TWENTY-NINE
Netherfield
Darcy
Darcy had not slept well in days. Not since Lady Catherine left Netherfield.
He sat near the window of his bedchamber, the frost-hardened lawn visible along the south path — the same path where he and Elizabeth had spoken about faith.
He was not looking at it particularly. He was simply occupying a position that was not the middle of the room, where the chair sat and where everything he had been avoiding tended to accumulate most heavily.
Lady Catherine first. As it always was.
What she had said in Bingley's office had settled somewhere in him that refused to give it up.
Not merely the accusations themselves, though they had been severe enough.
What lingered most persistently was the uncomfortable truth woven amongst them.
She had accused him of selfishness, of retreating from duty beneath the guise of grief.
She had spoken again of Anne, of family expectations long understood, of obligations his mother had once considered settled.
He had endured those arguments before.
For the better part of a year, Lady Catherine had pressed him on the subject of Anne — life had given them a second chance regardless, she said.
She had observed the first months of mourning without comment — he would grant her that much — but as the first year passed with no sign of Darcy emerging from Pemberley with any intention of resuming his duties to the family, she had grown increasingly direct.
He had believed, at first, that distance and silence might eventually discourage her.
They had not. His withdrawal had merely given her a slight pause.
But word of his coming to Hertfordshire had reached her, and the revelation that he had remained in the chair by choice had revived every expectation she once held. She had pressed it without apology.
His jaw tightened at the memory.
What had unsettled him most, however, was not Anne.
It was Clara.
Lady Catherine had spoken her name plainly and without mercy.
Had he listened sooner, acted differently, chosen differently — Clara would still live.
He had already inflicted those accusations upon himself countless times across two years of silence at Pemberley.
He had revisited every decision until grief and guilt became impossible to separate from one another.
But hearing the words spoken aloud by another person had altered something.
Private suffering became humiliation once another voice gave shape to it.
He had ended the conversation. Had sat afterward in Bingley's office alone for a considerable time before Marsh came to find him.
He did not know precisely what had passed between his aunt and Elizabeth in that Longbourn garden.
Bingley had told him only that Lady Catherine had called at Longbourn before leaving Hertfordshire and had spoken privately with Elizabeth.
That was the extent of what Bingley knew. That was the extent of what Darcy knew.
But he knew his aunt. He knew the sharpness of her displeasure when opposed. And with her intention for him renewed with vigour, Elizabeth had opposed her.
The image had lingered relentlessly since then. Elizabeth standing alone beneath Lady Catherine's scrutiny while Darcy remained absent from it entirely. Each attempt not to dwell upon it failed almost immediately.
Because the truth beneath it was deeply uncomfortable.
Elizabeth had faced that confrontation because of him.
He ought to have gone to her. Ought to have been there to defend her, to stand between her and whatever his aunt had chosen to deliver.
But he had been so wholly consumed by his own torment that the thought of going to Longbourn had scarcely presented itself, and when it had, he had pushed it away with the same argument he had been using for two years.
If he had failed to protect Clara, by what right did he imagine himself capable of protecting Elizabeth.
The argument had kept him away, he had allowed it to keep him away and some quiet part of him had always known it was not an argument so much as an excuse.
Another thing he knew with uncomfortable certainty was how Lady Catherine had come to know about Elizabeth at all.
Mr Collins was not in Hertfordshire — he had returned to Hunsford weeks ago and would have had no knowledge of recent developments.
Lady Catherine did not correspond with the Bennet family.
There was only one explanation. Caroline Bingley had spent two hours alone with Lady Catherine before Darcy returned from Oakham Mount that afternoon, and Caroline was not a woman who wasted two hours of proximity to a powerful ally.
She had provided everything Lady Catherine needed to arrive at Bingley's office armed and purposeful.
Darcy had said nothing to Caroline about it directly.
He had asked Bingley quietly to leave her out of what followed.
Bingley had agreed without argument, which told Darcy he had arrived at the same conclusion independently.
Then Richard had arrived with the account from Harrogate. The establishment on the south side of town. The girl who remembered a charming man who left with her purse. Wickham in town the day before the wedding and on the day itself
Darcy had taken the news with breath held and crescent-moon marks left in the palms from clenched hands. He had hoped he was wrong. He was not. Certainty felt both better and worse than suspicion had been. Darcy had sent word to Colonel Forster the same hour.
