Chapter 6 A New Understanding
Three days after the letter, Darcy received no response.
He had not expected one -- he had not asked for one -- but the silence was its own kind of answer, and he spent those three days in a state of controlled disintegration that would have alarmed anyone who knew him well enough to see past the mask.
Bingley saw past the mask.
"You look terrible," Bingley said cheerfully over breakfast on the third morning. "Have you slept at all?"
"I have slept adequately."
"You have the eyes of a man who has been staring at the ceiling composing speeches he will never deliver. I recognize the symptoms. I had them myself when Jane did not return my smile at the assembly last month."
"Jane Bennet has returned every smile you have ever directed at her. She returns smiles you have not yet thought of."
"Yes, well. Your situation is more complex. Which is a polite way of saying you have made it more difficult than it needs to be, because you are constitutionally incapable of simplicity." Bingley set down his fork. "Have you heard from Miss Elizabeth?"
"No."
"Are you going to do something about it?"
"What would you suggest?"
"Going to see her, for a start. You are engaged. It is expected. And you look as though you are slowly dying of something, and I would prefer it did not happen in my breakfast room."
The Meryton assembly that evening was not an event Darcy would have chosen to attend, but refusing would draw comment, and he had subjected Elizabeth to enough comment for a lifetime.
He dressed with more care than usual, which was saying something, and arrived at the assembly rooms with Bingley at his side and a knot in his stomach that no amount of discipline could loosen.
He saw her immediately. She was standing with Jane near the refreshment table, wearing a gown of deep amber that caught the candlelight, and she looked -- different.
He could not identify the change at first. She was still beautiful, still sharp-featured, still possessed of the particular energy that set her apart from every other woman in the room.
But something in her bearing had shifted.
The defensive set of her shoulders was softer.
The angle of her chin, usually raised in challenge, was level.
She looked, he realized, like a woman who had made a decision she had not yet spoken aloud.
She saw him across the room. Their eyes met, and the contact was a physical thing, a jolt that traveled through his body and settled in his chest. She did not look away.
She did not raise her chin or narrow her eyes or arm herself with the weaponized composure he had come to expect.
She simply looked at him, and for the first time since the library, her expression was open.
It was the most terrifying thing he had ever seen.
He made himself walk toward her. Each step felt deliberately taken, as though the air between them had thickened into something that required effort to traverse.
"Miss Bennet."
"Mr. Darcy."
The formality was habit, but it sounded different now, like a melody played in a new key. She was not wielding his name as a weapon. She was saying it carefully, as though testing its weight.
"You look well," he said, and immediately wished he had said something less inadequate.
"Thank you. You look --" She paused. The corner of her mouth moved. "As though you have not slept in three days."
"I have slept adequately."
"You used that word with Mr. Bingley at breakfast, I imagine."
"How did you --"
"You always say adequately when the truth is not at all. I have noticed."
The fact that she had noticed, that she had been paying close enough attention to catalogue his verbal habits, sent a wave of warmth through him that he could not conceal and did not try to.
"May I have the next dance?" he asked.
She extended her hand.
They had danced once before, at the Netherfield Ball, and the comparison was inescapable. That dance had been combat, every step a thrust, every turn a parry, the music a soundtrack to mutual antagonism. This was something else entirely.
Elizabeth's hand in his was lighter now, not gripping but resting, and when the figure brought them together, she did not lean away. She leaned in, fractionally, almost imperceptibly, and the warmth of her proximity was a gift he had not earned and did not know how to receive.
"I read your letter," she said.
His heart stopped. It was not a metaphor. For a full beat, the organ in his chest ceased to function, and the room tilted slightly on its axis.
"I would like to discuss it. Not here." She looked up at him. "But I want you to know that I read it. All of it. More than once."
"And?"
"And I owe you an apology."
The music swelled. They turned in the set, her hand leaving his and returning, and every contact felt like a conversation neither of them was ready to have aloud.
"You owe me nothing," he said.
"I owe you a great deal, in fact. I owe you the apology of a woman who prided herself on her judgment and discovered it was built on prejudice and vanity.
Mr. Wickham is --" She pressed her lips together.
"I believed him because I wanted to believe him.
Because his story made you the villain, and if you were the villain, then the way I felt when you kissed me was -- manageable.
Explicable. A simple failure of my body rather than a complicated truth about my heart. "
They were supposed to be dancing. Darcy was dimly aware of the music, the other couples, the watchful eyes of the neighborhood.
None of it mattered. Elizabeth Bennet was standing in front of him, in the middle of a country assembly, dismantling her own defenses with the same precision she usually reserved for dismantling his.
"What truth?" he asked, because he had to hear her say it, even if the answer destroyed him.
She met his eyes. "That I do not despise you.
That I have not despised you for some time.
That the contempt I performed was a costume I wore because the alternative -- admitting that Fitzwilliam Darcy made me feel things I could not control -- was more frightening than any villain Wickham could have invented. "
The dance ended. They stood facing each other, and Darcy realized he was smiling. Not the near-smile, not the twitch at the corner of his mouth that Elizabeth had catalogued so carefully. An actual smile. He felt it on his face like sunlight, unfamiliar and warm.
