Chapter 4
Mr. Darcy
McKeever cut the damaged ribbon from Darcy's watch fob.
He did it at the dressing table with a watchmaker's exactness, scissors angled just so, as though the ribbon might yet be saved by sheer force of professional pride.
It had survived three years of careful handling.
One wet afternoon had ruined it entirely.
"The watch is uninjured."
"I had not asked."
"No, sir."
Darcy stood at the window, hands clasped behind his back, one thumb pressed hard enough against the opposite wrist to leave a mark.
The storm had passed. It had left behind a yellow evening and a garden full of standing water that caught the last light like scattered coin.
The south pavilion was just visible between the trees.
From this height, at this distance, it looked harmless, which struck Darcy as a particularly unkind joke.
Elizabeth had refused him there, in all but location.
He had proposed in the morning room afterward, before an open door, with Bingley turning pages in the next room like a man performing the part of chaperon. No scene could have been more proper.
No proposal could have gone worse.
"You knew the drain had flooded."
"I knew it might, sir."
"Why were you on that path before breakfast?"
McKeever set the watch down with great care. "Sarah told me Miss Elizabeth had slept little and might take the air this morning. I wished to know which path was sound before anyone walked it."
"You discussed Miss Elizabeth's movements with a Netherfield housemaid."
"We discussed the weather, sir."
"You marked a book together."
"We discussed Cowper."
"You left a strip of her mending silk upon my shelf."
McKeever considered the charge with the gravity of a man weighing a genuine legal accusation. "That was careless of me."
"It was matchmaking."
The word should have embarrassed him. It embarrassed Darcy instead, and far more than McKeever.
McKeever folded the old ribbon into a neat square, unbothered. "It was a book, sir."
"And the walk?"
"You invited Miss Elizabeth."
"After Sarah announced the terrace was dry."
"It was dry."
Darcy turned from the window at last. "The result was a flooded pavilion and a proposal she believed came from duty alone."
McKeever's expression lost its careful neutrality for the first time all evening. "You proposed today?"
"I did."
"And Miss Elizabeth declined."
It was not a question. Darcy disliked how plainly the answer must have shown on him already. In his jaw. In the stillness he was working rather too hard to maintain.
"She considered my motive insufficient."
"Was it?"
Rank drew a line across the room, invisible but real as a wall.
McKeever rarely approached it. In ten years, he had never once stepped over.
Darcy might have dismissed the question outright.
Instead he sat down heavily in the chair by the fire, and the breath he released had been held rather longer than he had realised.
"I told her I admired her. I spoke of honour. I never once asked whether she could be happy with me."
"I see."
"Do you?"
"I see why she declined, sir."
The respectful answer cut clean through every excuse Darcy had been assembling since the morning room.
He had expected gratitude, he realised now, for doing the proper thing, for behaving exactly as a gentleman ought to behave under the circumstances.
Elizabeth had demanded truth instead about why he wished to do it at all.
He had possessed that truth the whole time.
He had simply hidden it behind duty until it came out sounding like reluctance.
Which was, he was beginning to understand, very nearly the worst thing it could have sounded like.
"Sarah believes Miss Elizabeth's opinion of you has improved, sir."
"You have discussed that as well, apparently."
"She observed it."
"And supplied it to you."
"I asked whether Miss Elizabeth had been distressed by the discovery at the pavilion. Sarah reported that she was angry only after the proposal. She gave no reason for it."
Darcy looked over at him properly. "You asked after her distress?"
"Yes, sir."
There was real concern in that single syllable, plain as anything.
McKeever had served Darcy since Cambridge.
He had managed fevers, mourning clothes, and the grim weeks after Ramsgate without ever once losing his composure.
His wages kept a widowed sister and her children fed in Derbyshire.
Darcy knew the man's discretion the way he knew his own hands.
He had never quite considered that the same discretion might extend to actual affection for the people who crossed his path.
"No more arrangements."
"Very good, sir."
"No messages invented, no meetings contrived, no rumours answered by anyone but me."
McKeever's brows drew together, wounded. "We invented nothing, sir."
"I know. Keep it that way."
"Yes, sir."
"If Sarah hears Miss Bingley speak of the pavilion, she is to tell Mrs. Nicholls. You are to tell me. Neither of you is to confront her directly."
"Certainly."
"And if Miss Elizabeth asks about today, you will answer only what she has a right to know."
"Which part would that be, sir?"
Darcy had no ready answer for him. It depended upon what Elizabeth actually asked, and upon whether she would consider his valet's interest in her welfare a kindness or an intrusion.
"The truth," he said at last. "No more than that."
McKeever inclined his head, something almost like satisfaction in it. "That was our rule already, sir."
Darcy nearly laughed. The impulse arrived strange and unfamiliar after the morning room, like a muscle he had forgotten he had.
At dinner, Elizabeth remained upstairs with Jane.
Her absence somehow occupied more space at the table than her presence ever had.
Caroline discussed the storm at considerable, unnecessary length.
She began with the damage to the kitchen garden, progressed through the inconvenience of damp carpets in the east hall, and arrived at the pavilion with the satisfied air of a traveller finally reaching her intended destination after a long and winding journey.
"It was fortunate that Charles saw them," she said to Mrs. Hurst, not troubling to lower her voice. "A longer absence might have produced unfortunate conclusions."
Bingley put down his glass with a sharp little click. "What conclusions?"
