CHAPTER SIXTEEN #2
He stilled upon hearing her voice, his focus seemingly roused from some distant contemplation. The blankness in his expression left her with the distinct and rather embarrassing impression that he had not truly absorbed a word of the colonel’s story.
Her teasing sally, she realised belatedly, had been aimed at a man who was not even present in the conversation.
Had he been engaged, it might have been taken as the playful challenge she intended; instead, it could only have sounded like a sharp and unprovoked cruelty.
In her attempt to reach him, she had only managed to sound exactly like the woman who had so loved making sport of his reticence.
A truly masterful manoeuvre, Lizzy, she laughed at herself pitifully.
The colonel turned to Darcy with a look of good-natured exasperation. “Come now, cousin. As a man whose entire life is devoted to coaxing a harvest from the stubborn soils of Derbyshire, what is your expert counsel?”
Darcy looked as if he was only just registering the end of a story he hadn’t heard. Her heart was pulsing in her ears as she watched him, desperately searching his impassive features for some echo of the upheaval that had just occurred within her own heart.
“There is little sense in labouring over a field that will yield no harvest,” he said eventually.
Unable to shake the suspicion he was not speaking solely of Eckleman and his soils, Elizabeth’s hands suddenly felt cold in her lap. The hopeful pulse she had felt in her own ears just moments before went completely silent.
It was, she thought with sardonic amusement, a perfectly constructed farce, one she would have laughed at were she not a central character. Lord knows her father would have been vastly entertained by the exquisitely terrible irony of it.
Her own heart was finally, hopelessly, softening to him. But she knew any regard on his part was now impossible; she herself had made it so.
Sensing the immediate collapse of the conversation, Colonel Fitzwilliam charged to the rescue.
“That reminds me of that time I happened upon Lieutenant Kennedy in Brighton!” he said, with valiant cheer, and then launched determinedly into a story.
The colonel’s voice became a meaningless drone in Elizabeth’s ears, entirely drowned out by the deafening silence emanating from the man whose expression now held the very distance she had so vehemently demanded of him.
With Darcy’s principles of visualisation in mind, Elizabeth focused on the leaf.
With a concentration that was almost a prayer, she coaxed it from the ground.
It rose, trembling, then held steady. Slowly she guided the leaf in a looping dance through the air before allowing it to drift into the stream.
With another pulse of will, she created a miniature whirlpool in the water below, swirling the leaf around and around in a mesmerising spiral.
A snap of a twig from the edge of the glade broke her focus.
The leaf sank into the water, the whirlpool vanished, and the magic dissipated as if it had never been. Elizabeth whirled around, her heart leaping into her throat.
Colonel Fitzwilliam was there, astride his horse. He dismounted with a slow deliberation, his gaze never leaving her. The appraising look in his eyes told her everything: he had seen it all.
He said nothing at first, simply walking his mount closer, the silence stretching uncomfortably. Finally, he said, in a tone missing its usual cheer, “Does Darcy know you have been doing this?”
“I have not yet shared it with him.”
“Why not? Elizabeth, after everything…you must know that he would want to help. Surely you cannot think otherwise.”
“He has enough to occupy him,” she said, prevaricating.
And there was another, more private reason she could not voice: the simple, disorienting fact of his nearness.
Her heart now seemed to thunder in her chest whenever he was close, a powerful, distracting rhythm that made focus impossible.
It was a complication her questionable grasp on her magic could not afford.
“Nothing would be so important to him as this.” The colonel gestured broadly. “This is progress. This is hope.”
“I do not doubt that he would wish to help,” she allowed.
“Then why not inform him?” the colonel demanded. “To practise in secret and conceal a strength is a division. What possible advantage is there in keeping this from him?”
Elizabeth pressed her lips together, evaluating how much of her internal realisations she could share.
“Because I have come to understand that the responsibility for our past failures lies with me, Richard, not with him. Whatever there has been between us, it has never been indifference. Quite the opposite. There is a constant tempest of emotion, and I am only now beginning to comprehend my own part in it.”
She looked away then, glancing towards the stream where the leaf had long since been carried away, as if finding the courage for the rest in the memory of her own small success.
“My magic is inextricably tied to that turmoil,” she continued, her voice quieter now.
