THIRTY
Netherfield
Elizabeth
"Mr Darcy." Elizabeth rose to her feet as Marsh pushed him in.
She had not intended to do so. Indeed, she had planned nothing beyond managing the journey from Longbourn without entirely losing possession of her composure. She had spent the whole drive considering what she ought to say to him and arrived at Netherfield with nothing settled.
Marsh pushed the chair closer and she looked at Darcy's face properly for the first time.
He had not been sleeping. That much was immediately evident.
His eyes bore the heaviness of several restless nights, the skin beneath them darker than she remembered.
Yet it was not the exhaustion that struck her most forcibly.
It was his expression. The gloom which had first greeted her at the Meryton assembly — the one she had since understood was not pride at all but grief wearing the appearance of pride — had returned.
She had watched it lift, fraction by fraction, across four excursions and several weeks of honest conversation.
Foolishly perhaps, she had believed it gone for good.
It was not gone. It had simply been waiting for Lady Catherine to put it back.
Elizabeth had spent the last week believing herself to have suffered considerably. Looking at him now, she revised that opinion entirely.
Marsh positioned him near the window where an armchair rested by the wall, bowed briefly to Elizabeth, cast one look at Darcy, and withdrew without a word.
Mr. Bennet, who had also risen when Darcy entered, spoke before Elizabeth could.
“You must forgive our unannounced visit, sir. Colonel Fitzwilliam came to me this morning with my daughter,” he said, addressing Darcy directly and without ceremony. “He considered it important that she should see you. I heard him out and agreed.”
Mr. Bennet stepped nearer.
“All I ask is that you both listen honestly and speak honestly.” He indicated the chair nearest the door. “I shall sit there quietly with a book.”
He did not wait for a response, but walked to occupy the chair, leaving Elizabeth with Darcy.
The library settled into silence.
It had been chosen deliberately.
Elizabeth understood that the moment Bingley led them there instead of the drawing room.
It was the one room in which she felt reasonably certain no one would wander accidentally within hearing.
She was grateful for it. More grateful still that it was her father chaperoning and not her mother, who would inevitably have stationed herself at the centre of the scene and discovered a reason to speak every four minutes.
Until this moment Elizabeth had not fully understood how completely she trusted her father, nor how completely he trusted her in return.
He had listened that morning whilst she and Colonel Fitzwilliam told him everything — or enough of it — and afterwards sat silent and thoughtful for some time.
Then he looked at her a long moment and said only that he would accompany her and that they must leave immediately.
She had not asked him to. He had not waited to be asked.
He had brought a book.
He was reading it now from the chair nearest the door, one leg crossed over the other, entirely absorbed or appearing to be.
His presence at that distance was sufficient — visible enough to satisfy propriety, remote enough that nothing could reach him unless she chose to raise her voice, which she did not intend to do.
Colonel Fitzwilliam and Bingley had remained in the drawing room. That had been understood without discussion. Mrs Hurst and Mr Hurst were not about, but Caroline Bingley had to be kept at bay.
Elizabeth sat back down. Her heart beating so fast she thought it would give her away entirely. Where was she to begin? What was she to say?
Darcy finally lifted his head to look at her. Aside from acknowledging and thanking her father, he had been avoiding her eyes altogether and had not said a word to her.
Elizabeth looked back at him steadily.
He was not undone — not visibly, not in any way that would have been apparent to someone who did not know how to look at him.
But she had learned, across weeks of outings and conversations, how to read the difference between his deliberate composure and the real thing.
This was not the real thing. The set of his jaw was too careful.
The stillness too sustained. He looked like he had been holding something at a fixed distance for several days and was beginning to feel the effort of it.
"Sir, forgive my lack of discretion—but when Colonel Fitzwilliam told me something of the burden you have been carrying, I found I could not come without first telling my father why." Elizabeth steadied her hand against her skirts. "I hope your spirit is not entirely broken?"
He swallowed, the movement of his throat tight and strained. "You are very good to come, Miss Elizabeth." He turned his head to look at Mr Bennet. "Your father is kind to have brought you."