Caroline smiled thinly. "None among friends, naturally."
"Then do not suggest them."
Hurst stopped chewing mid-bite. Louisa stared at her brother as though he had sprouted a second head. Bingley was almost never sharp. When he was, the effect rather exceeded Darcy's own habitual severity, because it happened so rarely.
"Charles, I meant only to protect Miss Eliza," Caroline said, colour rising.
"You protect her best by repeating the truth. Darcy and Miss Elizabeth were caught by weather on a path every person in this drawing room watched them take. We found them in an open shelter, in full view of the terrace. That is the whole account, and it is not a very interesting one."
"Naturally."
"You will give that account to anyone who asks. Word for word."
Caroline's colour rose further still. "Nobody will ask me."
"Excellent. Then the matter's finished, and we need not speak of it again."
Darcy had, he realised, underestimated his friend. The admission joined several others he had made that week, and the pile was getting embarrassingly large.
After dinner, Bingley followed Darcy into the library, closing the door behind them with unusual care.
"You asked her."
Darcy opened the door again. He no longer trusted closed doors in that particular house, not after everything. "I offered marriage."
"And she refused."
"Does everyone know?"
"Only a man who has just watched you fail to hear a single word spoken over two entire courses."
Darcy went to the fire and stood with both hands braced on the mantel, staring into it as though the flames might offer some useful counsel. Her answer still occupied the silence she had left behind her, filling it up. "She believed I acted from duty."
"Did you?"
"In part. I also wanted her — badly — but I did not say it well. I hardly said it at all."
"Then she was correct about the part you actually gave her. Wanting her in silence could hardly have assisted matters, could it."
Darcy gave him a look. Bingley smiled back without a shred of apology.
"You told me not to let another person decide whom I value. Perhaps you should not let the weather decide how you declare it either."
"The weather decided the necessity."
"No. The weather gave you an excuse, and you took it because it was easier than the truth."
Darcy turned to face him fully. Bingley had no gift whatsoever for deception, and his face showed sympathy, and amusement, and a small flicker of alarm at his own boldness, all three at once.
"You admired her before the pavilion. If you meant to seek her without needing an excuse, say so plainly. If you did not mean it — truly did not — then leave her in peace and let her be."
The choice was harder, somehow, than the proposal itself had been. A duty could be discharged once and set down. Courtship required him to risk refusal again and again, without the comfortable armour of necessity to hide behind each time.
"I meant to seek her."
The admission left him strangely exposed, standing there in front of the fire. It also left him relieved. Lighter than he had felt in days, as though he had set something heavy down at last.
"Then begin there."
The next morning, Darcy found Elizabeth in the small sitting room with Jane.
The door stood open. Sarah arranged flowers at the far table with elaborate unconcern, and Bingley occupied a chair beside Jane's sofa as though he had taken up permanent residence there.
There would be no privacy whatsoever. Darcy found, rather to his own surprise, that he welcomed it.
Elizabeth looked up. Her expression was composed, carefully so, but one finger pressed into the repaired fringe of her shawl without her seeming to notice it.
"Miss Bennet," he said to Jane. "I am pleased to see you improved."
"Thank you, Mr. Darcy. I am almost well enough to be disobedient again."
"Then Mr. Bingley should prepare himself accordingly."
Bingley grinned outright. Jane coloured, pretty and pink.
Darcy turned to Elizabeth. "May I speak with you here?"
"You may."
Sarah's hands slowed among the stems, though she did not stop.
"I owe you an apology. Yesterday I asked you to join your life to mine before I ever asked whether you desired it. I spoke of risk as though your reputation were mine to manage on your behalf. It is not."
Elizabeth's eyes widened. He pressed on before his own courage could think better of it.
"The storm did not create my admiration for you. It only created urgency — and I used that urgency badly. I will not repeat the offer unless you give me some reason to believe it would be welcome."
Silence followed, thick enough to feel. Jane looked at Elizabeth, then at Bingley. Bingley had become fascinated by the fire irons, studying them as though they held the secrets of the universe.
Elizabeth's grip loosened on the shawl at last. "That is a very complete apology."
"I had a sleepless night to compose it."
"Then I am sorry to have profited by your fatigue."
"You did not. McKeever did. He prefers a contrite employer to a stubborn one — says it is less work for everybody."
Sarah bent low over the flowers, hiding her face. Elizabeth saw it. So, rather helplessly, did Darcy.
"Your valet and Sarah appear to take a great deal of interest in our moral improvement."
"They have been instructed to restrict themselves to books and accurate weather reports from now on."
"The weather was accurate. It was only the timing that was poor."
"McKeever accepts no responsibility whatsoever for clouds. He was quite firm on the point."
Her mouth curved. Not forgiveness exactly, and not encouragement either, but something gentler than both. Something Darcy had not dared hope for that morning.
"I accept your apology. I cannot promise more than that."
"I ask no more."
It was necessity, rather than perfect honesty, that kept his answer so modest. He found he meant it anyway, or was learning to.
Darcy bowed and left her with her sister.
In the corridor, McKeever waited with a letter from Pemberley held out ready.
Sarah passed him carrying an empty vase, her chin high, her face composed.
They did not speak. They exchanged exactly one glance, brief, unreadable to anyone who had not spent the last two days watching for it.
Darcy knew an arrangement when he saw one.
This time, he let it pass without a word.