XLIV One More Moment
XLIV
One More Moment
The light was small, and it caught his face before he could turn away.
She had known. She had been building him in the dark for four months — the jaw, the cheekbone, the brow she had traced on a hundred nights — and she had known before the flint struck.
But knowing and seeing were not the same country, and the face staring back at her from her own pillow was the face she had last seen eight months ago across a drawing room in Kent.
He twisted away from the light, one arm coming up, and an oath broke out of him, low and raw, and then his own voice, unguarded and full and nothing like the whisper. “You can have no possible idea what you have done!”
“I rather think I have every idea.”
“You have put yourself—” His jaw worked. “You have no comprehension of what is now at stake!”
“Then tell me what is at stake.”
He would not look at her. He pressed himself to the far edge of the bed, his back half-turned, and she held the candle and waited.
“You tricked me,” he said, and his voice was scraped raw.
She raised the candle a fraction. “You are a fine one to talk.”
He turned at that, and his eyes found her face first and then dropped, and she saw what happened to him when they did — the colour in his face, the arrested breath, something he could no more master in the light than he had been able to master it in the dark — and he wrenched his gaze to the wall.
“For the love of God,” he said, and it came out ragged and nothing like a command. “Please put something on.”
“You threw my chemise across the room some while ago.”
A curse came out of him. He took the sheet and wrapped himself without grace and got to his feet.
He was taller in the light than she had remembered — she had last stood in a room with him in daylight eight months ago at Rosings, and she had not been attending to height then with anything like her present clarity — and he crossed to where the chemise had landed, retrieved it, held it out with his head turned away.
She took it and put it on. He stood with his back to her.
“How long have you known?”
“Long enough.” She drew her knees up. “I have been sure of it since the night you called me Lizzy. I had proof today.”
He turned. “What proof?”
“Your mother’s book,” she said. “In the library. Anne Fitzwilliam, written in a young woman’s hand, with a small flower beside the name.”
His eyes found her, and then went away. “I did not know it was there.”
“No. I did not suppose you did.”
“Why did you not say something when you suspected?”
“Would you have confirmed my suspicions that I had somehow married a dead man?”
His throat bobbed as he looked cautiously back up to her. “It was not done to… Good Lord, you gave no hint! I thought you… I am a fool! Why would you carry on as if you did not suspect?”
Elizabeth sighed. “When I came here, I thought I might have walked into something monstrous. You were a stranger in the dark, and I had no defence, and I had signed my name to a document that gave you every legal right over me. I was prepared to suffer, and I meant to suffer, if it would spare at least Jane from the same fate.”
“I would never have hurt you!”
“But how was I to know that? I expected… well, then you were not monstrous. From the first hour, you went out of your way to show me I was safe. You never asked for anything I had not already chosen to give. And so, by degrees, I trusted you. And by October, I could not have told you where George Carlisle ended and whoever you really were began, because the man I had come to know was both of them, or neither, and it did not seem to matter anymore.”
He was still. “And?”
“And when I began to suspect…” She was blinking rapidly, and there was a humiliating rush of tears building in her eyes.
“By then, I had already given you everything. My name. My body. My trust. If I was right and I had been deceived from the beginning — if you were, indeed, Fitzwilliam Darcy — I had still lain in your arms. That was done. There was no undoing it. So, I said nothing, because I was already lost, and I had made my choice, and I thought perhaps you would tell me yourself when you could.”
He turned away from her.
“But this!” His voice came out stripped of everything, raw and full and entirely undisguised.
“Tonight — the entire scene. You could have just told me you knew! Why the seduction, why the trickery? Why the… egad, why did you do that? Why do any of it, if all you wanted was to confirm what you already knew?”
She folded one arm over herself. “Perhaps I wanted one more moment of what I knew I was about to lose.”
He stared. “But you know now, fully, and if anyone ever comes to this house, if they question you, you cannot claim you did not know! Elizabeth, you could be found culpable!” He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth, and something that sounded almost like a choked sob shook him.
“Culpable for what, Mr Darcy?”
He sagged. His hand dropped, and he paced a few steps… then stopped, as if recalling he was not wearing breeches and tall boots, stalking about on a Persian rug at Pemberley. He was naked under a sheet, with bare feet on a stone floor.
“There is a warrant. High treason for something I did not do. I staged my own death to make it disappear, and it disappeared, but the man who built the case against me is still working, and there is now an investigation into the circumstances of my ‘death.’ If the Home Office finds me alive — if they find you here knowing — you are not merely my wife. You have harboured a fugitive. You have sheltered a man under attainder, and now you know it. That is not a misunderstanding that resolves itself.”
“So, what does that make me now?”
He turned back. “God help me… I do not know.”
“I am not asking what the law makes of me. I want to know what I am to you.”
“I… I do not unders—”
“What am I?”
The heat in it was real, and she did not try to contain it.
“I came here under your name. I slept in your bed. I opened my arms to a dead man’s ghost and called him George and gave him everything a wife gives, because that was what I believed him to be — my husband.
My lawful husband.” She held the candle up.
“If you are Fitzwilliam Darcy, then George Carlisle does not exist and never did. So, tell me — am I your wife, or am I the whore of a man who was never there?”
