SIXTEEN
Oakham Mount
Darcy
Time passed in a blur. Despite his conversations with Georgiana and Fitzwilliam, it took Darcy eight days after encountering Elizabeth and Wickham together in Meryton to relinquish the belief that she had somehow been complicit.
The conviction weakened by degrees, each crack widened by Fitzwilliam's steady reasoning and Georgiana's quiet certainty, until one morning he awoke and found himself unable to sustain it any longer.
What remained was considerably less comfortable than anger. It was the need for an explanation.
He had not attended the ball at Lucas Lodge. He had no wish to see Elizabeth, and he had insisted that Georgiana remain at Netherfield as well. His sister had agreed, though not without a reluctance she made little effort to conceal.
It was Bingley who finally moved him.
Returning from the engagement ball, he found Darcy in the small parlour that had become his preferred refuge since Wickham's arrest — aside from his bedchamber and, on occasion, the library. There was an unusual firmness in Bingley's expression that immediately drew Darcy's attention.
"I wish you would speak to Miss Elizabeth." He waited until Darcy looked up before continuing. "I am weary of making excuses for you. Whatever has passed between the two of you, it ought to be addressed. From where I stand, the injury appears entirely on one side."
Darcy said nothing.
Bingley had noticed his withdrawal from Longbourn and Miss Elizabeth almost immediately and had questioned him more than once.
When Darcy informed him it was a private matter, Bingley had respected the boundary, as was his nature.
He was not a man inclined to force confidences.
That he spoke so plainly now told Darcy that the matter had begun to trouble him deeply.
"She enquires after you and Georgiana every time I visit Longbourn." Bingley held his gaze. "Every single time. Tonight I was obliged to invent another explanation, and I found myself ashamed of it. Miss Elizabeth deserves better than that."
Darcy looked away.
"I do not ask for particulars," Bingley continued more quietly. "But if you mean to end the acquaintance, then end it. If you do not, then speak to her. What you are doing now is unfair."
Darcy thanked him and offered nothing further on the subject.
Yet that night the conversation remained with him.
He lay awake for hours turning it over in his mind and arrived, slowly and with little satisfaction, at the conclusion that Elizabeth deserved the benefit of the doubt.
If she was innocent of any design, if there existed an explanation he had not considered, then he owed her the opportunity to provide it.
He rode out the following morning before the household was awake, hoping to find her upon her usual route.
Oakham Mount was empty.
He returned to Netherfield no easier in mind than when he had left it.
Having finally resolved what he ought to do, he had found himself unable to do it.
Calling at Longbourn was out of the question.
To present himself there now, after a week of deliberate avoidance, would invite questions he was in no position to answer.
Nor was he eager to place himself before Mr. Bennet whose good opinion he had come to value.
Yet doubt alone could not undo what he knew of George Wickham.
He needed an explanation. Until he had one, Georgiana's safety had to come first.
The following morning he rose earlier still and rode out again, hoping fortune might prove more accommodating.
? ? ?
Elizabeth
Elizabeth had not even intended to go to Oakham Mount that morning until sleep eluded her all night.
Two days of turning Caroline Bingley's words over in her mind had made the walls of Longbourn feel considerably closer than usual.
Jane had noticed despite Elizabeth's best efforts to appear normal, but she had managed to convince her that her nerves were merely unsettled and that nothing was amiss.
It was the only explanation she could offer.
How foolish would it sound to admit that she had been vain enough to believe Mr. Darcy regarded her?
That she had imagined his placing Georgiana in her company was because he thought her a suitable friend and guide rather than an object of study because of her hearing?
That morning, with sleep still refusing to come and her thoughts no quieter than they had been the night before, she decided to walk. Walking was what she did when she needed to think, and she needed very badly to think.
Elizabeth had no expectation of seeing Mr. Darcy. For the ten days before Miss Bingley's remarks at Lucas Lodge, she had walked Oakham Mount daily and been disappointed each time not to find him there. It had become obvious that he had abandoned the path entirely.
So her decision to walk that morning had nothing to do with expecting to see him and everything to do with escaping herself.
She continued until she nearly reached the summit. Elizabeth was so occupied with her thoughts that she did not notice him until she saw the horse. It was tied beside the lower path, and he was seated upon the fallen log at the crest of the rise with his back to her, looking out across the valley.
The sight of him, simply sitting there as though he had every right to occupy the one place she had come to think of as entirely her own, did something unpleasant to her chest.
The thought irritated her sufficiently that she abandoned it at once.
Elizabeth's first instinct was to turn back and walk away. Her second was to remain where she was and demand an explanation, for she had rather a great deal she wished to say.
The second prevailed.
She continued up the path and must have stepped upon a twig, for he turned at the sound. Whatever he had been expecting, her expression was apparently not it, because something in his face shifted immediately towards caution.
Good, she thought.
"Miss Elizabeth." He inclined his head. His voice was careful.
She disliked it immediately.
