“The tea, man. The tea. Miss Darcy came to my home yesterday for the purpose of inviting Letitia to tea. Fortunately, she mentioned the names of the guests to my daughter’s companion, who immediately informed me. I find your sister blameless in all this. But I must warn you, Darcy, her association with these people will affect her pursuit of a marriage partner. She will find offers scarce if this continues.”

“I appreciate your concern for Georgiana. However, I am her guardian, and I will do what I think is best for her,” Darcy said through gritted teeth. “By the way, my grandmother was a Catholic.”

Sir John noted the change in Darcy’s voice and knew he had strayed from the matter at hand. He moderated his tone, as he had no wish to offend a Darcy, especially since it was an association with the Darcy family that he had been after in the first place.

“I want no hard feelings between us, Darcy. However, I must ask that you stop seeing my daughter. She was not brought up to…”

“I understand your concerns, Sir John,” Darcy said, interrupting, “and if I have hurt your daughter in any way, it was not intentionally done. May I ask that you convey to Miss Montford my wishes for her health and happiness?” Darcy stood up to let Sir John know the conversation had come to an end.

“I thank you for taking this so agreeably. But a word of advice. Your idea of a courtship is rather unconventional. Coming and going, disappearing for weeks at a time, no letters. That will not win you the affection of any lady. I tell you this since your father was a friend of mine, and I am sure he would have given you the same advice.”

Darcy nodded his head but said nothing, and rang for Rogers to see his visitor to the door. After watching a hackney take the odious man away, Darcy poured himself a brandy and took a chair in front of the fire, and with the first taste of liquor, he felt every muscle in his body relax. It was over. It was finally over. The peril had passed, and he was a free man. Now nothing stood between Elizabeth and him.

Ordinarily, Georgiana would have come downstairs to find out what had happened, but she was nowhere to be seen. But there was no mystery there, and her brother rang the bell for Rogers.

“Ask my sister to join me. Immediately.”

From the way Will was sitting in front of the fireplace, with all of his attention being directed toward the fire, Georgiana could not tell how things had gone with Sir John, but she suspected that her meddling in the Montford affair had been revealed.

Darcy let her stew for a few more minutes before beginning. “You have been busy, Georgiana.”

Georgie shook her head, pretending that she did not know what he was talking about. She was not prepared to admit to anything as she might make an unnecessary confession.

“Do not shake your head at me. The friend you visited yesterday was Letitia Montford. How very clever of you to arrange for a tea and share the guest list with Mrs. Redford. Of course, all of those invited to this imaginary get-together were ladies with whom Miss Montford would not associate. As a result, Sir John wants me to keep as far away from his daughter as possible, lest I contaminate her by insisting she mingle with people not of her class.”

“Oh, Will!” Georgiana ran to her brother and kissed him, and then she did a bit of a dance to show him how happy she was. “It worked. I did not know if it would, but once I realized I had an ally in Mrs. Redford, I thought it might. And it did. It did work.”

“You interfered in my personal affairs. Again.”

“But you cannot complain of something that turned out so well.”

“I most certainly can. What you did, young lady, was very wrong, beginning with your part in arranging to have Elizabeth go to Pemberley.”

“But if it had not been for our conspiracy, you would have gone to Kent to visit Anne and not Pemberley, where you waltzed with Elizabeth. It turned out perfectly. Better than any of us had reason to hope.”

“Lucky for you that it did. However, I insist you stay out of my affairs. I believe you have benefited from beginner’s luck, but you could end up doing more harm than good. Sir John has a temper, and this might have turned out quite differently.”

“I thought about that. But Sir John would not risk alienating you with a display of temper, and our concern that this whole affair might damage your reputation or cause you to lose friends was never a real threat. You do have a reputation, and it is spotless. Besides, you have more and better friends than Sir John could ever hope to, including people such as the Bingleys and the Gardiners.”

“Well, apparently Letitia was very much in favor of ending our unorthodox courtship. Richard informed me that he has learned from gossip at his club that she prefers Jasper Wiggins to me in any event.”

“Jasper Wiggins? Really? I know his sister, Adele.”

“Georgie, leave it alone. The young Wiggins will hear of Miss Montford’s freedom soon enough from Sir John.” Looking at her with a stern eye, he repeated, “Leave it alone.”

But Darcy could see the wheels spinning and suspected there was little he could do to stop his sister from plotting and planning. She should be a novelist. But then he smiled, and Georgie knew exactly what he was going to say: “Tomorrow, we go to Hertfordshire.”

