Chapter 8 #2
Breathing was suddenly difficult. Something pressed against my ribs—not pain, but the warning before pain, that awful tightness before everything breaks loose.
“I believed I was acting in his interest. That I was protecting him from an unequal match and an uncertain attachment. I was wrong. On every count, I was wrong, and your sister suffered for it, and Bingley suffered for it. And then, when I was in Hurst’s drawing room, watching your sister walk away and saw the suffering I had caused written on her face…
” I took a ragged breath. “I had to rectify my mistake.”
Elizabeth did not speak. She sat in her chair, her face utterly still—that terrible, struck stillness—and I waited.
The waiting was the worst thing I had ever endured, worse than my father’s death, worse than Wickham’s betrayal, worse than the night I sat in the Netherfield library and told myself that separating a man from the woman he loved was an act of friendship.
“Darcy?” Her voice was surprisingly gentle—the kind of gentleness one used before deploying the decapitation. “I believe you’ve said enough.”
I nodded, slowly rising to my feet and taking the seat next to her. The gentleman reading the Gibbon did not look up, although I presume he had heard the entire conversation.
And so I waited, much like a prisoner at the dock.
My hands trembled, and I was not ashamed of it.
Sweat prickled my brow. I tried not to scowl, because I was at her mercy.
She would not overlook my faults; if anything, she would add them to her vast compendium of everything she had weighed and found wanting.
She would despise me again, and my only consolation would be Bingley and Jane’s happiness.
When I had confessed my role to Bingley, how mistaken I was, and how I had given Sir Bertram to the Gardiner children, arranged for Jane’s presence in society, he had looked at me with an innocent confusion that had cleared immediately.
By jove, Darcy, he had said. You’ve made a mistake, and you’ve admitted it.
Why, we must call on Miss Bennet immediately and see if her affections are still amenable.
And I had consoled him that I had, during the course of my visits on the tortoise’s behalf, already taken the measure of Jane Bennet’s affections and found them to be not only amenable but hopeful.
But Elizabeth was not Bingley, nor Jane, who found sunshine in every equation. Elizabeth drew the darkest conclusions, judged with a critical eye, and rarely changed her mind. She had already revised her opinion of me once, but like mine, her good opinion—once lost—was nearly impossible to regain.
“At the musicale,” she said, and the pivot surprised me. “Caroline forced you to introduce Bingley to Miss Audley. She threatened you, didn’t she?”
I nodded, watching her eyes sharpen.
“And so, you complied but not quite. You introduced Jane and me alongside of Bingley, why?”
She would have made a formidable solicitor, dispensing the cross-examination I so richly deserved.
“I wished to protect your sister. To show Miss Audley that the introduction was merely friendly—of new acquaintances—and not a presentation in the social sense.
“But Miss Bingley was not pleased, was she? I saw her displeasure, and at the time I was surprised by your complicity. But now, I understand completely.”
“I am not sure you do.”
Her gaze hardened. “You were protecting yourself. Protecting the narrative in which you are the man who repairs things rather than the man who broke them.”
The sentence sliced like a blade between the ribs, and I did not flinch, because she was right.
“Miss Elizabeth—”
“What concerns me,” she continued, and her eyes met mine, and what I saw in them was not the anger I had feared or the contempt I had dreaded but something worse: disappointment, with sorrow threaded through it, “is not the confession itself. You did a terrible thing. You acknowledged it. You attempted to correct it. That is—” She pressed her lips together.
“That is more than many men would do, and I recognize it.”
“But.”
“But you were compelled. Caroline held a blade to your throat, and you complied. You introduced Bingley to the woman she had chosen as a replacement for my sister because Caroline threatened to tell me the truth, and you could not afford for me to know it, since you had not yet told me yourself. And I am left to wonder, Mr. Darcy—” Her voice cracked, just slightly.
“What else can you be compelled to do? What else have you arranged, managed, controlled, to maintain a version of events that serves your purposes? If Caroline could force your hand with a single threat, what would someone with real power do to you?”
“Nothing. No one—”
“You say that. But you also said you would step back and allow Bingley to make amends, and instead, you introduced Bingley to Gracechurch Street, accompanied him.”
“I wanted to see you and the tortoise.” My bleat was as laughable as any sheep caught with its head between fence rails.
“So you say, but perhaps even the attention you paid me was part of the arrangement—to ease Bingley back into Jane’s life.
To keep the sharp sister occupied.” She drew a breath, and it shuddered.
“I was merely part of the plan for a man who decides what other people need and then provides it, regardless of whether they have asked. I have spent my entire life watching my mother do precisely that, and I know where it leads.”
“You were never planned, and I resent that comparison.”
Indeed, the comparison stung more than anything else she had said, because it was true in ways I had not considered, and because it linked me to the very qualities in her family that I had once cited as grounds for objection.
“And yet it is true.” She skewered me, pointing a finger at me.
“Because back in Meryton, I was not part of your plan. You had no need for me, and you could not even spare me a glance. Perhaps I was an impediment, since you yourself told Bingley that he was dancing with the only handsome woman in the county.”
“That wasn’t what transpired.” A cold feeling slid down my spine. “Miss Elizabeth, I … I have no excuse.”
“And yet, what you had said was authentic, as you had not meant for me to overhear, although you did catch my eye, and then you dismissed me. Barely tolerable, not …” Her face flushed, and she pressed her hands flat over her skirts, and the gesture was the mirror of what I did to keep my hands from shaking.
