Chapter 30
CHAPTER THIRTY
DO NOT LOOK DOWN
Elizabeth
Three days of almost-normal had done more damage to my defenses than the storm that preceded them.
Georgiana stayed at Longbourn for two of those three days before returning to Netherfield, which was now blissfully devoid of female Bingleys-by-birth.
She taught Mary the bridge passage of the jig in exchange for Mary teaching her a particularly melancholy Bach prelude, and the two of them sat at the pianoforte for hours.
Darcy called every afternoon with Bingley, arriving at the civilized hour of two and departing at the increasingly uncivilized hour of six, which meant the man was spending four hours a day in a house where Lydia exercised her lungs at volume, Kitty trailed him, offering biscuits, cakes, and lemon squares, and Mama assessed him with the relentless efficiency of a woman evaluating a horse at auction while pretending to embroider.
He submitted to all of it. He played Commerce with Lydia and lost in a way that suggested he was trying to lose, which Lydia did not notice, and I noticed immediately.
He endured Papa’s rhetorical questions on subjects Papa had already decided, deployed for the sole purpose of watching a proud man navigate agreement without appearing sycophantic—which Darcy managed with such careful precision that Papa began assigning him reading, starting with Fordyce’s Sermons, which Darcy reported as appalling, which was why Papa liked him.
He kneaded bread in the kitchen beside Mama, who considered the surest path to a man’s soul to be demonstrated through the quality of his pastry technique, and who found his technique surprisingly competent for a man whose household employed a French-trained cook.
And he dropped food for Cinnamon with a healthy consistency that could not have been accidental.
And then, on the fourth morning, the sun came out, and Darcy arrived alone. He found me in the garden with Cinnamon and Belinda, which I had finished the night before by candlelight, turning the last page with the green ribbon trailing across my wrist.
“You finished it,” he said, nodding at the book.
“Lady Delacour survives. I was not certain she would.” I closed the cover. “The ending is more generous than I expected. Edgeworth forgives everyone, which is either compassionate or naive, and I have not decided which.”
“And which would you prefer?”
“Compassionate. I find I am developing a taste for it.”
He looked at me with that expression I was learning to read—the one where amusement and something deeper occupied the same space and neither displaced the other.
“Will you walk with me? A longer walk, I mean. Boots and a bonnet.” He hesitated, which was unusual for a man who generally delivered requests as though they were accomplished facts.
“Georgiana told me about the stream crossing. Where the stones are flat, and the water overran them in the storm. She said you taught her not to look down but to look at where she wished to step next. I should like to see it.”
Asking to see a stream where his sister had been brave was both curiosity and a need to understand, and naturally, I concurred.
My heart, however, wondered, though I swiftly quelled such imprudent thoughts. It would not do to entertain fanciful notions about Mr. Darcy’s intentions. He was a brother who cared greatly for a sister who had finally come out of her shell.
“I shall get my boots and my bonnet,” I said. “And I shall bring Cinnamon, because she will follow us regardless. It is more dignified to invite a cat than to be pursued by one.”
Cinnamon, as it happened, had already decided to come. She darted from one side of the path, weaving between dried bushes and clumps of greenery, chasing birds or stalking unseen creatures.
The meadow was golden in the November sun, the grass fading in the frost, and the hedgerows stripped to their bones. We walked side by side with eighteen inches of air between us, and the eighteen inches felt both impossible and insufficient, and I was acutely aware of every one of them.
“Bingley tells me he means to propose,” Darcy said.
“Jane tells me she means to accept. You may inform Bingley, if you wish, though I suspect she will tell him herself within approximately four seconds of the question being asked.”
“They are well-suited.”
“They are identically suited. Two people who believe the best of everyone and are occasionally right. It is a miracle they are not both dead of misplaced trust.”
He laughed, and I smiled.
We crossed the stile. Darcy offered his hand to help me over, and I took it, and the taking was an ordinary courtesy and not ordinary at all, and I released his fingers on the other side, and we walked on.
“Your father has been very generous with his time,” Darcy said, after a pause. “Our conversations have been instructive.”
“Papa considers you a project. He hasn’t had a good project since Mary abandoned Latin in favor of German. I would not be surprised if he begins assigning you more reading.”
“He has already assigned me Fordyce’s Sermons. I believe it was meant ironically.”
“With Papa, one can never be entirely certain. He may also have been testing whether you would actually read them, which would tell him everything he wished to know about your character.”
“I read two. They were appalling.”
“And this is why Papa likes you.”
Darcy did not blush, because men don’t blush, but the tips of his ears turned pink.
We walked in silence for a stretch, the path narrowing between hawthorn hedges, Cinnamon disappearing into the undergrowth and reappearing twenty yards ahead with the satisfied air of a cat who had investigated a mouse hole and found it wanting.
