6. The Quarrel
THE QUARREL
DARCY'S POV
The days since the terrace hadn't eased anything, whatever restraint Darcy had promised himself.
Georgiana had gone quieter still, excusing herself early from company two evenings running.
Elizabeth's careful cheerfulness had started to look, to his increasingly practiced eye, like a performance held together at real cost. He'd told himself, more than once, that a gentleman didn't corner a lady and demand her confidence, that Elizabeth had already taught him better than that this summer.
Each time some fresh flicker of worry wore the resolution down a little further.
By the fourth evening it gave out completely.
He watched them at dinner, Elizabeth and Georgiana, close enough to speak and saying almost nothing.
Something in the careful distance between them finally beat his own resolve.
He found Elizabeth afterward in the library, ostensibly reading, and shut the door with more decision than the moment strictly called for.
"Is Georgiana well?"
"Only a little unsettled, I think." She didn't look up from her book quite fast enough to hide the flicker of alarm.
"Unsettled by what?"
"I couldn't say precisely."
"You couldn't, or you won't?"
He said it sharper than he meant to, and saw her flinch—not fear, he thought, but the sting of being caught defending something she hadn't wanted to defend. "Mr. Darcy. There are things a young woman confides that aren't mine to repeat simply because I've been asked a direct question."
"I trusted my sister to your care this summer because I believed you'd tell me if something threatened her happiness.
" His voice had gone very controlled, very even, the voice, she'd learned, he used precisely when he was afraid.
"I didn't trust her to your judgment about which of her troubles I deserved to know. "
He heard the sentence land as he finished it, and knew at once it had come out crueler than he'd meant.
He could not soften it now without sounding as if he were retreating from something true.
His fear for Georgiana was stronger, in that moment, than his sense of what was fair to say to the woman standing in front of him.
He watched Elizabeth absorb it, watched her decide not to flinch, and understood that he had just told her, in effect, that her judgment did not count.
That was not what he had meant. It was, he realized too late, very nearly what he had said.
"Trust isn't the same as demanding a report each evening of everything she's said to me.
" Elizabeth rose, her own composure fraying at the edges now.
She had heard both things at once—the accusation, and underneath it, the flat dismissal of her right to have judged anything at all.
"If I'm to be any use to her at all, she has to believe I won't run to you the moment she's unhappy about something.
That isn't disloyalty to you. It's the only way I can be loyal to her. "
"There are dangers you don't know of, connected to this family, that make secrecy a luxury I can't afford where Georgiana's concerned." He heard, even as he said it, how close the words came to Ramsgate, to Wickham, to a wound he'd never fully described to her.
"Then tell me what they are. If there's a danger particular to this family, and you think I stand close enough to it to be of use, tell me plainly rather than asking me to guess at its shape while you keep its name to yourself."
He hesitated, and in that hesitation she read everything. He couldn't bring himself to speak of Ramsgate even now, even to justify his own alarm. The wound sat too close to the surface still. Sympathy and frustration fought in her at once, and neither quite won.
"I can't," he said finally. "Not without breaking a confidence of my own, which you might allow me the same right to keep as you claim for yourself."
The parallel hit them both at once. For a moment neither spoke, each recognizing they stood on exactly the same ground, defending exactly the same principle, and somehow still furious with each other for it.
"There are dangers made," Elizabeth said, steady now, "by never once trusting a young woman with the management of her own heart, Mr. Darcy.
By treating every attachment as a threat to be neutralized instead of a judgment to be respected, however imperfect that judgment still is. I wonder if you've considered that."
"Do you think me tyrannical, then?" It came out low, wounded in a way he hadn't meant to show.
"I think you're frightened," Elizabeth said, and the room went entirely silent around the two words.
He didn't know how to answer that, because it was true.
She'd said it plainly, not cruelly, the way you'd name a fever rather than a fault.
He wanted to tell her that her silence these past days had cut him more than he could account for.
That he'd lain awake believing she regretted her position at Pemberley, regretted him, regretted the whole undeclared shape of whatever had been growing between them since Longbourn.
He wanted to ask, plainly, whether he'd lost her good opinion twice in one summer through no clearer offense than trying, badly, to protect the people he loved.
He said none of it. What he said instead, quiet and formal, was: "If Miss Bennet finds Pemberley oppressive in any particular, she has only to say so, and I'll arrange matters so her comfort isn't further burdened by my family's difficulties."
He watched something like hurt cross her face before she mastered it.
He understood, a beat too late, that she'd heard exactly what he hadn't meant and everything he feared.
He thought this quarrel was about himself, about her regretting him, when the truth sat somewhere entirely outside the room, in a girl's hidden letters and a soldier's patient cruelty. Neither of them said any of that aloud.
"I don't find Pemberley oppressive," Elizabeth said at last, very quietly, and left him standing among the shelves with the distinct, miserable sense of having wounded the one person he'd most wanted to protect, for reasons he still didn't understand.
He didn't follow her. He stood a long while after the door closed, running the whole exchange back.
Every time, he failed to find the exact sentence where it had turned from concern into injury.
Only that it had, somewhere, and he'd been the one to cause it without meaning to.
It occurred to him, standing there with a book he hadn't opened still in his hand, that he'd done exactly what he'd promised himself he wouldn't. He'd mistaken her silence for a verdict on him, when a wiser man would have paused long enough to ask whether the trouble was hers at all.