, and not only from you. Mr Wickham talked of it constantly. The woods, the stream, the library too, I believe. He seemed to love every stone of the place, right up until the day you drove him out of it.”

The carriage lurched over a rut. Darcy put out a hand to the strap and kept hold of it for longer than he needed to.

He ought to tell her. He had meant to tell her at Hunsford, before she stopped him. He had meant to tell her at Netherfield, when Bingley urged him to. He could tell her now, in a few plain sentences: the living Wickham had refused and then been paid for, the debts, and Anne. But she had married him yesterday because she had no other choice. If he told her now, shut up with her in a carriage, it would sound like exactly what it was not. It would sound like an excuse he had got ready on the road. She would set it beside Wickham's easy, sorrowful stories, and Darcy had no doubt which of the two she would believe.

He let go of the strap.

“I know Mr Wickham a good deal better than you do. There are times when you might simply trust my judgement.”

Elizabeth made a small sound through her nose. In any other lady he would have called it a snort.

“Your judgement, sir? Your judgement has tried twice to part my sister from the man who loves her.”

“Yes. It has.”

She had plainly expected him to argue. She opened her mouth, and then closed it again.

“I was wrong,” he said. “I have learned my lesson.”

“That remains to be seen.”

She went back to the window. Darcy looked out of his own for the next several miles and could not afterwards have said what he had seen there.

They changed horses at Barnet. Tea was brought, and neither of them drank it. After Highgate the fields gave way to market gardens and brick kilns, and then to rows of new houses, and then to the smoke of London. On the Holloway road a dray tipped half its load of cabbages across the way. The carter stood among them and told the sky exactly what he thought of it. Darcy saw Elizabeth press her lips together very hard. He wished she would laugh out loud, if only to show him that she still could when he was there.

As they came nearer to the square, he began to worry about something else.

Wickham had talked to her of Pemberley. He had very likely talked to her of Georgiana too, and nothing Wickham said of Georgiana could be trusted. His sister was sixteen. She could not buy a pair of gloves without begging the shopman's pardon for the trouble. If Elizabeth met her coolly, even once, Georgiana would shrink away and not come out again for a month. He had asked his wife to trust him and been told it remained to be seen. He could hardly ask her to be kind to a girl she had every reason to count on his side.

“My sister is very young,” he said as they turned into the square. “And very shy. She has not been much in company outside our own family.”

Elizabeth gave him a long look.

“You need not instruct me, sir. I have four sisters. I believe I know something of the breed.”

The carriage stopped. The footman had not yet let down the step when the front door flew open, and by the time Darcy had handed Elizabeth down to the pavement, Georgiana was halfway down the steps. She had no bonnet on and no shawl, and she paid no attention at all to the windows across the square, where he did not doubt the neighbours were enjoying the sight.

She ran straight into his arms. He caught her and held her, and she laughed into his coat. She smelled of lavender water. For a moment he forgot the road and the rut, and the cellar at Longbourn, and everything else.

“You are come at last! I have been watching from the drawing room since eleven.”

She stepped back, and he saw that she was holding a little bunch of roses and sweet william, tied with a blue ribbon. It had been badly crushed between them. Georgiana looked down at it in dismay, and then past him at Elizabeth. Her face went pink right up to her hair. Darcy watched her gather her courage and very nearly lose it again.

Then she came forward and held out the flowers.

“Mrs Darcy, I am so very glad you have come. I have always wanted a sister, and now I have one. I hope you will not think me forward. I picked these myself this morning from the hothouse. I am afraid they were a great deal prettier an hour ago.”

Darcy did not move.