Chapter 47

Knowing that Mr. Bennet and Lydia would soon arrive at Longbourn, there was a tension at the breakfast table that was palpable. Each of the sisters had their own reasons for being upset. Mary thought that to sneak off with a man in the dead of night was immoral. Kitty was upset because she knew she would have behaved better than Lydia if she had been allowed to go to Brighton, while Jane thought of the unhappiness Lydia had caused her parents. But because of Mr. Darcy, it was Lizzy who had something to lose, and for that reason, she was unsympathetic to anything her mother had to say on her youngest sister’s behalf.

Because Lydia was Mrs. Bennet’s favorite, her mother was prepared to forgive and forget and to chalk up all her actions to youthful indiscretion. However, there was still an underlying anger because she had been made to suffer unnecessarily, and Lizzy, not Lydia, was to bear the brunt of it.

“Lizzy, I do not like your tone of voice when speaking of Lydia. I would think that you, of all people, would be more sympathetic to your sister. With Wickham being so very bad, her heart will be broken because there is no one to love her.”

“No one to love her!” Lizzy answered in an exasperated voice, and she thought about how everyone had sprung into action in order to keep their sister from ruining her life. But Jane cautioned Lizzy with a look. Although most of their mother’s episodes of nerves were theater, Jane knew that this event had greatly upset her.

“But why me in particular, Mama?” Lizzy asked in confusion.

“Because you have no one to love you either. It did not have to be that way. You could have had Mr. Collins, but you lost him to Charlotte Lucas. And now Mr. Peterson won’t have you. According to his letter, he has made an offer of marriage to his cousin, Miss Gayle. I knew something like this would happen. With you running around on holiday in Derbyshire, I knew Mr. Peterson would not wait. But, Lizzy, you must do your part in finding a husband. You cannot rely on Jane to carry you through.”

Lizzy stood up. If she remained in the breakfast room a moment longer, she might say something to her mother that she would come to regret, and Jane followed her upstairs.

“Obviously, Mama opened a personal letter addressed to me and learned that Mr. Peterson ‘will not have me,’” Lizzy said, throwing herself back onto the bed pillows. “Jane, I am so tired of all this drama. First it was Mr. Darcy and Miss Montford and now Lydia and Wickham. It really is getting to be too much.”

“Well, you might have to put up with all this drama a little longer because Uncle Gardiner’s carriage has just turned into the drive.”

As expected, Lydia’s entrance was as dramatic as a Shakespearean tragedy. She had not cried during the long journey to Longbourn, but now that she was at home and had a friendlier audience than her father and uncle, she renewed her copious weeping even before the front door had closed behind her. The emotionally spent sixteen-year-old girl had to be assisted to her room by her mother, Aunt Gardiner, and Kitty, and while Mr. Gardiner went to the kitchen in search of a meal, Mr. Bennet summoned Jane and Lizzy into the library. He quickly summarized for his daughters the events that had taken place in Brighton.

“There is no doubt Wickham intended to lure Lydia away from the Forsters. By his own admission, he had no intention of marrying her, so his sole purpose was her seduction. I do not understand it,” their father said, shaking his head. “The streets of Brighton were teeming with handsome young women. He could have approached any of them, but instead, he picked Lydia. It does not make any sense to me.

“The other thing that has puzzled me greatly is Mr. Darcy’s involvement in this whole affair. Colonel Forster told me that Mr. Darcy’s presence was invaluable as Lydia was in a near constant state of hysteria, and no one, not even his wife, could get her to calm down until Mr. Darcy offered to speak to her. Ten minutes later, he came downstairs and not another peep was to be heard from her until she saw your uncle and me.”

“Did he give a reason for his actions?” Lizzy asked.

“Yes, he said that he has known Wickham since he was a boy on the Pemberley estate and knew him to be capable of the most immoral behavior. He felt that if he had made known Wickham’s character, this could never have happened. Although it would have been a relief to take the weight of all that guilt off my shoulders and to have put it on his, I could not do it. It was my dereliction of duty as a father that was the true cause of all this unhappiness.

“Mr. Darcy remained in town for another two days and offered the services of his solicitor, but when I tried to thank him, he was embarrassed and said I owed him nothing. The man is an absolute cipher—as stoic a fellow as I have ever met.”

“What will happen to Wickham?” Jane asked.

“According to Colonel Forster, because of Mr. Darcy’s intervention, from a military point of view, Wickham has not actually done anything wrong, so he will not be brought up on charges. Other than withholding his last month’s pay and being forced out of the militia, the only thing Colonel Forster can do is leave him to his fellow officers. Because Wickham owes debts of honor to so many of them, he will be lucky to get out of Brighton alive. Additionally, the colonel sent an aide around to the shops and public houses to find out how much Wickham owed them. His debts are significant, and the colonel is confident he will end up spending some time in debtors’ prison unless some benefactor comes forward, an unlikely scenario.”