“Elizabeth.”
Not Miss Bennet. Not the careful formality of the drawing room. My name, spoken in a November meadow with no one to hear it but the hedgerows and the cat.
“There is something I must tell you. About Georgiana. About what happened before—the reason I am the way I am and why I could not hear you when you warned me about Caroline.” He stopped walking.
His hands went behind his back, gripping each other, a posture Georgiana adopted when she was bracing for something difficult, and the recognition that the gesture was inherited made my chest ache.
“Darcy.” I stopped, too. Turned to face him on the path, with the stream now visible through the trees, glinting silver in the sun. “Georgiana told me.”
He went very still.
“In the bath,” I said. “At Longbourn, the night she crossed. She was shivering and brave, and she told me everything. Wickham, the lies, the trunk in the hallway, and your fortuitous arrival. All of it.”
His face—I cannot describe his face. I had seen Darcy angry and formal and tender and broken and laughing, and I had never seen this. Stripped. As though the last wall had been dissolved.
“You knew.” His voice was barely audible. “That night, when I crossed the room to you, wet and cold. You already knew.”
“Yes.”
“And you danced with me.”
“Yes.”
He turned away, one hand pressing against his mouth, and I gave him the moment because some things require air. When he turned back, his eyes were bright.
“I manage everything,” he said, and the saying had the quality of a confession delivered to a court he has finally decided to trust. “I managed Ramsgate until the management became a cage. I managed Georgiana until she had to cross a stream to choose her own people. I managed my feelings for you until they escaped in a kitchen over ginger biscuits and I said things I had no intention of saying aloud.”
“Magnificent,” I said.
He blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“You said I was magnificent. And remarkable, and extraordinary.” I was smiling, and it didn’t surprise me. “You were mumbling between biscuit bites, and I was not supposed to have heard.”
“I was not mumbling. I was stating facts under duress.”
“Under the duress of ginger biscuits.”
“Your ginger biscuits are a force beyond mortal resistance.” His voice was steadier now. “Elizabeth, I need you to understand. Georgiana chose to tell you, and I did not authorize or orchestrate the telling.”
“I know that, and I would never betray that trust. She came to me in the middle of a storm, and she knew that I would open the door, and that I wanted nothing from her but her trust.”
He was quiet for a moment. The stream glinted through the trees, the sound of flowing water bubbly and delightful.
“Words will always be inadequate—” his breath caught.
“Then let me show you,” I said, glancing at Cinnamon, who had reached the bank. “This is where she crossed.”
Darcy stood at the bank and looked at the water. I watched him see it—the smallness of it, the ordinariness. A girl’s stepping-stone crossing between two estates, between two worlds, between the brother who caged her with love and the woman who taught her the cage had a door.
“She said not to look down,” he murmured. “To look where you wish to step next.”
“She was afraid of the water, and I told her to pick a stone and commit to it.”
“You taught my sister to be brave.”
“I taught your sister to cross a stream. The bravery was hers.”
He looked at me then. Fully, the way the sun was looking at the water—directly, without apology, and illuminating everything.
“I love you, Elizabeth.” He said it as though it were a fact of geography—as though he were pointing out that the stream ran east, or that the meadow sloped toward Longbourn, or that November followed October.
“I have loved you since the kitchen, when you fed me biscuits and scolded me, and your eyes were magnificent. I lost the ability to classify you, and the inability has been the making of me. And here I stand at a stream where my sister learned to be brave, and I am asking you to let me be brave in return.”
My throat was tight, my eyes burning, and my hands shaking, and I could have deflected with wit, but I chose not to.
I looked into his eyes, those dear, dark, watchful eyes, and I did not see a man assessing me for my worth. I saw one who valued me, not counting the cost, but taking me with all my faults and foibles and finding me very suitable indeed.
He extended his hand. “Will you cross with me?”
I looked at the stream. The flat stones, dry now, the water low and quiet, the far bank leading back to Netherfield and the fields and whatever came next.
A small crossing. An ordinary crossing. The kind a girl had made in a rainstorm when she had learned that the choice was hers, and the choosing had changed everything.
I took his hand. His fingers closed around mine, warm and steady.
“Do not look down,” he said.
“I am looking exactly where I wish to step.” I kept my gaze on him, noting that naughty lock of hair over his forehead, and trusting him to guide me across.
I didn’t see the stones, but I didn’t miss a step, stone by stone, hand in hand.
When we reached the Netherfield side, I wrapped my arms around him and said, plainly, “I love you, too, finally.”
He lifted my hand and pressed his lips to my knuckles.
The pressing was gentle and deliberate and completely improper, and I did not care, because propriety had governed us long enough.
The man holding my hand had crossed every boundary I had built, and I had let him, and the letting was not surrender.
It was a choice. Mine.