Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE TRUTH BETWEEN US
Darcy
My conscience would not let me rest. I had to tell Elizabeth before Caroline’s letter reached Jane.
A Darcy does not cower, after all, and certainly not before a Bingley.
My father’s voice echoed in my head, telling me to take the responsibility.
So I sent my card to Gracechurch Street and braced myself for the consequences.
Elizabeth was free on a Monday, and I arranged to escort Miss Elizabeth to Harding and Howell on Pall Mall, where a new shipment of Italian silks had arrived and where, I suggested, she might find something suitable for spring.
The Gardiners gave their consent although they did not know that the courtship contained a confession that would, in all probability, end it.
She appeared on the steps at half past ten, in yet another green dress. Willow green this time—calmer, or so it pretended. She wore it with the careless confidence of a woman who has stopped pretending she does not dress for a particular man.
I was grateful, but I was also terrified, because the green dress meant she trusted me, and trust was the one thing I was about to betray.
“Mr. Darcy.” She took my arm with a familiarity that had become—when had it become?—natural. “Italian silks. How very cosmopolitan. I had no idea you took an interest in fabric.”
“I have an interest in quality. The Italians understand drape in ways the English have never mastered.”
“I see. And here I was, under the impression you wished to take a walk with me. But no—it is the drape that compels you.”
“The drape and the company.”
Her smile was entirely without guile, the one she had recently bestowed on me over strawberry ice when she had let down her guard.
It made me feel as though I were standing in a room with all the windows open and the air coming in from every direction at once.
I wanted to stop walking. I wanted to stand on the Cheapside pavement and look at her and commit every detail of that particular smile to memory, because I did not believe I would see it again after today.
We walked. The morning was mild, the sort of London morning that pretends to be spring and then changes its mind by three o’clock, and Elizabeth talked as Elizabeth talks—quickly, wittily, with the verbal agility of a woman who uses language the way a fencer uses a foil.
She told me about a letter from her father in which he expressed bewilderment that both his eldest daughters were still in London and that neither had proved useful.
She described Rose’s latest demand that Sir Bertram be granted a seat at the dinner table.
She asked whether I had heard from Georgiana, and when I said I had, and that Georgiana had sent a new piece of music, Elizabeth said she should very much like to hear it, and the sentence contained a future tense that cut me open.
Once we neared Harding and Howell, I steered us down Half Moon Street, toward the lending library where we could converse in relative peace. I would need the dusty calm because my heart was, at the moment, fencing with my stomach.
“Mr. Darcy?” Elizabeth said at my arm. “I believe this is not the way to Pall Mall. Are we taking a scenic route through the lending libraries of Mayfair?”
“I thought we might need literary fortification before we wrap ourselves with silk.” I hated the bait and switch, but I feared she would not have been so eager to accompany me if not for the prospect of beauty.
This was, I reflected, another evidence of my failing, so I added, “I should like to speak with you, Miss Elizabeth, and the conversation requires more privacy than a silk warehouse can provide.”
Her easy smile faded, the way a fire dims when no one feeds it. What replaced it was a careful wariness—Elizabeth’s intelligence at full capacity—her dark eyes moving across my face as if scrutinizing a document for the second or third time.
“You are very serious this morning. Has something happened?”
“I will explain, and I only hope you will use your judgment and consider my contrition.”
“Sounds ominous.” Her voice cooled by degrees. “Then let us go to your library and take a dose of literary fortification.”
The library was small, bright, and—thank Heaven—empty, save for an elderly gentleman dozing over Gibbon.
The proprietor, familiar with my subscription, waved us to chairs by the window.
Elizabeth sat. I hovered at the glass, searching the pavement for any of the dozen opening lines I had rehearsed since the musicale.
Not one of them was suitable. There was simply no graceful way to confess a betrayal of this magnitude—that I had been the architect of Bingley’s separation from Jane.
I could not blame the Bingley sisters, as I was the one who had noted the many improprieties of the Bennet family at the Netherfield Ball.
I had been appalled at the parents’ lack of social comprehension and their failure to rein in their younger daughters.
