Shadowed Vows at Rosings Park

Chapter 1

ELIZABETH

The carriage hit a rut and Elizabeth's forehead struck the glass.

She sat back, pressing her fingers to the spot.

A small pain. Nothing compared to what she carried.

The Hertfordshire countryside unrolled beyond the window, hedgerows and ploughed fields and a church spire she recognised from childhood, and none of it looked as it had when she'd left. The same view, seen by different eyes.

Three weeks since Hunsford.

She tested the thought the way you test a loose tooth with your tongue, pushing at it, measuring the pain.

Three weeks since Collins had hit her. Three weeks since Elizabeth had seized the paperweight to make Collins release Charlotte, only for him to turn on her and wrench her arm down, and Charlotte had caught the falling marble before it struck the floor.

Three weeks since Darcy had walked in from the hall and found Collins dead on the parlour floor.

His face had gone blank. Then he had told them exactly what to do in a voice so controlled it sounded like a man reciting directions from a ledger.

She had obeyed. She had been obeying ever since.

The carriage swayed. She adjusted the brim of her bonnet, a habitual gesture now, though there was almost nothing left to hide.

Three weeks was enough for skin to forget what hands had done to it.

The bruise on her cheek was the last to go, a faint greenish shadow along the bone that only she could find in the mirror, and even that needed barely a dusting of rice powder.

Her body was healing. The rest of her was not.

Darcy's salve sat in her valise. A small ceramic pot from the apothecary, sealed with wax, delivered with the same briskness he brought to concealments, proposals, and the management of women who had witnessed murder.

Apply it twice daily. I will not have my future wife bearing another man's marks.

As though the marks were the problem. As though bruises were what needed erasing.

His letter was in her pocket. She had read it once in her chamber at Rosings before dawn, standing at the window in the grey light with Charlotte asleep on the other side of the connecting door and the yew trees standing in the garden like mourners.

Your family must believe our attachment genuine... Charlotte's safety depends upon the story holding firm... trust my judgment, if not yet my character.

She did hate him. She thought she did. Hatred ought to have been clean and bright, like the edge of a blade.

What she felt for Darcy was fouled by the memory of his fingers on her bruised cheek, feather-light, trembling.

By his voice breaking on the word Elizabeth in the dark of her Rosings bedroom.

By the sight of him alone at the end of the garden path after he found the body, motionless until he mastered himself.

That glimpse of shaken control lodged beneath her ribs and would not be dislodged.

The carriage turned down the lane to Longbourn. Elizabeth drew a breath, adjusted her bonnet to shadow her face, and assembled her smile.

Her mother was already on the gravel. Naturally.

Mrs. Bennet had the predatory instinct of a woman who could sense an advantageous match from three counties away, and news of Elizabeth's engagement to a man worth ten thousand a year had reached her by express.

She stood in the drive with her arms half-raised and her face alight with the purest joy Elizabeth had ever seen on it, and the sight was so grotesque in context, joy, when everything was ashes, that Elizabeth had to look away before her expression cracked.

"Lizzy! Oh, my dear girl! Mr. Darcy! Ten thousand a year! And to think how you used to speak of him!"

"Good morning, Mamma."

Kitty and Lydia appeared, trailing questions and excited noise.

Mary stood in the doorway with her hymnal, looking disapproving, which was her contribution to most family occasions.

But it was Jane whom Elizabeth found, standing on the front step, motionless, composed, her gentle face already registering what no one else in the family had seen.

The pallor. The tension around Elizabeth's mouth.

How she held herself as though something inside her might spill if she moved too quickly.

"Lizzy." Jane took her hands. Her fingers were warm. Elizabeth's were ice. "You look altered."

Jane had chosen the precise word. Altered. Not tired, thin, or pale. Jane saw what Charlotte had seen, what Darcy saw every time he looked at her: the woman who had walked into Kent had returned harder, warier, and less free.

"The journey was fatiguing," Elizabeth said, and withdrew her hands.

Inside, Longbourn was the same. Faded curtains.

Worn carpet. The hall table cluttered with her mother's correspondence, a note from Mrs. Hill about household accounts, and a vase of flowers that had been fresh a week ago and now drooped over the rim like drunks at a railing.

Elizabeth moved through the familiar rooms and felt nothing.

Or felt everything, but at a distance, like watching a play you have already seen.

Mr. Bennet emerged from his library. His eyes found his daughter immediately, and the sharp concern in them made Elizabeth's stomach tighten. He never claimed to read people; he merely noticed what others preferred to overlook.

"So my Lizzy returns to us engaged to a gentleman she once professed to dislike above all others." His irony was intact, but beneath it she heard something else, a note of concern pitched too low for Mrs. Bennet's ears. "How remarkably adaptable you are, my dear."

"Circumstances altered my understanding of him, Papa."

"Indeed? I confess it is an interesting reversal." He lowered his voice. "I suppose a man may change his opinion as readily as a woman may change hers. Though I wonder what made Kent so persuasive."

Elizabeth's heart slammed. Her father was guessing, casting lines, testing which one snagged. He did not know. He couldn't know. But he sensed the wrongness of it as a man senses a change in weather: not through evidence but through pressure.