He spoke with all the proper decorum, but the deflection of the question did not fool Elizabeth.
In the brief second before he looked away, she caught a glimpse of his shattered spirits.
He was trying to brave it out, but that solitary, exhausted look told her he simply did not have the heart to lie to her.
"Colonel Fitzwilliam told me about Wickham," she said. "About Harrogate."
Her fingers tightened briefly in her lap before she forced them to release. She looked past his stiff posture, straight into the raw agony he was trying so hard to conceal.
“I am sorry. That after carrying this burden this long and finally discovering your suspicion justified, he has now fled and the matter still remains—" She stopped, the words catching in her throat. "I am simply sorry."
Darcy’s hands shifted against the arms of the chair — not quite gripping them, but adjusting slowly, deliberately, as if attempting to redirect some violent inward force.
"He will be found," Darcy said. His voice was perfectly even, but Elizabeth felt the cold precision of what lay beneath it, something focused and entirely without mercy. "Wherever Wickham goes, he will be found. Justice will be served."
Elizabeth nodded. The absolute certainty in his tone left no room for platitudes. She swallowed the lump in her own throat, choosing instead to step into the deeper, quieter shadow of his grief.
"Colonel Fitzwilliam told me about Dr Aldridge," she said softly.
The name seemed to strike a physical blow.
Darcy turned his face toward the window, his profile cutting a sharp, rigid line against the grey afternoon light.
A long, agonising moment passed, the silence stretching so thin Elizabeth could hear the steady tick of the mantel clock and the faint rustle of her father shifting in the corner of the room.
When Darcy finally turned back, the cold focus was gone, replaced by a bleak, hollow exhaustion.
"When I saw him come down from the carriage with you and your father," Darcy said, his voice dropping an octave, "I thought he might have."
"Please forgive the liberty he took," Elizabeth said, her voice gentle but firm. "Family sometimes takes such liberties when they are driven by despair."
Darcy swallowed, his throat tightening against his cravat as he processed her words. "I suppose I cannot fault Richard for wanting to break the silence.”
"He is not certain what your aunt said to you," Elizabeth continued, "but I think I have an idea, judging by what she said to me."
She did not elaborate. There was no need to drag Lady Catherine's cruel words into the room, not when the air was already so heavy. Instead, she watched the shadow of her name pass over him, his jaw tightening into a hard line before slowly releasing.
Elizabeth smoothed her skirts, grounding herself before she spoke.
"I confess, I was initially angry about it all.
I hoped you would call at Longbourn — perhaps just once, simply to say you did not share her sentiment.
When I did not see you, I assumed some of the things she said were true, and that you had chosen to withdraw. "
She paused, looking up from her lap to meet his eyes fully. The pride and hurt she had carried for weeks dissolved into nothing but sorrow for him.
"I did not know the weight of what you were going through until your cousin spoke to me this morning," she said softly, her voice steady but laced with regret. "Now I understand why you had to stay away."
Darcy looked at her directly then — a question in his expression that he did not put into words.
The silence that followed had a different quality from the ones before it. Something had shifted.
"What did she say to you?" Darcy said at last, the words rough and hard-won. "Bingley told me Lady Catherine spoke to you privately."
Elizabeth considered how much to give him, measuring the fragile state of his composure against the ugliness of his aunt's words.
"She told me you were intended to Miss de Bourgh," she said, her voice steady despite the memory of it. "That it had been the understanding of both families since childhood. That you had at last seen reason." She held his gaze, refusing to let her eyes waver. "I did not believe it."
"You were correct not to."
"She also spoke of your wife." Elizabeth said it plainly, because there was no useful way to soften it. "As a warning. She implied that the last woman to attach herself to you had paid for the presumption."
She watched his face carefully as she said it. "I want you to know I dismissed it entirely. Whatever happened on that road had nothing to do with counsel or propriety, or anything Lady Catherine chose to frame it as."
Darcy said nothing for a moment. His hands were perfectly still on the arms of his chair.