Swipe Left on Mr. Darcy — Follow Request, Page 9
By Suha · Published
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Transcript
Page 9 (two stacked panels). Panel 1: Darcy hovers awkwardly at the far end of the black grand piano, arms at his sides, tense and over-invested, watching the two women like a man defusing a bomb. Lizzie leans on the piano; Georgiana sits at the keys. Panel 2: From behind the bench — Lizzie glances back at Darcy over her shoulder, dry and fond. Darcy, caught out, blinks. LIZZIE: Go and be somewhere else for ten minutes.
Image description
Two panels: Darcy hovers tensely at the end of the piano watching Lizzie and Georgiana; then Lizzie glances back over her shoulder and tells him to go and be somewhere else.
About this chapter
The engagement is public, the town has its version, and now Lizzie has to face the one audience that actually matters. Darcy takes her out to the estate to meet his younger sister Georgiana — seventeen, painfully shy, and the person whose good opinion he cares about more than anyone's on earth. Lizzie arrives at the foot of the stone steps with a knot in her stomach for a reason she can't say out loud: she is the girl who sat in a coffee shop and swallowed George Wickham's story whole, and Georgiana is the girl he actually tried to destroy. The first hour is a slow-motion catastrophe of good manners — a too-formal greeting in the sunlit hall, three people and three cups of tea and nothing to say, Darcy hovering like a man defusing a bomb. Then Lizzie spots the piano, and the girl who can barely finish a sentence sits down and turns into someone else entirely. Lizzie chases Darcy out of the room, and in the golden quiet of the music room Georgiana finally asks the question she has been holding all afternoon: he told you, didn't he — about last summer. Lizzie could be gentle. Instead she tells the truth: she believed every word that man said too, and repeated it to half her town for weeks. The shame Georgiana has carried alone since she was sixteen turns out to be shared, and halved, and survivable. Darcy comes back to find the two of them shoulder to shoulder on the piano bench, heads together, his sister laughing — and the man who spent a year unable to smile is undone in a doorway. By golden hour Lizzie is standing at the top of the steps instead of the bottom, on the inside of the door, with a standing invitation for next weekend. The hard part was never the door.