24. The Concealed Conclusion #3
“You lied,” she repeated, and this time her voice carried the edge she had been suppressing, sharp enough to draw blood.
“You brought me into your home to mother your son—your natural son, the child born of your body—and you allowed me to believe he was your brother’s offspring, permitted me to pity you for unrequited devotion while all the while you had possessed what any man might have desired of the woman he loved. ”
She could not continue. Could not name the nature of their relationship, the intimacy that had produced the child she had come to love as fiercely as if he were her own.
“I was going to tell you.” His voice was ragged. “I thought… I hoped… that if you came to love Thomas first, if you understood what he meant to me.”
“You hoped I would be too attached to leave.” The words tasted bitter, welling from what was left of her heart. “You calculated that if I bonded with him, I would overlook the deception.”
“No.” He took a step toward her, and she stepped back. “Yes. I had not dared to hope, but living with you, watching you with Thomas and… I began to wish for a true marriage. I wanted what you gave my son. Acceptance, unconditional. You waited for him, and I thought…”
“You deceived me.” She wrapped her arms around herself, cold despite the fire burning in the grate. “Every day. Every conversation. Every moment you let me believe Wickham was his father, you were lying.”
“Yes.” He did not try to defend himself, did not offer excuses—simply stood before her, stripped bare, accepting whatever judgment she would render. “I will spend the rest of my life earning your forgiveness, if you will let me.”
Elizabeth stared at this man she had married, the one she had begun to love, who had built their marriage on carefully constructed half-truths, and she rued the day she fancied she might unravel him—how diligently she had recorded her observations, how she had delighted in her own mistaken insights.
“You want my forgiveness,” she sputtered.
“I want your love.” His voice broke upon the word, fracturing like ice beneath too great a weight, and she watched the composure he had maintained throughout this terrible conversation finally give way to something raw and unguarded and utterly unlike the proud man who had arrived at Longbourn to propose a marriage of convenience.
“I have wanted it since the moment I saw you crossing the lawn at Netherfield with mud on your petticoat and fire in your eyes, wanted it with a desperation I did not know myself capable of feeling. I know I have ruined my chances, that I have squandered through cowardice and concealment any right I might have had to ask for it. But I am asking nonetheless. I am begging, Elizabeth, for the chance to prove myself worthy of what I have so thoroughly failed to deserve.”
“And if I cannot?”
“Then I will wait…” He swallowed hard, lowering his gaze to the floor.
“As long as you do not leave the marriage. I will fulfill my end of the bargain, continue to support your family, but I will not trouble you with my presence or expectations.” He struggled to stand straight, to tilt his chin as if to appear resolute, but his lower lip trembled, and then he took a breath, ragged and raw.
“But Elizabeth, I do love you. That was never a lie. Whatever else I have done, whatever else I have hidden, that was always true.”
She wanted to believe him. Heaven help her, she wanted to believe him.
But trust, once shattered, did not reassemble itself on command.
“The key.” She held out her hand. “To the cabinet. I want access to Lady Amelia’s papers. All of them.”
Darcy reached into his waistcoat and withdrew a small brass key. He placed it in her palm without hesitation.
“And complete candor henceforth.” She closed her fingers around the cold metal.
“No further concealment, no convenient omissions, no half-truths dressed as discretion. If there is anything else I ought to know, you will tell me now, or you will tell me when I am ready to hear it, but you will tell me.”
“There is more.” His voice was barely audible, the words dragged from him as though hot coals. “About Amelia—why she refused to marry me, though she carried my child. And why I hoped you would be different.”
He was not making sense. She wanted to point out she had no opportunity to carry his child, but that point stung, because it meant he could not come to her, even when she had invited him. The humiliation, even to herself, was devastating.
“I cannot hear it now. Not when I feel like this.” She turned toward the door, the brass key hot in her palm.
“Elizabeth.” His voice stopped her at the threshold. “What about Thomas?”
She stood with her back to him, her hand on the doorknob. The question hung in the air between them—the only question that truly mattered.
What about Thomas?
The child who called her Lizba, who built walls instead of towers, who had claimed her heart long before she knew whose son he truly was.
“I am going to the nursery,” she said, not turning around. “He will be waking from his nap, and he does not like to wake alone.”
“Elizabeth—”
“He has claimed me, Fitzwilliam,” she said more softly, almost to herself. “Whatever else has changed, that has not.”