Chapter 8 Complications
Morning light at Netherfield was ruthlessly honest. It flooded the breakfast room through tall windows, illuminating every detail with a clarity that left no room for pretense: the quality of the china, the freshness of the flowers, the fact that Mr. Darcy could not stop looking at Miss Elizabeth Bennet, and the fact that she was looking back.
They sat at opposite ends of the breakfast table, a geography of propriety that fooled no one.
Bingley, seated beside Jane, was radiating the particular satisfaction of a man who had engineered the storm himself.
Caroline, pouring tea with the mechanical precision of a woman in the early stages of fury, kept her eyes on her cup and her comments to the weather.
Elizabeth reached for the marmalade. Darcy watched her hand -- her bare hand, without gloves at the breakfast table -- and remembered the feeling of those fingers against his chest, the way they had spread over his heart as though measuring its pulse.
The memory hit him with such force that he forgot he was holding a coffee cup and nearly missed his mouth.
"The rain has stopped," Bingley announced, with the tragic cheerfulness of a man watching his guests' reason for staying evaporate. "Though the roads may still be poor. You are welcome to remain as long as --"
"The roads will be fine, Charles." Caroline's smile was precise. "I am sure the Misses Bennet are eager to return home."
Elizabeth caught Darcy's eye across the table. The look was brief, private, laden with everything they could not say in company. The corner of her mouth twitched, and he felt an answering warmth spread through his chest like sunlight through glass.
"Thank you for your hospitality, Mr. Bingley," Elizabeth said. "The evening was most -- educational."
Caroline's teacup hit its saucer with a sound like a punctuation mark.
The Bennets departed after breakfast. Jane and Elizabeth in the carriage, Mrs. Bennet having sent it with strict instructions to bring her daughters home before noon, when the neighbors would begin calling and the engagement must be displayed.
Darcy walked them to the door. In the entrance hallway, in the same alcove where he had pressed his forehead to hers and asked her to tell him she felt nothing, he caught Elizabeth's hand for a moment as Jane turned away.
"Tonight," he said, low enough that only she could hear. "I will call at Longbourn."
She squeezed his fingers. "I will be in the garden."
The day that followed was productive and agonizing in equal measure.
Darcy reviewed correspondence, wrote to his steward at Pemberley regarding Christmas preparations, and answered a letter from Colonel Fitzwilliam with a brevity that would later require explanation.
All the while, the library haunted him: the feel of her hair coming loose in his hands, the taste of her skin, the sound she made when his mouth found her collarbone.
He relived every moment with the obsessive precision of a man cataloguing treasure, and the hours until evening stretched before him like a desert.
At four o'clock, a letter arrived that burned the desert away.
It was from Colonel Forster, addressed jointly to Darcy and Bingley, informing them that Lieutenant George Wickham had been seen in Meryton that afternoon in close conversation with Miss Lydia Bennet.
The colonel wrote with the careful neutrality of a military man delivering uncomfortable intelligence, but the implication was clear: Wickham was circling the youngest Bennet sister with an attention that had nothing to do with affection and everything to do with revenge.
Darcy read the letter twice. The second time, his hands were steady, but something inside him had turned to iron.
"Bingley."
Bingley looked up from his own correspondence. His expression changed when he saw Darcy's face. "What is it?"
"Wickham. He is paying attention to Lydia Bennet."
"Lydia? She is -- what, fifteen?"
"Sixteen. Young enough to be flattered. Young enough to be foolish. And exactly the right target if one wished to cause maximum damage to the Bennet family and, by extension, to me."
Bingley set down his pen. "What do you want to do?"
"I want to ride to Meryton and put George Wickham through a wall." Darcy's voice was calm. His knuckles, wrapped around the letter, were white. "But that would be unhelpful. What I will do instead is speak to Colonel Forster and then to Elizabeth."
He rode to Longbourn.
Elizabeth met him at the gate. She was wearing a pelisse over her gown, her cheeks pink from the cold, her expression shifting from warm anticipation to alarm when she saw his face.
