Chapter 10
THE SWITCH
The horse took the last fence at a run. Darcy was out of the saddle at the cottage gate before it had stopped moving.
Elizabeth stood in the doorway with one hand on the frame. Her face was white. When she saw him, something in it closed.
"Mr. Darcy," she said. "Of course. The morning wanted only you."
Behind her, in the dim of the single room, George Wickham picked his hat up off the table.
Darcy had imagined meeting him for five years.
In the imaginings there were words, and sometimes more than words.
What happened instead took ten seconds. Wickham looked at him across the room, over Elizabeth's shoulder, and weighed something, and finished weighing it.
Then he smiled and gave the small bow of one gentleman leaving another to his business.
He walked out the rear door with his hat still in his hand.
"Stay here," Darcy said, and went past her into the cottage.
The rear door stood open on the field. Wickham was already at the hedgerow, walking toward the village at a stroll. He was whistling.
Darcy stood in the doorway with his fists closed and let him go.
Run the man down in an open field, in view of the road.
The morning became a brawl with a county's worth of questions attached.
Wickham would smile through every one of them.
The damage was in the room behind him. He shut the door on the whistling and turned.
Elizabeth had come in from the threshold. She stood at the table with the leather folder open in her hands, looking at what it held. It held paper. Blank paper, a full quire, square and clean.
She laughed once. It was a sound he never wanted to hear again.
"Papers concerning my sisters' portions," she said. "He dressed the table, the way you would dress a stage." She set the folder down with care, as if it might go off. Her chin was up and her mouth was set. Her hands shook at the ends of her arms as though they belonged to some other woman.
The cottage was cold as a cellar. Darcy took off his coat and put it around her shoulders. She let him, which frightened him more than anything else the morning had done. Her hands came up and gripped the lapels. They needed something to hold, and the coat was there.
"Thank you," she said, in a voice with nothing in it. Then: "You will tell me how you came to be here."
"I saw you take the Meryton road."
"Saw me. From where?"
"From the rise above Netherfield."
"The rise above Netherfield. That is half a mile from my father's lane. What were you doing on it at eight in the morning?"
He could have softened it. He had helped build the morning out of things half-said, and he was done with half.
"Watching. I have watched Wickham since the week he came into the county.
I know his lodgings, his debts, and his habits.
Twice this week his habits brought him out this road, to this cottage, and I could not account for it.
This morning he did not appear at all, and a paid boy ran up your lane, and then you came out walking fast, toward the one place on his map I could not explain. So I rode."
She was very still while he said it. He watched her take each piece and set it where it fit. He watched the sum arrive. It was the wrong sum, and it arrived too fast to stop.
"You watched his habits," she said. "Did you know mine?"
The room was quiet.
"You will answer me. He stood where you are standing not an hour ago and recited my mornings to me like a catechism. Oakham Mount or the churchyard path. Every day. Alone. My own sister sold them for a compliment." Her voice did not rise. It dropped. "Did you know my walks, Mr. Darcy?"
"Yes."
"For how long?"
"Since the ball."
She closed her eyes for one breath. When she opened them, he was looking at a stranger.
"The note named my father's solicitor. It was written by a man who knew my house. It brought me up my own road, at my own hour, and two men met me at the end of it, and both of them, both, sir, had my mornings by heart."
"Miss Bennet—"
"You will let me finish." She gripped the coat tighter.
"He told me what I am to him. A lever. He was gracious enough to be plain, which is more than I can say for the rest of my acquaintance.
So you will forgive the question, and you will answer it the same way, because I have had a morning of theater. What am I to you?"
He stood with the whole answer in his mouth. A studio on Brook Street. A face in a portfolio. Three weeks of mornings on a cold rise. The truth would ruin him and the silence would ruin him. He chose the truth, and he had got as far as opening his mouth when the wheels came.
A carriage was slowing at the gate. The Netherfield grays. Stepping down from it, in a traveling cloak, with her sister behind her, came Caroline Bingley.
Darcy stood in a cold cottage in his shirtsleeves, beside a shaking woman wrapped in his coat. The Meryton road led nowhere Caroline Bingley had ever wanted to go.
She was smiling when she came up the path.
The smile was for the cottage in general.
It lasted until the doorway gave her the room: Elizabeth, the coat, Darcy without it, the bare table, the cold hearth.
The smile stopped. What replaced it took a moment to assemble, and when it had assembled it was pleasant, and her eyes were not.
"Mr. Darcy."
"Miss Bingley."
"Oh," said Mrs. Hurst, at her shoulder.
"We were driving out," Caroline said. "Louisa wanted air.
" Mrs. Hurst looked like a woman who had wanted no such thing and had not been consulted.
"And here is Miss Eliza. You are pale, my dear.
And cold, I think." Her gaze had found the coat at the first step and never left it.
She said the rest to the coat. "How fortunate we came this way.
We will carry you home, of course. You cannot walk in your state. Louisa, make room."
"Miss Bingley." Darcy kept his voice level. "This is not what it appears."
"I am sure it is not," said Caroline, in the voice of a woman already composing the letter.
Elizabeth looked at the carriage. Then she looked at Darcy, one look, long enough to read, and what it held was a verdict. She took the coat from her shoulders, folded it once, and held it out. He took it because there was nothing else to do with his hands.
"You knew my walks," she said, too low for the door to hear. "So did he. I am a map two men have shared between them, sir, and I am asked to be grateful to the one who arrived second."
"That is not—"
"He told me it was too late the moment I left my gate this morning." She stepped past him. "I begin to think my gate was the ball."
She went down the path and climbed into the carriage without taking the footman's hand. Caroline stood a moment longer, looking at Darcy, at the cottage, at the coat over his arm, gathering what a story requires.
"There is certain to be an explanation," she said. "I look forward to hearing which one."
The step came up, the door shut, and the carriage went on toward Longbourn.
Darcy stood at the gate of a vacant cottage with his horse cropping the hedge and his coat over his arm.
What came next required no imagination. The story would be in three drawing rooms by dinner and in every house in the county by Sunday.
A gentleman, a lady, an empty cottage, and a coat.
The county had one word for how such stories ended, and the word was marriage.
Every person who heard the tale would arrive at the word before the teller finished.
Somewhere past the hedgerow, Wickham was still walking toward the village, whistling.
Every road out of that room was in his pocket.
All but one. The man had planned for a militia officer and a ruined girl.
What he had got instead was Darcy. Darcy would have years to decide whether that was rescue or only a different door of the same trap.
He put on the coat. It was warm where her hands had gripped it. He stood in the cold road wearing the warmth until it faded.
Then he mounted and followed the carriage, far enough behind to go unseen, all the way to her father's gate. Watching was the thing he knew.