Chapter 35
Chapter Thirty-Five
Darcy heard the wheels in the yard before Norton came to the door. He was in the study, staring at an untouched glass of brandy and debating on the merits of collapsing on his cot when the hooves on gravel roused him.
“Colonel Fitzwilliam, sir,” Norton said. “In the hall. And damp about the temper.”
Darcy stood and went to the door. He had expected another letter, not the man himself. Fitzwilliam’s presence implied either that concern had sharpened into action or that curiosity had. Neither was convenient. The former was more just.
Fitzwilliam stood by the fire, shedding gloves, road-cloak, and impatience in unequal portions. Travel had reddened his face and soaked his coat. The weather, Darcy thought, suited him—inconvenient enough to provoke complaint, yet insufficient to excuse it.
“You look delighted,” Fitzwilliam said. “It is always pleasant to be received by a relation as if one had ridden north bearing plague.”
“I should perform delight better if you had warned me of your approach.”
“Had I warned you, you might have found a reason to prevent it, and then where would family feeling be?” Fitzwilliam gave one quick, assessing glance.
“You have slept poorly. Good. I dislike being the only man swaying on his feet. Shall we tip a bottle and finish ourselves off with a bit of gossip?”
Darcy lowered his voice. “Not here.”
“No. One sees at once this hall has ears, eyes, and very likely opinions enough. Very well. Give me food, fire, and privacy in the order most likely to preserve your civility.”
Mrs Reeves, summoned by instinct rather than bell, provided the first two without question. Within fifteen minutes Fitzwilliam had been refreshed, nourished with a tray substantial enough to reconcile his constitution to the north, and restored to a cheerfulness incompatible with true humility.
Only then did Darcy lead him into the study and close the door.
Fitzwilliam glanced around once, noting the desk crowded with ledgers, the maps pinned near the shelf, the muddy boots by the hearth, the fresh draughts of water-channels inked in Hadley’s blunt competent hand.
“So it is true,” he said. “You have become a man of ditches.”
“If you rode two hundred miles to sneer at drainage, I shall send you back unfed.”
“No. I rode because your last letter was the most alarming example of restraint I have received from you in years, and because that style in you generally signals either disaster or devotion. Sometimes both.”
Darcy said nothing.
Fitzwilliam’s expression altered. Wit ceded to seriousness. “I was right, then. There is a matter here.”
Darcy moved to the window before replying. The yard offered no help. “There is a lady in this house,” he said at last, “whose circumstances are not what they should be.”
Fitzwilliam made a small, impatient sound. “That much my horse knew by the time he reached your gate. Try the next degree of accuracy.”
Darcy turned. “You will not speak her name outside this room.”
“Then I shall need it inside.”
“Miss Elizabeth Bennet.”
Fitzwilliam’s brows rose. “Ah. Lady Catherine has mentioned that name in my hearing. And, I take it, at least half what she told me was even true. But I imagine there is more, even than our aunt has imagined.”
It was intolerable how quickly he saw. “Our aunt has information enough,” Darcy said, “but not the sort that makes her useful.”
“No,” Fitzwilliam said slowly. “I suppose not.”
He took the armchair by the hearth without waiting, the privilege of cousins and soldiers. “Go on.”
Darcy did, though not clearly. He withheld what Elizabeth had not trusted him with.
He told the rest—the rescue, the injury, her wish to flee the house before her leg had healed, the existence of papers Elizabeth feared to expose, his sense that any formal enquiry might endanger her and anyone aiding her.
Fitzwilliam listened without interruption, a sign both of seriousness and alarm. When Darcy finished, he turned one glove between his hands. “And Georgiana knows?”
“Not the particulars.”
“The widowed sister you mentioned?”
“I imagine she knows the whole of it.”
“The servants?”
“Only what any household might observe when two ladies arrive half-drowned and one with a wound that would have killed most.”
“And you,” Fitzwilliam said evenly, “my dear Darcy, I presume only what your face has always taught me—that you can labour like six men and still, where affection is concerned, place yourself in absurdity by excessive delicacy at the wrong end of the question.”
