21. The Sonnet’s Fate #3
But there had been something else in his voice when he spoke of her—beneath the bitterness and careful control. Something that sounded suspiciously like longing.
Elizabeth closed the book of sonnets, and the conclusion arrived not as revelation but as a confirmation she had been circling for days.
Darcy had loved Lady Amelia. Not openly, perhaps.
Not successfully, for certain. Lady Amelia had chosen the dashing brother, the charmer who made women laugh and forget their better judgment.
She had chosen George Wickham over Fitzwilliam Darcy, and Darcy had been left to watch from the margins, loving a woman he could not have, grieving a woman he could not claim.
And Elizabeth was the second choice. The words were ugly. He had married her because Lady Amelia was dead and he required a mother for her child. She almost despised her own na?veté. Had she truly believed she could capture Darcy’s complicated heart?
She had known, marrying him, that this was an arrangement rather than a romance.
She had accepted the terms with clear eyes.
But somewhere between the barn, the sickroom, and the sonnets read by firelight, Elizabeth had forgotten that she was merely convenient.
She had begun to believe herself essential.
The word mocked her now. He had called her essential, and she had treasured the word like a jewel, and all the while his heart had belonged to a ghost. She ought to feel angry, wronged, deceived, and any number of things a scorned woman felt.
Yet, standing in the dim library with dust motes drifting through the slanted light and the brokenness of a man stretched over the lines of a sonnet, all she could muster was something much nearer to tenderness.
He had loved, and lost, and borne the grief alone. He had watched the woman he wanted choose his own brother. He had taken in her child, guarded her papers, preserved her memory, and then married Elizabeth—perhaps hoping that duty might become something more.
But love and grief could not coexist. And Darcy was unable to bring himself to consummate a marriage that must feel like a betrayal of a memory.
The conclusion settled into Elizabeth’s chest like the crushing of her heart—excruciating but also numb.
She understood now. She understood his conflict, his hesitation, his desperate declaration of love followed by his failure to act upon it.
He was torn between a living wife and the dead woman he had never stopped loving.
She paced the length of the aisle, arguing with herself, and finding no purchase, because there was none to be found.
I am not you. I do not ride well, and I do not write novels, essays, or philosophy. I am merely Elizabeth Bennet of Longbourn, possessed of tolerable wit and impertinent observations and very little else to recommend me.
But I am here. I am alive. You are not. You forsook him.
You did not care enough to make yourself his, to take his name, and give your son a name.
You… are not… And some stubborn part of her refused to yield.
I am loved, now. He said so, and he meant it.
Whatever else—I love you. And she had believed him.
Perhaps he lied to himself or wished to believe he could find it in his heart to love again. But she would hold on to the present.
She wanted to go to him now. To walk to his study, knock on the door, and tell him she understood—or was beginning to—and that whatever he carried, she would help him bear it.
She wanted to hold his head in her lap as she had held Thomas’s, to smooth his hair, kiss the grief from his eyes, and promise that loss need not mean loneliness.
But she could not move. He had made his choice last night. He had chosen not to come to her, not to trust her, not to bridge the distance that his secrets had created. If she went to him now, she would be the one who yielded first. She would be the one who accepted less than she deserved.
And Elizabeth Bennet did not chase men who declined her invitation.
She would wait and let him come to her. And if he did not—if he continued to hide behind notes and noble protestations of unworthiness—then she would know exactly where she stood.
Replacing the sonnets on the shelf, she turned toward the door, longing to hold Thomas in her arms. She would kiss him, he would call her Lizba, and she would remember that with whatever complications entangled in this marriage, there was goodness as well.
She was halfway to the nursery stairs when Jamison’s distinctive throat-clearing halted her.
“Mrs. Darcy.”
She turned. The footman held a silver salver, and on it lay a letter—thick paper, pressed seal, direction written in a familiar hand.
“An express has arrived from Longbourn, madam. From Miss Bennet.”
Elizabeth’s heart stuttered. An express was costly and meant news that could not wait.
“Thank you, Jamison.” She took the letter with fingers that trembled only slightly, and Jamison withdrew with his customary discretion.
Elizabeth broke the seal and began to read.