“When Mr Darcy would try to teach me, his instruction would touch upon an old, deep-seated fear. My magic would become chaotic in response, but my pride refused to admit that fear when it was far easier to project the blame outward. I cannot subject him to that again until I have mastered this internal battle.”
“Elizabeth, I cannot agree to this secrecy.”
His refusal, so blunt and absolute, made her flinch inwardly, but she did not let it show. Instead, she held his gaze, her own softening from explanation into a plea.
“Then let me offer you a promise instead of a reason,” she said. “I will reveal my progress to him soon. And I promise you, Richard, if it ever feels dangerous, if I feel the power slipping from my grasp, I will inform him immediately. I beg you to trust me.”
The colonel considered her words for a long moment, his gaze hard and penetrating. “I wish you two would simply speak to each other,” he finally said, with a rare edge of frustration in his voice.
Elizabeth’s heart twisted, but she did not offer a reply.
Without another word, the colonel remounted his horse and guided it back the way he had come, leaving Elizabeth alone with the rueful realisation that she had managed to exasperate one of the most amiable men in all of England.
Darcy, when he appeared for breakfast, was already dressed for the road. His practical riding boots and the dark, functional cut of his coat made him a figure of purpose.
“Good morning, Darcy!” Colonel Fitzwilliam said, his own cheerfulness a sharp contrast to his cousin’s sombre expression. “I had not realised you had any pressing engagements this morning.”
Darcy offered a curt nod in his cousin’s direction, his focus clearly elsewhere. “An express arrived from the Arcane Office this morning.”
Elizabeth’s hand stilled, her teacup halfway to her lips. She felt a knot of apprehension tighten in her stomach. “Is it a mission?”
“One might call it so,” he replied, his gaze not quite meeting hers. He walked to the sideboard and poured himself a cup of tea. “There is a faltering node a short ride south of here, near the old crossroads. The Office has bid me to see to it.”
The word ‘me’ hung in the air. Elizabeth set her cup down with a click before the porcelain could betray her hand’s tremble. “And am I to understand,” she began, her voice carefully even, “that you are to go alone?”
“That was the directive,” he confirmed.
So. This was the consequence of Buxton. The Arcane Office did not trust their Concordance. Yet as she glanced at his averted face, a colder, more painful thought took root. Perhaps it was Darcy who had lost faith.
“The Office believes that given the minor nature of the decay, my own magic should be sufficient to the task,” Darcy added, after a pause.
Elizabeth studied her plate, praying her composure would hold.
Across the table, she could feel the weight of Colonel Fitzwilliam’s gaze upon her. It was an urgent plea, a silent pressure urging her to speak, to tell him of the leaf that had danced and the whirlpool that had spun at her command.
No. She could not. To confess her progress now, to potentially create fresh division between them and to risk compromising his control before a mission that demanded his absolute magical focus, was unthinkable.
Their last attempt, fuelled by their own emotional turmoil, had already ended in the fires of Buxton.
Ignoring the colonel, she drew a breath and schooled her features into a mask of polite concern. “Then I wish you a safe journey, Mr Darcy.”
He did not reply at once. He simply looked at her, and for just an instant, she caught something utterly forlorn in the depths of his gaze.
It was the look of a man standing on a desolate shore, staring out across an impassable sea.
Then, before she could study it further, there was a subtle shift, a flattening around his mouth, and his expression was once more perfectly closed off.
He said, “Should all go as planned, I shall be returned to Pemberley by the morrow.”
And with that, he set down his cup and quit the room. The silence that followed his departure was broken only by the colonel’s heavy sigh. Elizabeth’s gaze fell to her teacup, where her own reflection stared back at her, distorted and wavering in the tepid liquid.
She had needed this time alone with her abilities to finally separate the magic from the fear, the power from the pain.
She had succeeded, although the control she had acquired was a new and tenuous thing, and the prospect of bringing it into the charged atmosphere of his presence was still terrifying.
But to see him ride off alone like this, while she deliberately kept him in the dark, transformed her efforts into something that felt disturbingly like a betrayal.
She resolved that upon Darcy’s return, she would offer a full account of the entire matter.
But until that moment, what a profoundly useless thing their marriage seemed. They were not truly husband and wife, they were not friends, and now, they were no longer even fellow conscripts in the one task that had bound them.