"Mr. Bennet!" Her mother swept between them. "You mustn't tease Lizzy so! She has made a brilliant match, and that's all that matters. Oh, Lizzy, you must tell us everything! How did he propose? Was he very much in love?"

Elizabeth was rescued by Hill announcing refreshments. They moved to the parlour. Jane slipped her arm through Elizabeth's, the pressure of it gentle, insistent, a question that could not be spoken here.

"Later," Elizabeth whispered.

She would share nothing. Jane was goodness, real, uncomplicated goodness, and Elizabeth would not bring the darkness of Hunsford into her sister's clean rooms.

Mrs. Bennet held court from the sofa. "Ten thousand a year, and likely more! And such a fine, tall man, though dreadfully proud. But I suppose he has cause to be proud now, securing my clever Lizzy!"

Elizabeth drank her tea. The cup trembled in her grip. Every word she spoke was another stone in the cairn of lies she was building her future on, and the structure was already so high she couldn't see over it.

"Charlotte bears it well," she said when her mother mentioned the widowhood, and the lie tasted like copper on her tongue.

Charlotte did not bear it well. Charlotte had become a ghost. She sat in rooms and said the right things and folded her hands in her lap and smiled when smiling was required, and behind her eyes there was a door that had closed and would not open again.

Colonel Fitzwilliam stood at that door. Charlotte had told Elizabeth what he intended, and why she believed acceptance offered the safest terms. Knowing did not make the sight of his hand at Charlotte's elbow less frightening: proprietary, certain, the grip of a man who had made a claim and meant to collect.

Hill appeared with a letter. Silver salver, dark wax, the Darcy crest pressed into it like a wound.

"From your betrothed, I presume?" Mr. Bennet's eyes were sharp. "How attentive he is, to write so soon after your departure."

Elizabeth took the letter upstairs. She sat on her childhood bed, the same narrow mattress, the same quilt, the same window through which she had watched the Hertfordshire sky since she was old enough to look, and broke the seal.

Elizabeth,

I trust your journey concluded without incident. Remember our agreement. I must ask you to conduct yourself as a woman content in her engagement — your family must believe it freely made.

I have written to Bingley requesting the use of Netherfield. I shall arrive within the week. Until then, I should be grateful for regular correspondence. The appearance of easy communication between us will serve our purpose.

I need not remind you what is at stake. Charlotte's safety, and yours, depends upon the story we have built holding firm.

Your health concerns me. Continue applying the salve. I cannot bear that you should carry marks that are not of your choosing.

You may hate me if you must, Elizabeth. I would ask only that you trust my judgment, if not yet my character.

F. Darcy

She folded the letter. The paper was warm from her grip.

Your health concerns me sat among the commands like a live coal in ash.

The rest was spare and cold, the language of a man issuing orders.

Those four words recalled his fingers against her marked cheek, absurdly gentle for a man who had just blackmailed her into marriage.

She set the letter aside, pressed her hands flat on her knees, and stared at the wall.

Jane knocked. "May I come in?"

She entered without waiting. Closed the door. Stood in the middle of Elizabeth's bedroom with her fair hair loose about her shoulders and her face set with an expression Elizabeth had seen perhaps three times in their lives, soft, immovable determination.

"You're not yourself. Something has changed — I can see it, Lizzy, though I can't name it. You left us one sister and have returned another, and I — I don't wish to pry, but if there's anything you wish to share, I'm here."

Elizabeth looked at her sister. At the goodness in her face, the love, the worry.

The temptation to speak was physical, a pressure behind her ribs, pushing outward, seeking release.

How simple it would be to say it all. Every terrible detail, from the paperweight to this morning's letter, laid out in plain words that would make it real and make it Jane's burden too.

She could not. Jane was the one unspoiled part left, and Elizabeth would keep her that way.

"I was mistaken about Mr. Darcy," she said. "In Kent, I saw him differently."

That much was true. She had seen the focused intent beneath his reserve.

The possessiveness that surfaced when he found her vulnerable.

The man who dangled protection with one hand and claimed ownership with the other.

She had also seen, and this was the part she could not explain to Jane, could barely explain to herself, how his face changed in unguarded moments.

How his voice had softened when he thought her asleep, his fingers in her hair, whispering What have you done to me?

as though she were a problem he had not anticipated and could not solve.

"You don't love him," Jane said. Not a question.

"I shall be mistress of Pemberley."

"Oh, Lizzy." Jane's voice broke. "What has happened to you?"

Elizabeth stared out the window at the distant treeline where Netherfield stood, empty for now, waiting for its new occupant. Where Darcy would soon be. Three miles away. Watching.

"I've made my choice," she said. "Please, Jane. Ask me no more."

She lay awake that night in her childhood bed, listening to Longbourn settle around her, the familiar creaks and ticks, the wind in the eaves, the sounds that had meant safety for twenty years and now meant nothing at all.

Tomorrow she would write to him. Tomorrow she would begin performing the part of the happy bride.

Tomorrow the deception she had been practising since Rosings would take on a new audience, and she would feed it with smiles and lies and the careful dusting of powder.

No one would know what it cost her except the woman a mile down the road, at Lucas Lodge, who shared the same secret and the same cage.

"Damn you, Fitzwilliam Darcy," she whispered to the dark ceiling.

Outside, clouds gathered over Netherfield. Rain before dawn.