Chapter 28 Ptolemy’s Model
“Mr Darcy, grab the crowbar quickly. You will want to see this!”
Darcy had been engaged until the very last moment, and entered the shop right at closing time, so he flipped the sign and locked the door. There was nothing nefarious about it, as Mrs Thorne would have done the same anyway.
“I see you have relegated me to the status of carter or longshoreman, madam.”
“If the shoe fits—” she said with a laugh, and Darcy went to get the familiar crowbar. He suspected she could perfectly well open the box with her teeth if she really wanted to or just have the carter do it. He desperately hoped that she enjoyed his aid and saved the job for him deliberately.
The crate was slightly larger than most he had opened, and Mrs Thorne was leaning over it, looking to see if there were any notes. “This one should be quite special, I think. Our buyer shipped it express.”
Darcy engaged the crowbar, popped off the lid, and they peered inside.
There was no wine in this box, but what they did find was another box, wrapped in oilcloth to protect it from the damp.
Once Darcy lifted the inner box out, he set it on the floor and pushed the outer box over into a corner.
That done, he cut the oilcloth with his penknife, prised open the inner box, and they were greeted with a stack of books—and not just any books.
Amanda gasped and sank to the floor on her knees, looking at the covers lovingly.
Both felt as if they were holding a great treasure, hidden away all through the ages, just waiting for this day.
The books were ancient, so Darcy ran back across the store to pick up his gloves from the entrance and grabbed Amanda’s while he was at it.
On his return, they found that they had the thoroughly scandalous The Plays of Molière, published around 1622.
There were either first editions, or at the least very old copies, of four of Shakespeare’s tragedies, all published around 1604–20.
There were even incredibly old copies of both The Divine Comedy and Inferno by Dante, though since they were published in the fourteenth century, they were obviously not first editions.
There were more contemporary first editions by English and Scottish writers such as Burns and Defoe, which both garnered appreciation but not the awe of the older ones. They could wait.
By the time they were into the third tier, Amanda was sitting on her hands and knees, poking around in the box with her gloved hands, while Darcy had abandoned propriety altogether to join her on the floor.
He was trying to stay out of her way while still being able to comment on what she found, so he sat back on his knees, waiting for her to hand something to him so he could neatly stack it on a small cloth he had taken from a workbench to put on the floor.
As Amanda pulled a somewhat battered early copy of Henry VIII from the pile, Darcy gasped in surprise at what was revealed below, and nearly shouted, “This I must have—if you are willing to sell it, that is. That is Ptolemy’s Cosmographia from 1482.
The cosmology is of course complete nonsense, but this is real! This is history! This is incredible!”
Amanda laughed openly. “Not so greedy, Mr Darcy! I want that one for my own collection, and besides that, you already ha—”
She gasped in surprise and tried to disguise cutting the sentence off mid-word with a cough, but Darcy was staring at her—hard!
He continued staring at her in shock, then whispered, ‘What was that?’
She stuttered and stammered. “That is to say, I believe I understood you to have—”
Darcy, still sitting back on his haunches, looked over at the woman, and he saw the first sign of truly strong emotion he had seen since the first time she threw him out of her shop, and this was not the emotion he was hoping for. He thought she was showing fear, closer to terror.
She could not meet his eye, and muttered a bit more, as she gradually leaned back from her knees until she was first sitting on her ankles as he was, and then slumping all the way down until she was sitting on the floor, looking entirely dejected.
Darcy, feeling he had come to the ultimate turning point of his life, very slowly and carefully manoeuvred himself around so he was facing her directly.
She would not meet his eye, so he slid over to where their knees were almost together, reached over to put his hand near hers, but not actually touching.
With a shaking voice, he whispered, “Amanda, please—please—I swear to you, on my life, that I will never harm you, nor allow any harm to come to you that I can prevent. Not now! Not ever! No matter what!”
Then he took a shaky breath and continued, “With your permission, though, I will ask only one thing of you. I will only ask once. You may answer or not as you choose. I will never ask again.”
