Chapter 4 Dangerous Proximity
Darcy learned of Wickham's presence in Meryton through the worst possible channel: Caroline Bingley, who delivered the information with the relish of a cat presenting a dead bird.
"Your old friend Mr. Wickham has been seen about town," she said over breakfast, her smile razor-thin. "He seems to have struck up quite a friendship with your fiancee. They were observed walking together in Meryton yesterday. Alone."
She let the word alone sit on the table between them like a grenade.
Darcy set down his coffee cup with a precision that required all of his considerable discipline. "Thank you, Miss Bingley."
"I thought you should know. Given Miss Eliza's tendency toward -- how shall I put it? -- impulsive encounters with gentlemen in private settings."
"Caroline." Bingley's voice carried an unusual edge. "That is enough."
Caroline's smile did not waver, but she returned her attention to her toast with the air of a woman who had achieved her objective. Darcy stared at his plate and felt something dark and unfamiliar uncoil in his chest.
Jealousy. He recognized it intellectually, the way one recognizes a disease from a textbook description. He had never experienced it before. There had never been occasion. Women had pursued him, not the reverse, and he had never wanted any of them enough to care whether they looked at another man.
Elizabeth was different. Elizabeth was everything different.
He spent the morning in Bingley's study, ostensibly reviewing correspondence, actually constructing and demolishing scenarios in which Wickham told Elizabeth every lie he had ever polished to a shine.
The living denied out of spite. The friendship betrayed.
The carefully curated narrative of victimhood that Wickham had been performing since they were boys, each iteration more refined, more convincing, more devastating.
Elizabeth would believe him. Of course she would. Wickham was charming and she was predisposed to distrust Darcy, and the combination was a poison for which he had no antidote except the truth, and the truth involved Georgiana, and the truth was not his to tell.
He wrote three letters to Elizabeth and burned all of them.
The dinner at Netherfield that evening was Caroline's design, though she presented it as Bingley's idea with the seamless mendacity of long practice.
The Bennets arrived in their best evening wear: Mrs. Bennet in a gown of alarming purple, Mr. Bennet in quiet resignation, Jane luminous, and Elizabeth --
Elizabeth in dark green silk that caught the candlelight and turned it into something alive. Her hair was pinned up, exposing the line of her neck, and Darcy stared at the place where his mouth had been and felt the memory of her pulse beneath his lips like a brand.
She caught him looking. Her chin lifted. Her eyes held a challenge and something else, something that might have been awareness, the involuntary recognition of a shared history written on the body. She looked away first, a small victory that gave him no satisfaction.
Dinner was an exercise in endurance. Caroline had seated Elizabeth between Mr. Hurst, who spoke only of hunting, and Colonel Forster, who spoke only of militia matters, while placing herself at Darcy's side, where she could monitor his attention with the vigilance of a hawk.
Mrs. Bennet dominated the conversation from her end of the table, expounding on wedding details that Darcy had not agreed to and describing Pemberley to the assembled company as though she had personally overseen its construction.
Elizabeth ate in near silence, responding to questions with a politeness that Darcy recognized as her most dangerous mood: the preternatural calm that preceded either a devastatingly witty remark or a devastatingly honest one.
She did not look at him. She did not need to.
He could feel her presence across the table like a change in temperature, and the effort of not looking at her was consuming resources he needed for basic social function.
After dinner, the ladies withdrew. When the gentlemen rejoined them, Elizabeth was at the pianoforte.
She played badly. She knew she played badly, and it was one of the things Darcy found most charming about her: the complete absence of pretense, the cheerful acknowledgment that her talents lay elsewhere.
She stumbled through a country air with more enthusiasm than skill, her fingers occasionally finding the right notes by accident rather than design, and her enjoyment was so genuine that the errors became endearing rather than painful.
"You play with great energy, Miss Bennet," he said, moving to stand beside the instrument. "May I turn pages?"
She looked up at him. "You may. Though I warn you, my page-turning needs are unpredictable. I rarely play the notes written on the page."
"Then I shall improvise."
He stood at her shoulder, close enough to smell the lavender in her hair, close enough to see the fine chain of a necklace disappearing into the neckline of her dress, close enough that when she shifted on the bench, her arm brushed his hip. The contact was accidental. The aftershock was not.
She continued playing. Her fingers faltered, recovered, faltered again. He reached over her to turn the page and his arm passed inches from her face, and he heard her breath catch -- a tiny sound, barely there, audible only because he was listening for it with every nerve in his body.
"Your tempo has changed," he murmured.
"The piece demands flexibility." Her voice was not quite steady.
"The piece is a simple country dance in common time."
"Then perhaps it is the player who demands flexibility."
He turned another page. This time his hand grazed her shoulder. She did not flinch. She did not pull away. Her fingers hit a wrong chord and she laughed, a short, breathless sound that cut through his composure like a blade.
"I believe the composer would weep," she said.
"The composer has been dead two hundred years. His feelings are not our concern."
She looked up at him then, and for a moment the room fell away -- Caroline's watchful malice, Mrs. Bennet's chatter, the ambient scrutiny of a dozen guests -- and there was only Elizabeth's face tilted toward his, her eyes dark with something she was fighting not to feel, her lips slightly parted, and the distance between them measured in inches and willpower and nothing else.