“I did not mean to injure you, Miss Elizabeth. I was only—”
“I refused to be wounded,” she cut me off.
“I laughed at your words and told anyone who would listen that they did not signify. But you, Mr. Darcy, you were a man of consequence delivering a verdict on a woman of no consequence, and the verdict was that she was beneath your notice. I carried that verdict with me from Hertfordshire to London, and every time you looked at me as though I were extraordinary, I heard the echo of not handsome enough, and I could not reconcile the two.”
“Miss Elizabeth, those words were deplorable. If I could take them back—”
“You cannot because you meant them. You had no reason for my good opinion. Now you do, because of Bingley and Jane and repairing the rift.”
“If you believe that—”
“I am not finished.” Her eyes were bright, but she did not weep.
This Elizabeth—this particular, devastating Elizabeth—did not weep in front of the man who had hurt her.
She held herself together with the same fierce, trembling composure that Jane held at Hursts’ door, and the similarity between the sisters had never been more apparent.
“You have been kind to me. You have been attentive, generous, and unexpectedly warm, and you have shown me a version of yourself that I admire very much. But you withheld the truth for weeks—not because you were searching for the right moment, but because you wanted me to love you before I knew the worst of you, and that is a kind of management too.”
She said the word love, and I saw the instant she realized she had dropped her feelings, as sure as I saw the moment she had fallen—at Gunter’s, watching the strawberry ice melt.
I saw the widening of the eyes, heard the indrawn breath, and then she looked away, blinking too fast at what she had said, and I would hold onto it, because she could not unsay it.
I swallowed the permanent lump in my throat. “Yes, it is true. Everything I did, and you are right to be angry.”
“I am not angry.” Her tone had softened. “I am wounded, disappointed, and frightened, because I have spent the last several weeks allowing myself to feel something I was not prepared to feel, and now I do not know whether the man in front of me or the man who performed for me is one and the same.”
“He is the same man,” I said, and my voice was not steady. I had given up pretending it could be.
“Is he? Because the man who brings strawberries, kneels on carpets, and speaks to four-year-olds about tortoise dreams is not the same man who told his friend that my sister’s heart was empty.
Those are not the same person, Mr. Darcy.
And I need to understand which one is real before I can—” She stopped. “Before I can trust either of them.”
“Both are real. That is the difficulty.” I leaned forward, and for the first time in the conversation, I allowed myself to look at her without defense—without the careful management of expression that I had deployed since the day we met.
“I misjudged you, your sister, and I acted cruelly and arrogantly. I did not consider Bingley’s feelings but told him what to do.
I saw myself as noble and just, and when I recognized the error, I tried to repair it on my own.
I brought Bertram to gain entrance; I sought leave to call on Jane so that I might ascertain her feelings for Bingley, and then, only after I was assured she still held him in regard, did I proceed to pave the way—but you, Elizabeth, you were never part of the plan.
I had no plans for you because you hated me—justifiably by the atrocious way I behaved in Meryton. ”
“But you did charm me with kindness, because you knew I could be an impediment for Jane’s feelings.”
“No, Elizabeth, I did not set out to charm you.” I held her gaze, as watery as mine, although a man did not show his weakness.
“In the course of repairing the breach, I met the reason I kept returning to Gracechurch Street. A woman whom I had never truly dismissed in Meryton—one I watched and argued with myself, and I could not look away. You are the woman who argues with marble and wears various shades of green for a man she has decided not to dislike. I fell in love with you. And I could not stop to tell the truth because—”
My sentence collapsed. I stopped, hoping Elizabeth would relent, would trust, would believe me. I sat across from her in that lending library, hands clenched, chest split wide, searching for the words that a feeling with no edges, no name, and no mercy refused to give me.
She bit her lower lip, holding back either her fury or her sorrow, possibly both, and so I let the admission scrape from my throat.
“I was afraid, because you spent months despising me, and when you softened toward me, and you smiled at me and looked up at me, I could not…could not risk—” I took a shuddering breath and soldiered on because she had given me the floor, and I had little left to hope.
“I wanted to give us a chance. And I knew that the truth, delivered too soon, would end us before we had begun.”
Elizabeth sat very still. The elderly gentleman turned another page of Gibbon.
The light from the window fell across her face, and I saw her jaw tighten—the same tightening, the same effort to hold—and I wanted to reach across the space between us and touch her hand, just her hand, just the backs of her fingers, but I could not move, because my body had gone without me and left only the ache behind.
“I need time,” she said.
“I understand.”
“I am not saying no, Mr. Darcy. I am saying that I cannot—” She stopped. Started again. “I cannot revise my opinion a third time in the space of a month. You have asked me to see you as a villain, then as a hero, and now as a man who is both, and I need to determine whether I can live with both.”
She stood, and I rose after her, and she regarded me with those fine eyes, which were wet, but she would not let them spill.
“May I call on you again?” I reached for her hand, not willing she should leave.
But she did, turning away from the table of unread books and away from my offer.
Pressing her lips firmly, she nodded once, a small controlled movement that contained more emotion than any word she had spoken. Then she picked up her reticule from the chair, straightened her green dress, and walked to the door.
She paused at the threshold and looked back at me over her shoulder.
Not a farewell—something harder, and sadder, a look that held everything she had not said and was not yet ready to say, and I received it standing by the window with my hands at my sides and gave her back the only thing I had left: the truth of my face, undefended, wrecked, and entirely hers.