She did not return the courtesy. "Mr. Darcy."
She stopped a few feet from him and looked at him directly. He looked tired. Had she encountered him a few days earlier, she might have found herself concerned by the observation.
Now she merely waited.
"I have been hoping to speak with you." He rose to his feet.
Elizabeth laughed at once. Not because anything amused her.
"I find that rather difficult to believe, sir."
Something crossed his face. Not offence. It was nearer surprise, as though he had not expected resistance from her.
"I wonder, Mr. Darcy, whether this conversation concerns my hearing." She had not intended to say it so directly. Yet it was the wound she had been carrying for two days, and the words escaped before she could stop them.
For the first time since she had known him, Elizabeth saw him look genuinely stricken. Not embarrassed. Not defensive.
Stricken.
For the briefest moment she found herself wondering whether she had misunderstood something after all.
Then she remembered the ballroom at Lucas Lodge.
She remembered Caroline Bingley's smile.
The hurt returned in full.
"No, Mr. Darcy," she said, shaking her head. "You do not get to look surprised."
He looked away as though unable to meet her eyes.
"Miss Bingley mocked me with it at the ball.
She told me that you had known about my hearing from the night of the Meryton assembly.
That you had been observing it deliberately.
That your interest in me, your calls at Longbourn, your acquaintance with me, all of it, was for the sake of your sister.
" She kept her voice even. It cost her something. "Is that true?"
Darcy opened his mouth to speak, but Elizabeth raised a hand.
"Do not tell me it is complicated, sir. Do not manage this the way you manage everything else. I am asking you a direct question, and I would like a direct answer."
"It began that way," he said slowly.
The words landed exactly as she had known they would.
They still took her breath away.
"It began that way," she repeated. "You saw something in me that reminded you of your mother.
You decided I would be useful to Georgiana.
And so you sought my acquaintance, asked your sister to befriend me, called at Longbourn, walked with me in the garden, sat with me on this mount.
.." Her voice remained steady. She was proud of that.
"And none of it was what I believed it to be? "
"That is not—"
"You confirmed it just now."
She did not raise her voice.
She did not need to.
"You said it began that way. Which means that for some portion of the time I have known you, I was being studied.
Observed. Used." She looked at him. "I have spent my entire life ensuring that no one could see what I did not wish them to see.
I have been careful and thorough, and never once careless.
Yet you saw it in a single evening and said nothing.
You watched me for weeks and said nothing.
And I had no idea." Her voice tightened despite herself. "That is not a small thing, Mr. Darcy."
"No," he said quietly. "It is not."
"You knew my secret." She looked out over the valley. "You knew the one thing I have never told anyone. The thing I have spent years concealing. And you used it."
"I did not use—"
"What would you call it, sir?"
Darcy was silent.
"I should very much like to know," Elizabeth continued, turning back to him, "what you would call seeking out a woman's acquaintance because of a condition she has worked her entire life to hide, without telling her that you know, without asking her permission, and without once considering what it might mean to her to discover that the attention she had been. .." She stopped.
She was not going to finish that sentence.
"What would you call that?"
Darcy looked at her with an expression she could not read.
"I would call it wrong," he said quietly. "I would call it a failure of honesty which I cannot excuse. I would call it my mistake."
Elizabeth held his gaze.
"That is not enough," she said. "For a man whose mother endured the same thing, I would have expected greater kindness.
And for a man I trusted, however foolishly, I would have expected him to keep my confidence rather than repeat it to Miss Bingley.
She has never liked me, and now you have handed her a weapon. "
The colour drained from Darcy's face.
Elizabeth did not wait for a reply.
She turned and started down the path.
"Miss Elizabeth."
She stopped. She did not turn around.
"It became something else."
The strain in his voice caught her despite herself.
"I need you to know that. Whatever it began as, it became something else entirely.
I was going to tell you. I had decided to tell you.
Then I saw you with Wickham in Meryton and believed you were befriending the man who had spent years tormenting my family.
The man who nearly ruined Georgiana." He paused for a while.
"I withdrew because I thought you were connected to him.
I came here this morning intending to ask for an explanation.
I know now that I was wrong. And I know I have handled this badly from beginning to end. "
Elizabeth closed her eyes.
"You thought I was friends with him?" The question escaped before she could stop it.
"I did."
She laughed again.
It sounded nothing like amusement.
"So while I was wondering what I had done to offend you, you were deciding whether I was capable of assisting a villain."
The silence behind her was answer enough.
Something inside her hurt more at that than she cared to admit. "I see."
"It became something else," he repeated quietly. "That much is true, whatever else you choose to believe."
Elizabeth stood for a long moment with her back to him, the valley spread before her and the cold morning air pressing against her cheeks.
Then she continued down the path without looking back.
She walked all the way to Longbourn at a pace that had nothing to do with the cold. She did not cry. She did not stop. She told herself very firmly that it did not matter what it had become.
She was not entirely certain she believed it.