Under other circumstances Darcy might have ordered him out. Today the rebuke struck too close to truth to dismiss.
“She is alarmed,” he said. “And recently hurt again in an attempt to leave the house—”
Fitzwilliam sat up sharply. “To leave?”
Darcy regretted the admission instantly.
“She thought to go for our sake. Mine, Georgiana’s, the house’s. She did not get farther than the south lane.”
Fitzwilliam studied him with an almost irony-stripped look.
“And you brought her back. Of course you did.”
Fitzwilliam set the glove on the arm of the chair.
“Very well. Let us set aside all decoration and speak plainly. If this lady is under some legal or quasi-legal threat, and if you have already sheltered her without reporting it because you judge the threat unjust or at least unclear, then your position may yet be defensible. If, however, you continue without acquiring facts necessary to protect Georgiana and yourself, your position becomes not chivalrous but reckless.”
“You think I do not know that?”
“I think you know and do not like the knowledge because it arrives too late to keep your feelings in order.”
That struck. Darcy turned away lest his face betray too much.
Fitzwilliam said more quietly, “Do you love her?”
The question entered with such bluntness that for an instant all the lesser tensions—the legal danger, gossip, household arrangements, even Georgiana’s position—went into the background.
Darcy hesitated only because the truthful answer required not thought but surrender. “Yes.”
Fitzwilliam closed his eyes briefly, not with surprise, but resigned to a fate he had suspected and disliked on practical grounds.
“Then we are all in deeper water than I hoped.” The words might have been comic from another. From Fitzwilliam, who had ridden north instead of waiting to be proved right from a distance, they came almost kindly.
“Does she love you?” he asked.
Darcy thought of Elizabeth in the lane, shaking with pain and fury in his arms. Of her wit guarded under dread. Of the quiet wound on her face when he refused her truth of Fitzwilliam’s letter. Of the lie she told him yesterday with her voice unwavering and eyes full of what the voice denied.
“She may,” he said. “Or she may be too entangled by gratitude, circumstance, and habit to distinguish one feeling from another.”
“That is the most hopelessly honourable answer you could give and probably the truest.”
Darcy nodded. “You have judged the matter rightly.”
The candle she had lit at some hour she had stopped counting was on its second wick and burning crooked.
She had heard wheels in the gravel sometime after midnight, and Darcy’s tread cross the hall to the door—a voice not Hadley’s, not the village, answering his, then receding with him into the study.
The door had closed after them. In the four hours since, no one had been to her door to put a name to the voice she had heard.
She had spent her hours in the chair turning over what she did not know: whether she was waiting for the question she wanted asked or the question she had no answer to.
The first version of the visitor—most patient, most plausible at one in the morning—was a magistrate.
Some man in a coat with the kind of patience the law cultivates, sent for from Bakewell, willing to receive his cold supper in the study while he waited for the household to wake.
The second was a friend Darcy had not named to her—a steward, a solicitor, a relation.
The third was that whoever had come had nothing whatever to do with her, and the carriage in the dark had simply been somebody arriving on Northmere’s other business, and her hands were cold for nothing.
With every quarter that passed without a knock at the parlour door, the magistrate began to thin.
A magistrate, having travelled by night, would not have suffered to be put off until breakfast. A magistrate would have stood in the hall and waited for her to be brought down.
He would have wished to have her at first light, when the household was asleep, so that the going-out of him from the house with her in his keeping would not be witnessed.
There had been no such moving. The house had been still since the front door had closed.
She did not trust the thinning. Hope was as dangerous to her, this morning, as fear.
She was waiting because Darcy had told her, in the room where she had told him every truth she had been keeping, that he would speak to her again before the household was awake. The household was not yet awake. He had not come down.
She loved him.
She had stopped pretending, even to herself in the dark, that this was anything else.
What she would say if he asked—what she would say if he came to take her—what she would say if he came down and said nothing at all and only stood at the door and looked at her—were three different sentences, none of them ready.
The fire she had built up twice in the night was low again. The candle was almost out. The window had begun to give her back the parlour in faint reflection, which meant the dark beyond it was thinning.
She heard the study door open at last.