CHAPTER 31 #3
For a breath, the room nearly remembered that they had once known how to be amused together.
Then Wickham’s name returned between them.
Miss Bennet’s eyes lowered to her own hand, resting on the arm of the chair.
“I shall remember,” she said, “that a furnished story is not necessarily a true one.”
The sentence was so exactly hers—practical, pointed, slightly irreverent, and steady—that for one foolish instant he wanted to smile.
He did not.
“I am grateful.”
“You need not be grateful. Suspicion is no great hardship to me when properly invited.”
“Miss Bennet—”
He stopped.
He had almost said too much. The next sentence had been waiting under his tongue with no permission to exist.
My father believed him.
Or perhaps:
He has already cost me my home.
Or worse:
My sister—
He closed his hand once upon his knee and released it.
Miss Bennet saw the movement. Of course she did. She saw almost everything he most wished to keep unobserved.
But she did not ask.
That was the mercy of it.
That was also the cruelty.
Questions he could have answered, or refused, or managed. Her forbearance left him alone with what he had not said.
“You have told me enough to warn me,” she said at last.
“Enough that you will not be wholly unwarned, I hope. Not enough that I can pretend the matter is fairly told.”
“Then I shall not mistake the warning for the whole case.”
He looked at her.
The old ache in him, the one he had learned to file beneath work and discipline and exact living, shifted under the pressure of that answer.
It was not relief. Relief would have implied the matter had grown smaller.
It had not. Wickham still existed. The old machinery that had protected him still moved.
Darcy’s own history still lay like a net spread under any future hope.
But Miss Bennet had not stepped back from him.
He had brought Wickham’s name into her room, and she had neither recoiled from the dirt of it nor tried to make him wash it clean before her.
“Thank you,” he said.
The words were almost useless.
He rose because he could not remain seated under the force of what he had not said.
Miss Bennet rose also. Mrs. Doddridge, with perfect discretion, had become very interested in the thread in her needle.
Lord Pomington opened one eye and closed it again, either satisfied with the proceedings or unwilling to take responsibility for them.
Darcy meant to take his leave properly. He had made the call. He had given the warning. He had not instructed her, had not demanded belief, had not poured out old injury in exchange for present sympathy. He had done, if not enough, then as much as honour allowed.
“Mr. Darcy.”
He looked at her.
She did not ask him for the rest. Her eyes held too much understanding for ease, but no claim.
“Thursday?” she said.
For one foolish instant, he did not understand the word.
Then he understood it too well.
Thursday. The ordinary hour. Papers, chairs, leases, rooms, the tolerated fiction of usefulness. A place he could enter only by pretending he wanted nothing beyond it.
“If you still wish it,” he said.
“I do.”
There was no extravagance in her answer. No softness offered to excuse him. No promise beyond the words.
That was why it struck so hard.
She offered him her hand in farewell.
He took it with every intention of returning it after the proper bow.
He did not.
The intention was clear to him even as it failed.
Her gloved hand was steady in his, and the steadiness undid him more thoroughly than fear would have done.
The warning, the name, the old disgrace, her refusal to be managed, the impossible trust of Thursday offered again — all of it met in him at once.
He bent over her hand and, before caution could return, pressed his lips to her fingers.
It was over at once.
Too late.
When he straightened, Miss Bennet had gone very still.
He released her hand, though every part of him resisted the wisdom of it.
“Be careful,” he said.
It came out lower than he intended. Less a request than the remnant of one.
Her colour had risen, but her eyes did not leave his.
“I shall be.”
He believed her.
That did not help.
He bowed, because if he remained one moment longer, he might make the morning worse by revealing why leaving had become difficult.
Mrs. Doddridge rose with the calm of a woman who had seen nothing beyond a gentleman taking proper leave, which was either blindness or charity, and Darcy suspected Mrs. Doddridge of neither in excess.
Miss Bennet did not move toward him.
That steadied him enough to reach the door.
He left Portman Square in daylight, which made the departure feel less private and therefore no easier. The door closed behind him with the soft finality of a well-managed house.
He had warned her.
He had not confessed.
He had accepted friendship as gift and torment, and trusted her judgment because anything less would insult the very quality he most loved in her.
It ought to have made him easier.
Instead, as he stepped into the cold brightness of the square, Darcy understood that fear had been familiar. Trust gave him something to lose.