Forster had replied that same evening.
Wickham was gone. Deserted. Someone within the regiment had warned him and he had run with calculation rather than panic, which was entirely consistent with who he was. The search was ongoing. Nothing had been found.
The anger that arrived with that news was cold and focused in a way grief had never been.
It did not undo two years. It did not bring Clara back.
But it separated the guilt from its object and left the guilt standing alone, without the foundation it had rested on for two years, looking considerably less substantial than it had before.
Bingley had come to him before Richard arrived, pressing him about the chair — Lady Catherine had told Bingley about Dr Aldridge before departing Netherfield, apparently believing Bingley would use the information to persuade Darcy to seek treatment and leave Hertfordshire.
It was the kind of manoeuvre that was entirely Lady Catherine — using one person as an instrument against another without troubling herself about the consequences.
Bingley, to his credit, had said nothing to his sisters about it.
He had simply come to Darcy, pressing him in the gentle insufficient way he pressed things — too much warmth, not enough willingness to push the wound directly. Darcy had deflected him.
When Richard arrived, Bingley had told him everything. Richard pressed Darcy with a different argument. He was more persuasive.
You are punishing yourself for something Wickham did. How long do you intend to let him win?
Darcy had not answered. He had not been able to locate an argument against it that he actually believed Richard would accept, and offering one he did not believe was a waste of both their time. He had simply sat with it through the night and was sitting with it still.
He had told himself for two years that the chair was the appropriate consequence of what he had done — that a man who had placed his wife in a carriage and watched her die did not deserve to recover from the same accident she had not survived.
The logic had seemed sound in the dark of Pemberley with no one to contest it.
It seemed considerably less sound in the grey morning light with Richard's words still in the room, Wickham still at large and Elizabeth somewhere on the other side of the frost-hardened Hertfordshire fields.
Because Richard was right. Bingley was right too. Darcy was reluctant to admit the last part, but even Lady Catherine had not been entirely wrong — though her reasons had nothing whatsoever to do with him and everything to do with herself.
The chair had never protected anyone. Not Clara — she was gone and nothing Darcy did now would change that.
Not Georgiana, who had spent two years watching her brother disappear and calling it grief when it was something more deliberate than grief.
Not Elizabeth, who had stood in a garden and received whatever his aunt had chosen to deliver because he had left her entirely alone with it.
He was not certain he was ready to let it go.
But Wickham was at large.
That thought had arrived somewhere past three in the morning and refused to leave.
A man confined to a bath chair could do very little about George Wickham.
A man who could stand, who could act with something resembling his full capacity, could do considerably more.
Could pursue the matter through channels that required his physical presence and full authority.
Could ensure that wherever Wickham ran the reach of those he had wronged extended further than he anticipated.
Justice was more important than punishment.
If going after Wickham meant relinquishing the chair, then Darcy would make that trade without hesitation.
He had not said this to Richard or to Bingley. He was saying it now, alone by the window, in the honesty that arrives only when there is no one present to perform composure for.
He thought about Clara. About what she would say if she could. He believed she would find the past two years deeply unsatisfactory. She would have wanted him to live. To find someone worth living for.
The thought of Elizabeth arrived on the heels of that one. He acknowledged it this time without qualification.
He was still sitting with it when he heard the carriage on the drive.
He leaned toward the window. Bingley's carriage. They had said they were going to Colonel Forster that morning. He watched without moving as figures descended.
Mr Bennet first. Darcy's hand tightened on the windowsill. What business had brought him here? Then Bingley. Then Richard. Then Elizabeth.
His grip on the windowsill loosened. Darcy exhaled. The sight of her undid something in him he had been holding carefully in place.
She stepped down last and looked immediately toward the house, and even through glass the weight of that look reached him in a way that had no useful response.
She had come.
He had not gone to her and she had come anyway, which told him something he was not certain he deserved to be told and could not pretend he had not received.
He remained at the window until they had walked out of his view. He looked at the empty drive and the frost-crusted gravel and thought about what it meant that she was inside. That she was here with her father. Only one thing came to mind.
A knock at the door interrupted his thought.
Marsh entered.
"Mr Bennet and Miss Elizabeth are here, sir," he said. "They are asking for you."
Darcy looked at Marsh, sighed deeply, and nodded.
Marsh crossed behind the chair and began pushing him toward the door.