"You are staring, Mr. Darcy."
"I am reading the music."
"The music is behind you."
"Then I am staring."
She looked away. Closed the pianoforte lid with a decisive click. "I believe that is enough musicianship for one evening."
The party broke up slowly, guests collecting wraps and calling carriages, the elaborate social choreography of departure.
Darcy found himself in the entrance hall as the Bennet family gathered their things, the space crowded with coats and chatter and the barely organized chaos that the Bennets seemed to generate wherever they went.
Mrs. Bennet was lecturing Jane on the importance of making Bingley jealous (Jane was too kind to point out the contradictions in this strategy).
Mr. Bennet was retrieving his hat with the unhurried movements of a man who had long since stopped being surprised by his wife.
Lydia and Kitty were giggling about an officer.
Mary was delivering an unsolicited critique of the evening's musical selections to no one in particular.
Elizabeth stood apart from all of it, pulling on her gloves, her face composed and distant. Darcy moved toward her, propelled by something stronger than judgment.
"Miss Bennet. A word."
She followed him into the narrow space between the staircase and the corridor wall, a shadowed alcove hidden from the main hallway by the curve of the banister. It was not private -- anyone might turn the corner -- but it was as close to privacy as the evening would allow.
"What is it?" she asked. Her voice was careful, controlled, but in the dimness he could see the rapid movement at the base of her throat. Her pulse. Beating faster than it should.
"Wickham." He said the name like swallowing glass. "Whatever he has told you about me --"
"This is not the time."
"Then when? You have heard his version. You believe it. I can see it in the way you look at me -- as though I am confirmation of every suspicion you ever held."
"And are you not?"
"No." He stepped closer. He should not. He knew he should not.
But she was right there, and the candlelight was doing things to her eyes, and the scent of lavender was making coherent thought increasingly difficult.
"I am many things you accuse me of. I am proud.
I am poor at expressing warmth. I have been guilty of judging your family harshly.
But the man Wickham described to you does not exist."
"How do you know what he described?"
"Because I know what he tells everyone. Because he has been telling the same story, with minor variations, for ten years.
And because the truth is more complicated and more painful than anything he could invent, and I cannot --" He stopped.
His jaw worked. "I cannot tell you yet. Not here.
Not like this. But I am asking you to wait before you condemn me. I am asking you for time."
She stared up at him. In the shadow of the staircase, her face was all planes and angles, firelight and darkness, and she was so close he could feel the warmth of her breath.
"You are asking me to trust you."
"I am asking you to suspend judgment. That is not the same thing."
"For you, Mr. Darcy, I suspect it is."
He braced his hands against the wall on either side of her, not touching her, not trapping her, but creating a space that belonged to only them. She did not step away. Her back was against the wall and her eyes were on his face and neither of them was breathing properly.
"Tell me you felt nothing." His voice was barely audible. "In the library. Tell me the kiss meant nothing. Tell me, and I will believe you, and I will never speak of it again."
Her lips parted. He waited. The seconds stretched like taffy, each one an agony, each one a prayer.
"I cannot tell you that," she whispered.
Something detonated in his chest. Not joy -- it was too desperate for joy. Relief, perhaps, or the particular pain of having a wound confirmed: yes, it is real, yes, it will scar, yes, you are right to bleed.
He leaned closer. Not kissing her. Not quite. His forehead touched hers. His eyes closed. He breathed her air, lavender and warmth and Elizabeth, and felt the shudder that ran through her body, answering his own.
"Fitzwilliam," she said, and it was the first time she had used his Christian name, and it sounded different in her mouth than it had in anyone's, not a title or a formality but a confession, a key turned in a lock.
"Elizabeth."
"We cannot. Not here."
"I know."
"Then step back."
He did not move. She did not move. They stood in the darkness of the staircase alcove with their foreheads touching and their hands at their sides and the entire architecture of propriety and pride and mutual suspicion trembling between them like a held breath.
"Mr. Darcy?" Mrs. Bennet's voice from the hallway. "Mr. Darcy, the carriage is here, and I must insist you consider white roses for the wedding breakfast. I have a particular fondness for --"
They sprang apart. Elizabeth smoothed her gloves with hands that shook. Darcy straightened his coat with an expression that could have been carved from stone.
"Coming, Mama," Elizabeth called, and her voice was steady, astonishingly steady, and she walked past Darcy without looking at him and into the bright hallway and out the door and into the cold night air, where the shock of November hit her flushed skin and she breathed, breathed, breathed.
In the carriage, surrounded by her family's chatter, she pressed her hand against her racing heart and felt the echo of his forehead against hers and knew, with a certainty that terrified her, that she could not tell him she felt nothing.
Because she felt everything. And she did not know what to do with any of it.
At Netherfield, Darcy stood in the empty hallway for a long time after the door closed. His hands, still braced against the wall where her back had been, were trembling.
Fitzwilliam.
She had called him Fitzwilliam.
He pressed his forehead against the cold wall and let the trembling happen and did not try to stop it.