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“You do not have to say it. I am not blind, Elizabeth. He can be very stiff with people he does not know, and he does not always hide what he thinks of them.” She was silent a moment, choosing her words. “But I think he has some excuse. He was master of Pemberley at an age when most young men think of nothing but horses and tailors. A great many families depend on the estate, and he knows every one of them by name. He taught me to visit the cottages and to learn the children's names. He taught me to bring what was needed before anyone had to ask for it. He says a Darcy who waits to be asked has already failed.”

Elizabeth did not answer.

She was thinking of a man who had stood apart at every assembly in Hertfordshire, looking at the company as though it had been got up to displease him. She thought of her own words to him in the parlour at Hunsford, which had not been kind. None of it sat easily beside a young man doing Madame Duval in a bad French accent for a sick child.

“May I ask you something?” Georgiana had gone a little pink. “You need not answer if it is impertinent.”

“Then I shall keep the right to be offended.”

“Why did you and my brother marry? It was all so very sudden.”

Elizabeth had known someone would ask. She had only hoped to have a better answer ready when they did.

“I cannot tell you all of it. It came about through a misunderstanding, mostly.”

To her surprise, Georgiana smiled. “He said you would tell me that.”

“Did he, indeed?”

“He told me the truth last night, after you had gone up. About Mr Bingley and your sister, and how he tried to part them, not once but twice. He said you told him exactly what you thought of him for it, and that you were very eloquent.” The smile widened. “I think he meant that as a compliment. It is hard to be sure with Fitzwilliam. He told me if I wanted your side, I should ask.”

Elizabeth stopped on the path. Behind them, the footman stopped too and became very interested in a laurel bush.

“He told you that? All of it?”

“We do not keep much from each other. There has only ever been the two of us, you see.” Georgiana drew her on again with a light hand at her elbow. “He was so angry with himself the first time. When he came back from Kent in the spring, he was in the blackest humour for weeks. He hardly spoke at dinner, and he rode out every morning before it was light. Mrs Reynolds asked me if he was ill.”

Elizabeth swallowed. She saw Mr Darcy again in the parlour doorway at Hunsford, with the rain dark on his shoulders, and heard the sentence she had not let him finish. She thought too of what Georgiana had let slip the day before, about letters from Kent, one after another, to a sister who had never heard him mention a lady in her life. She did not care to look at either memory too closely in the middle of Hyde Park.

“So you see,” Georgiana said, with the air of a girl working out a sum on her slate, “if he did it again, after being so unhappy the first time, it must have been a very great mistake. It cannot have been meant unkindly. He is not unkind.”

“You are a loyal advocate.”

“I am an honest one. I wish you would give him another chance, Elizabeth. He is a good man, and his judgement is nearly always sound. There is only one subject where I think it fails him altogether.”

“And what subject is that?”

“Mr Wickham.”

Elizabeth kept her face as it was. It took some doing.

“You will not have heard of him,” Georgiana went on. “He was the son of Papa's steward, and Papa's godson too. He grew up at Pemberley with Fitzwilliam. When I was small he used to put me up on his pony and lead me round the stable yard, and he cut me a whistle from a willow twig. I have it still. Fitzwilliam never liked him, not even when they were boys. I have never understood why.”

“I know Mr Wickham,” Elizabeth said. “He was in Meryton with the militia.”

Georgiana turned to her with a face so eager that Elizabeth almost wished she had said nothing.

“You know him! Oh, how is he? Is he well? Is he still merry? He used to say there was nothing so serious that it would not bear a joke, if you only waited long enough.”

“He was in excellent health and spirits when I last saw him. My youngest sister thought him the most agreeable man in the county.”

“I am so glad. It has been such a long time.” The brightness went out of her as quickly as it had come. “He called at Pemberley once, the summer before last. I was away from home, and I did not even know he had been until I got back. Then Fitzwilliam asked me to come to him in the library. He told me I was never to write to Mr Wickham again, or speak to him, or receive him.”

“Did he tell you why?”

“No. He only said that the matter was closed, in that voice he uses when it is.” Georgiana had caught the ribbon of her bonnet between her fingers and was winding it round and round one glove. “I cried for two days. I adored George, and he grew into such a charming man.”

The way she said it indicated to Elizabeth that Georgiana’s liking of Wickham was not limited to childhood nostalgia, but perhaps affected by the same charm Elizabeth herself had almost fallen for.