I was sure Elizabeth had felt the mortification, and the Bingley sisters had witnessed her consternation.
However, Bingley had been so besotted he was on the verge of proposing marriage to a woman who had held herself silent, smiled at everyone, and did not seem to distinguish him from any other gentleman she had danced with.
I now knew it was her manner of masking the mortification she must have felt—persuading herself to see the good in every situation.
“Darcy?” Elizabeth’s voice cut through my muddled thoughts. “You wished to converse, and I had assumed it was with me instead of the window pane. Or were you counting the streaks left by the shower?”
“I hadn’t counted.”
“I contemplate details when I am nervous, like the way your jaw clenches in synchronicity with your scowls, and occasionally, you would relax, as if you’d convinced yourself that the weather would be sunny, but then the clouds sweep over your countenance, and the furrows between your eyes would deepen.
Whatever it is, you might as well enlighten me before I concoct a story far worse than anything you can possibly recall. ”
I turned from the window and blinked, taking in everything I loved about dear Elizabeth.
Her kindness and ability to piece together puzzles, yet I could not forget her ire, and the not-speaking was agony, because my chest had tightened to the point where drawing a full breath required a great act of will.
“Miss Elizabeth.” My voice came out hoarse.
I cleared my throat and tried again. “I need to… There is something I must tell you, and I would ask…” I drew another breath, and this one shuddered.
She noticed it, of course, and she sat up straighter.
Her lips parted, and those eyes widened. Alerted, her cheeks flushed with color.
She believed I was about to propose. Or at least, she anticipated something pleasurable—a prelude before showering her with silks—the kind of trip that suggested a bright and happy future.
“God help me,” I muttered as my knees weakened, and I dropped in front of her chair.
“Will you hear me without interruption? I need to say this entirely… I need to get through it. All of it. Before I lose the—” I pressed my thumb into the chair’s leg until the wood bit into the pad. “Before my nerve fails.”
The hope in her face flickered and held. She folded her hands in her lap with a deliberateness that told me her heart was doing something extraordinary, and she nodded.
“It is not what you believe.” I stumbled through, my throat tight.
“I have not been honest with you.” I watched her eyes—those fine, dark, devastating eyes—and saw the expectation now tinged with confusion, but she nodded encouragingly, as if I still had something worth anticipating.
And her nod was a knife, because what I was about to say would extinguish her spirit, and I would have to stand here and watch the light go out.
“It concerns Bingley, and your sister, and the events of last November.”
A gasp, followed by the covering of her lips. “What are you saying?”
Her expression dimmed, hope retreating but not extinguished—just wary now.
“I was wrong, abjectly so, and…”
The light went out of her eyes, and I saw the exact moment when she realized this was not a proposal. Her hands tightened, and those eyes narrowed, guarded.
“Go on.”
I remained on my knees—the only proper posture for a penitent—looking up at the devastation I had caused.
“You believe that Caroline and Louisa Bingley maneuvered the separation by concealing Jane’s presence in London and by disparaging her family. That is true. They did.” I paused. My hands were shaking, so I pressed them flat against my thighs. “But they did not act alone.”
Elizabeth’s chin lifted. The gesture was involuntary—a bracing, as though she were preparing to receive a blow—and the sight of it made something in my chest crack, because I was the blow. I was what she needed bracing against.
“In November, I told Bingley that your sister did not return his regard.”
The words came out of my mouth, and I heard them as if from a great distance, flat, terrible, irrevocable. Elizabeth’s face went very still, and I hated the anguish I saw frozen.
“I told him—” My voice scraped. I cleared my throat, but the scraping would not resolve. “I told him that her composure indicated indifference, that her manners, though pleasing, did not suggest a particular attachment, and that a continued pursuit would be both futile and imprudent.”
I could not look away from her eyes. I watched happiness die there—the excitement from Gracechurch Street, the hope of a woman expecting a declaration—all slipping away. The last grip, the sickening release, and then nothing where something had lived.
I forged ahead. “Bingley trusted my judgment, and he left Netherfield without saying goodbye.”
“I know.”