TWENTY-FIVE
Oakham Mount
Darcy
They had reached a fallen log near the lower path when Darcy asked that they stop a while.
The ground at the base of the mount was hard with frost, the grass pale and brittle underfoot, the air sharp enough that breath showed faintly.
It was not the most forgiving terrain for wheels.
Marsh had assessed it without comment that morning and pronounced it manageable. Darcy was beginning to have his doubts.
Elizabeth settled herself upon it without ceremony, which was entirely characteristic of her, and resumed what she had been saying about her mother's cook and the particular superiority of a well-made syllabub over every other dessert known to the English kitchen.
She had strong opinions on the matter. She expressed them with the same earnest precision she brought to chess strategy, faith or any other subject, as though the relative merits of syllabub versus trifle were a question deserving of serious intellectual engagement.
Darcy listened with half his attention and allowed the other half to go where it had been going with increasing regularity for the past eight days.
Bingley and Jane were some distance ahead on the path, their voices carrying back occasionally in fragments — Jane's quiet, Bingley's warmer and more frequent.
Sarah walked some distance behind, maintaining the discreet and reliable distance that had become the settled arrangement of every outing.
Marsh had positioned himself further still, near enough to assist if required and far enough that the conversation between Darcy and Elizabeth remained their own.
This was the fourth outing. They had gone to the Mimram on the fifteenth, the path level and frost-edged and entirely suitable for wheels, and Elizabeth had described the river in summer with such warmth that Darcy had found himself regretting, for the first time, that he had not come to Hertfordshire sooner.
On the eighteenth they had gone to the old mill path near Meryton bridge, where the ground was compacted and the water moved quietly beside them.
Sir William Lucas had walked past on the far bank and waved with such enthusiasm that even Darcy had been unable to find it entirely disagreeable.
Now they were at the foot of Oakham Mount, and Elizabeth was defending syllabub with considerable conviction, and Darcy was not thinking about syllabub at all.
Richard's reply had arrived two days ago.
Brief and characteristically direct, as all Richard's correspondence tended to be. He had received the letter. He would leave for Pemberley the morning after writing his reply. He would write again when he had something worth reporting.
Darcy had read it twice, folded it, and placed it in the drawer of the writing table where it had remained since. He could do nothing until Richard wrote again. He had resolved to occupy himself with other things in the meantime.
The resolution had not proved entirely successful.
Wickham was still in Meryton. Bingley had spoken to Colonel Forster as promised, and Forster had received the information with the measured discretion expected of a man of his position.
According to Bingley, the Colonel had not been entirely surprised.
He had heard murmurings of his own regarding Wickham — nothing substantial, nothing he could act upon, but enough that a second account from a gentleman who had known the man the better part of his life carried weight.
He would keep a closer eye on him. That was all he had promised.
It was something. It was not enough.
Darcy had found himself thinking about Wickham in his spare time more than he could help. The possibility of his having had some hand in the accident. What he would do to him if it were ever proven that he was in Harrogate during the wedding.
Marsh had noticed the preoccupation. Marsh always noticed.
Yet rather than address it directly, he had taken, after every outing, to remarking upon how agreeable the afternoon had been — the air, the paths, the particular quality of Miss Elizabeth's conversation that day.
He always said it with the pretext of making innocent conversation, as though the observation had no ulterior motive.
Darcy was not deceived for a moment. Marsh was not commenting on the countryside.
He never had been. And it worked every time, which was the most irritating thing about it.
Elizabeth tilted her head deliberately into his eyeline. "You are not listening."
“I am listening.” Darcy turned toward her, smiling.
“You have not reacted to anything I have said in four minutes. I told you my mother once instructed our cook to make syllabub for a dinner party and the result was something considerably closer to warm cream with ambitions. You did not even smile . ”
"I apologise for the cream."
Elizabeth narrowed her eyes slightly, her gaze settling on him. “You have been thinking of something.”
It was not quite a question.
“Partly,” Darcy said.
“Does it have anything to do with Mr. Wickham?" She paused. "Because since I told you he was in Hertfordshire, you seem to drift off sometimes when we are speaking."
Darcy almost smiled. So it was not only Marsh who had noticed. Elizabeth had seen it too, apparently without any difficulty whatsoever.
“Yes,” he said. “Partly. It is a suspicion I cannot entirely dismiss. I have written to my cousin regarding it.”
Elizabeth held his gaze a moment longer, then let it go.
"And the other part?" she said.
He looked at her then. Properly. With the full attention he had been attempting to give her all afternoon before Wickham repeatedly intruded upon his thoughts.
Over the last three outings and the past eight days, Darcy had attempted to examine honestly what existed between them.
The conclusion remained stubbornly unchanged.
He might call it agreeable company, uncommon intelligence, or merely the natural ease born of familiarity, yet every evening ended in precisely the same manner, with the house quiet around him and his thoughts returning inevitably to something Elizabeth Bennet had said, or the expression with which she had said it.
He was not merely interested in Elizabeth Bennet.
He had not been for some time.
The guilt had come with that conclusion, as it always did.
He had let it come. He had let it pass. He did not imagine it would stop arriving — not for a long time yet.
But he had decided, somewhere across these past eight days, that feeling it no longer had to mean the same thing it once had.
Clara was gone. That truth had not changed.
But he was still here, and he had found a reason to truly try to be.
There was only one lapse in that hope.
He was a man in a bath chair. And he could not, with any honesty, ask a woman of Elizabeth's intelligence and vitality to build a life around that.
He glanced ahead toward the mount, its upper path disappearing into the tree line above them, and then back toward her.
"You described this place to me at Netherfield," he said. "At the breakfast table, the morning you and your sister left. You said the lower paths were accessible. That the ground was manageable for wheels."
"I remember," said Elizabeth.
"Every place you recommended, you had already considered whether it was accessible. Not as an afterthought." He paused. "I noticed that."
Elizabeth said nothing. Her gaze moved between his eyes and his lips, as though weighing each word as it came.
"I have noticed a considerable number of things," Darcy continued, his words measured, each one chosen.
"Across these excursions and several weeks of acquaintance.
" He looked down briefly at his hands upon the arm of the chair.
"I find I notice them still when you are not present.
Which is, I have concluded, rather more significant than I initially allowed. "
The meadow was quiet around them. Sarah stood some distance away near the path, entirely absorbed in her own thoughts.
Elizabeth had not spoken. She had gone very still.
“You possess intelligence of a kind I have encountered very rarely,” he said.
“Not the performance of it. The substance. You read without vanity and argue without needing triumph and listen in a way most people do not.” He paused.
“You have spoken to me honestly since the first real conversation we shared, and you have not altered that manner for my sake. I find I value it more than I can easily express.”
Elizabeth shifted uneasily upon the log, her expression altering into something quieter and more careful than her usual composure.
"Mr. Darcy—"
“I am not finished,” he said, his voice quiet enough that she halted immediately.
He looked away from her then, toward the pale line of the horizon beyond the mount.
"I am a man in a bath chair," he said. "I do not say it for sympathy.
I say it because it is the material fact of my situation and I will not pretend otherwise.
" His hand moved slightly against the arm of the chair.
"I cannot dance with you. I cannot walk beside you on a path in the ordinary sense of the word.
I cannot offer you the things a man in full health might offer without qualification.
" He was quiet for a moment. "There are things I find I wish I could offer that I am not in a position to offer properly. That is the difficulty."
The silence that followed was not uncomfortable. It was the silence of two people sitting with something that had been said and could not be unsaid.