"You are smiling," she said, and she sounded astonished.
"You have given me reason."
"I have given you an apology and a confession of emotional cowardice. These are not typically occasions for smiling."
"They are when the woman making them is you."
She laughed. The sound cut through the noise of the assembly like a bell, bright and startled and real, and the heads that turned toward them saw something they had not expected: Miss Elizabeth Bennet laughing at something Mr. Darcy had said, and Mr. Darcy looking at her as though the rest of the world had just become irrelevant.
The evening that followed was unlike any they had shared. They walked together in the garden behind the assembly rooms, Jane and Bingley a convenient twenty paces ahead, lost in their own quiet conversation and making no effort whatsoever to chaperone.
The night was cold, the sky clear, stars sharp as pins above the bare trees. Their breath made ghosts in the air. Elizabeth's arm was through his, and the pressure of her hand against his forearm was a steady warmth that he felt through coat and shirt and skin.
"Tell me about Georgiana," she said.
No one asked about Georgiana. His aunt inquired after her accomplishments.
Society asked after her prospects. No one asked about her, and the fact that Elizabeth did -- with genuine concern, with the voice of a woman who had wept over a stranger's pain because a letter told her of it -- made something crack inside him.
"She is the best person I know," he said.
"She is gentle and kind and so afraid of the world that she barely speaks above a whisper in company.
She plays piano like an angel and believes she is not good enough.
She trusts too easily and then does not trust at all, because the one time she gave her trust fully, it was used to destroy her. "
"Ramsgate."
"Ramsgate."
Elizabeth's hand tightened on his arm. "You saved her."
"I arrived in time. That is not the same as saving her.
The damage was done. She has not been the same since, and I --" His voice caught.
He cleared his throat. "I hired the woman.
Mrs. Younge. Wickham recommended her and I did not question it because I was too busy, too distracted, too confident that my judgment was infallible.
My sister nearly eloped with a predator because I was too proud to ask questions. "
"You were deceived by a man who deceives everyone. That is not pride. That is trust, and trust is not a failing."
He looked at her. In the starlight, her face was silver and shadow, her eyes luminous, and she was looking at him with an expression he had never seen before: not challenge, not defiance, not the grudging respect of a woman who had been proved wrong.
Something warmer. Something that made his breath unsteady.
"You are being kind to me," he said. "I am not accustomed to that."
"Then you have been keeping poor company."
"The best company I have ever kept is yours. Even when you were trying to destroy me."
"I was never trying to destroy you. I was trying to resist you. There is a difference."
The word resist hung between them, loaded with everything they had done and everything they had not.
He stopped walking. She stopped with him.
They stood in the garden path with the stars above and the distant sound of the assembly behind them, and the twenty paces between themselves and Jane might as well have been twenty miles.
"Is that what this is?" he asked. "Resistance?"
"It was." She tilted her face up. "I am less certain what it is now."
He wanted to kiss her. The wanting was a physical force, a gravitational pull that operated at the cellular level, and it required every ounce of restraint he possessed to stand still and let her choose the distance between them.
"Your letter," she said. "The things you wrote about me. About what I --"
"Every word was true."
"I know." She said it simply, without deflection, and the simplicity was more intimate than any touch. "I know they were true. I could feel the truth of them. That is what frightened me most."
"Are you still frightened?"
She considered the question with the seriousness it deserved. "Yes," she said. "But I am beginning to think that the things most worth having are the things that frighten us most."
He reached for her hand. Slowly, deliberately, giving her time to pull away. She did not pull away. His fingers closed around hers, and the contact -- bare skin to bare skin, no gloves, not in the cold night garden -- was electric, a circuit completed, a current that ran through both of them.
"You are the handsomest woman of my acquaintance," he said. "I believe I mentioned that in the letter."
"You did. I was not sure whether to be flattered or annoyed."
"Which did you choose?"
"Both." She smiled, and the smile was a new thing, not her sharp smile or her defensive smile or the polite smile she wore in company, but something softer, unguarded, a smile she had not shown anyone before.
"I chose both, Mr. Darcy, because you have the singular talent of inspiring contradictory emotions simultaneously. "
He laughed. The sound surprised him -- it was not a sound he made often, and in the silence of the garden it felt like a confession.
She looked at him with that new expression, the warm one, the one that made his chest ache, and she laughed too, a genuine, delighted sound that wound itself around his laughter and became something larger than either.
They stood in the garden laughing together, their hands linked, the cold air turning their breath to mist, and for the first time since the library at Netherfield, Darcy felt something that was not guilt or fear or desperate longing.
He felt hope.
They walked back to the assembly rooms in companionable silence, their hands still joined, and when they reached the door and propriety required them to separate, she squeezed his fingers once before releasing them.
"Goodnight, Mr. Darcy."
"Goodnight, Miss Bennet."
The formality was gentle now, a game rather than a wall, and the smile she gave him over her shoulder as she walked back into the light was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
He stood in the cold for a long time, his hand still warm where hers had been, and thought: I could live on that smile. For the rest of my life, I could live on that smile alone.
He did not think he would have to.