He waited, feeling his hand shaking uncontrollably, and saw her eyes glance up at him, then back down, then up and down, five or six times.
There were tears in her eyes that he felt responsible for, but he felt that it was incumbent on him to be strong for these few minutes, regardless of the pain he was feeling or inflicting.
He whispered again, barely audible. “Amanda—please—just tell me. Who are you? If nothing else, please just finish the sentence.”
He saw her swallow once, twice, thrice, then with the back of her glove, she wiped a tear from her left eye, then followed with the right.
She drew a deep, shuddering breath and whispered, “You do not need it, Fitzwilliam, because you already have one on the second black shelf from the top, about three feet from the north end. I leased it to Lord Folenroy for an afternoon for ￡136.”
Jaw hanging open at the sheer audacity of what she had almost managed to pull off, he looked at her in awe and wonder.
She looked back at him, seemed to take some strength for a moment by striking a defiant tone, and then she slumped back down, hardly looking at him as she continued.
“As to your other question—” then she paused in thought for some time while he waited anxiously, his entire body trembling.
“I am not Elizabeth Bennet, the na?ve and carefree girl who once thought her parents and sisters loved her and she would only marry for the deepest love.”
He thought that to be the saddest sentence he had ever heard in his life, and wondered if he should answer, but she shook her head fractionally, as if to tell him she was not finished.
“I am not Elizabeth Bennet—but I once was.”
She took a deep breath and continued.
“I am not Elizabeth Darcy, the abandoned and scorned wife who hated and despised her husband and her family so much that she was willing to lose home and hearth, family and respectability, safety and security, just to be clear of him. The selfish wife who was willing to inflict the supreme and terrible pain of true mourning and guilt on every single person she knew, just so she could breathe free air.”
He saw her hands had curled into fists, so tightly that he would have thought them to presage violence on anyone who was less gentle.
She looked up at him, with hate, hurt, anger and humiliation plain to see in her eyes. “I am not Elizabeth Darcy—but I once was.”
The laying of that name to rest for the moment seemed to calm her a little. Her body slumped back from the rigid posture of a cornered animal ready to fight, to something less dejected than how she had started.
“I am not Amanda Thorne, the fearless widow with a made-up name, who made her own way in the world with the help of a few true friends, afraid of nobody and nothing, just wanting to live her life by her rules so long as she could make prosperity and security for her new family.”
She stared into the distance, as if seeing the people who depended on her, and Darcy could see in her eyes that she was getting ready to fight for them, and he had no doubt she would win. With a shaking breath, she looked him directly in the eyes and continued.
“I am not Amanda Thorne—but I once was.”
She seemed to sit back and think for a while, as Darcy wondered if he should say anything, but thought better of it. He had taken his turn on their wedding day, and the scale was nowhere near balanced.
She sighed, leaned forward on her hands, which she placed beside her thighs flat on the floor, staring at a spot between her legs intently for a moment.
With a sigh, she said, “It used to be easier, you know. Perhaps, someday it will be again—but not today.”
That seemed to exhaust her words for the moment, so he asked timidly, “What was easier?”
She glanced at him, but, unable to keep eye contact, she looked back down and continued, “When I was a na?ve young girl, life was easy, fun, and carefree. I convinced myself that I could sketch a man’s character based on one rude comment hardly worse than what her own mother said every day, and I never had my wilful ignorance tested, never experienced any anxiety nor hardship.
To be honest, at that time I was almost as cynical as my father, but it was easy.
Nobody expected anything of me, most especially myself. ”
Darcy sighed, wondering if that was the time for the apology that was five years overdue, but she took the decision out of his hands by continuing.
“It got harder when my own mother engineered my doom, and I was trying to escape my wretched fate. It seemed like the whole world conspired against me. My father tortured me with threats to my sisters. My sisters tortured me by saying I should just accept you, and I could make something of you. My intended despised me. My best friend betrayed me. My father, through no extraordinary effort save blind luck, found the best thief-taker in England, and he caught me—twice! I assume you know all this?”
“Your sisters explained it to me. I assume you remember 11:37?”