"What has happened?"
He told her. He watched her face as the information landed: Wickham, Lydia, the calculated cruelty of targeting a girl who was all impulse and no judgment.
He watched concern become anger become fear, and then, most remarkably, he watched fear become something harder.
Something that looked like his Elizabeth's particular brand of courage: the kind that burned hottest when the people she loved were threatened.
"I will speak to my father," she said. "Lydia must be restricted. Her walks into Meryton, her interactions with the officers --"
"Forster is already aware. He will keep Wickham under observation. But Elizabeth --" He hesitated. "Wickham is not merely predatory. He is strategic. He knows that harming your sister would harm you, and that harming you would wound me. This may be aimed at us as much as at her."
"Then we will address it together."
The simplicity of it -- we, together, the first time she had placed them on the same side of a battle line -- struck him with a force that had nothing to do with Wickham and everything to do with the woman standing in front of him, fierce and frightened and choosing to fight beside him rather than alone.
He could not help it. He reached for her, pulling her against him in the shadow of the Longbourn gate, his arms wrapping around her as though he could shield her from every threat through sheer physical determination.
She came willingly, her face pressed against his chest, her hands gripping the lapels of his riding coat, and for a moment they simply stood there, holding each other against the cold and the fear and the dawning realization that caring about someone made you vulnerable in ways that pride could never protect against.
"We will handle Wickham," he said against her hair. "I promise."
"I know." Her voice was muffled against his coat. "I trust you."
The words were small. The weight of them was enormous. He tightened his arms and pressed his lips to the top of her head and thought: she trusts me. After everything, she trusts me.
It was the first time anyone had given him something more precious than respect.
Then the evening went wrong.
Elizabeth spoke to her father, who listened with unusual seriousness and agreed to curtail Lydia's liberties. She returned to the garden to report this to Darcy, and found him standing at the stone wall, his expression a study in carefully contained fury.
"What is it now?" she asked.
"I saw them. From the lane. Wickham and your sister, walking together near the milliner's, not an hour ago. He had his hand on her arm. She was laughing."
"She laughs at everything. It does not mean --"
"He was looking at her the way he looked at Georgiana."
The words fell between them like stones. Elizabeth stared at him.
"You were watching from the lane? You followed them?"
"I was riding back from Forster's. I saw them by chance."
"And what did you do?"
"Nothing. I did nothing, because intervening publicly would cause exactly the scandal Wickham desires."
"Then why are you angry with me?"
"I am not angry with you."
"You are. I can see it. You are standing there vibrating with rage and looking at me as though I have failed to -- to what? Control my sixteen-year-old sister? Chain her to the house? I spoke to my father. I did what I could. What more do you expect?"
"I expect --" He stopped. The iron in him was close to the surface now, dangerous and hot.
"I expect that the danger would be taken seriously.
Your father agreed to restrict Lydia and then, within the hour, she was walking through Meryton with the man who nearly destroyed my sister.
Restriction means nothing if it is not enforced. "
"You are blaming my family."
"I am stating facts."
"You are doing what you always do. You are standing in judgment of people you consider beneath you, applying standards they cannot meet, and then expressing disappointment when they fail to live up to your expectations.
My father is not your steward. My sister is not Georgiana.
You cannot manage us like tenants on your estate. "
"That is unfair."
"Is it? Because from where I stand, you look exactly like the man I thought you were before your letter: proud, controlling, convinced that you know better than everyone around you --"
"I am trying to protect your sister."
"You are trying to control the situation. There is a difference."
They were shouting. Not loudly -- neither of them raised their voices above a fierce hiss -- but the intensity was the same as volume, and the garden felt suddenly small, the stone wall too close, the house too near, the entire world compressed into the space between two people who had been tender with each other that morning and were now tearing at wounds they thought had healed.
"You are determined to misunderstand me," he said.
"And you are determined to fix things by force of will, regardless of what anyone else wants or needs. That is not protection. That is pride."
"Pride." He said the word as though she had struck him. "You still think this is about pride."
"What else would it be?"