“You are my wife!” The words came out hard and fast. “George Carlisle is a fiction, but the Baron of Auchengray is a legitimate title. It belongs to Fitzwilliam Darcy by inheritance through his mother. Both names are mine. And regardless, Scottish law requires only our own avowed words and very little else. The marriage is valid in every particular that the law can be made to recognise, and I will hear no further protests of fraud on that subject.”
His breath came out ragged. “If you wish to be,” he said, and the last four words dropped so quietly she had to hold herself very still to catch them. “If you wish to be my wife.”
She heard it. The door he had left open in those four words.
“You gave me an exit,” she said. “Before I even came here. You built it into the offer before I had signed my name.”
His shoulders drooped, and he looked away as he nodded.
“You always meant to let me go. If I wanted it. So, why…”
“I meant to give you a choice.” Something in his voice had gone very quiet. “You had been given very few of them. It seemed the least that was owed to you. But then we…” He shook his head. “It does not matter. The choice is still yours.”
She set the candle down on the table beside her. Her hands were not quite still.
“Why did you marry at all? You could have arranged any number of things without putting yourself at such risk — without putting me in this position. Why marriage?”
He dropped his eyes to the floor. “I heard what was arranged for you.”
“You told me that before. And what of it?”
“And I could not let it come to pass.”
“You could have found a dozen arrangements that did not require making me your wife. You chose marriage. Why?”
When he spoke, it came out low and without defence.
“I had been in this house for three weeks, and I had spoken to no one. Angus brought the post. Mrs MacLeod left meals at the door. I had the mural chamber and the library and four hundred years of other people’s stone around me, and I had done that to myself deliberately, and I had told myself it was necessary, and it was necessary, and I was—” He stopped and ran a hand through his hair, the cold sweat chilling at his temple.
“Well, I told myself I needed a mistress for the house. Someone whose presence would make the household appear inhabited enough to deflect questions. That was the reason I gave myself.”
“Then why me?” she asked. “Of all the women whose situations were desperate — and I assure you there are many — why Elizabeth Bennet?”
He turned away from her.
“I… heard about your father. I knew you — what you had read and what you had argued and what you did when people underestimated you, which was most of the world. I knew you had wit enough to survive humiliation and pride enough to despise being pitied.” His jaw worked once.
“I told myself I was saving you from a dangerous marriage. That was true. I told myself I was making a practical arrangement that would serve us both. That was also true.”
He drew breath with difficulty. The plain words were coming out of him slower than the lies ever had.
“But the truth is that I wanted you here,” he said.
“Not merely a wife on paper or a mistress to the house. You. Your mind. Your temper. Your company. I put you in the cage I built for myself, and I called it rescue, and I knew what I was doing, and I did it anyway, because I was alone and I wanted you, and company was only the more decent word for it. There is no version of that which is not what it is.”
She held his gaze across the candle — this man, his face in the light, the jaw set and the eyes entirely steady and the whole of him braced for whatever she was going to say — and the anger and the grief and the terrible complicated tenderness of it all moved through her at once, and none of them won.
“So, I was a convenience? Someone to run your household and be company in the dark, and that was the whole of it?”
He looked up. The Hertfordshire face was there — the jaw set hard, the cold pride she had catalogued at Meryton and Netherfield and Rosings as arrogance, the expression she had carried in her memory for eight months as the whole of him.
The man in the dark had never shown her that face. The candle had it back at once.
“How can you ask me that?”
“Without very much difficulty, it seems.”
“After everything—” His voice cracked, and he drove over it. “Do you believe I was performing? Four months in this room — do you think any of it was performed?”
“I do not know what to think. I do not know who you are.”
“You know exactly who I am!” The crack was open now, the cold entirely gone from it.
“You knew me as I was before, and you have known me in the dark for months, and you know the difference between a man performing and a man destroyed, and I would like to know how you can stand there and ask me that!”
Her throat was very tight.
“And I will ask you the same.” He was fully himself now, the whisper gone and George Carlisle gone and nothing between her and the man underneath.
“Every night you reached for me — was that sympathy? Did you open your arms to a man you pitied? Was I something to be endured in the dark while you waited to go home?”
“I was never a prisoner.”
“Indeed!” he scoffed. “You are too intelligent to believe that. You came here because the alternative was to watch your sister suffer. That made you my captive as surely as a lock and key. And I knew it. I have known it since the day you arrived. You need not despise me for it.” He turned away.
“I despise myself enough for the both of us.”
“Do not—”
“You are spared that office.” He said it to the wall. “It is the one useful thing I can still do for you.”
She heard the quaver in his voice — just barely, the full voice breaking at its edge — and then he turned, and she saw his face in the candlelight.
There were tears on it. Not falling, only there, the brightness of them in his eyes, and he made no effort to conceal them because he had apparently gone past concealment entirely.
He stood in the light with his face open and the tears on it as plain as the jaw and the cheekbone and the brow she had been mapping in the dark.
She had thought that when she struck the flint, she would feel something like triumph. She had nothing of the kind in her.
The door closed, and she sat alone in the candlelight, her hands in her lap, tears running down her face, with nothing to say and no one left to say it to.