Faceless (Boundless #1)

III The Best Laid Plans

III

The Best Laid Plans

Fitzwilliam had been watching him since dinner.

Not obviously — he never did anything obviously — but Darcy knew that look, had known it since they were boys.

It was the look his cousin wore when he had arrived at a conclusion and was deciding in his own time whether to say it aloud or let it work on its own.

It was not a comfortable look to be on the receiving end of at the best of times.

Tonight, it was worse than that, because Darcy could feel the warmth in his own face and could not entirely account for it, and Fitzwilliam had sharp eyes and thirty years of practice.

He reached for his wine and gave him nothing.

Across the table, Lady Catherine was addressing herself to the Hunsford road, which had been in a disgraceful state since November and which the parish had done nothing to remedy despite repeated and emphatic representation from Rosings.

At her right, Anne wore the quiet, faintly distant air of most evenings, as though she had made her peace with the proceedings long ago and found it restful.

“The ruts alone are a hazard to any carriage. I have said so to Mr Collins, I have said so to the churchwarden, I have said so to anyone with the power to act.” She set her fork down with the authority of strong opinions about cutlery as punctuation. “Nothing has been done.”

“The parish has neglected it shamefully,” Darcy said — true, requiring no thought, which suited the evening admirably.

“You passed along it today, did you not, when you called at the parsonage?”

“We did.” Fitzwilliam reached for his wine. “The ruts are considerable.” He set the glass down and added, in the same easy register and without glancing at Darcy, “It was a pleasant call. The household were all in fine spirits this afternoon.”

Darcy swallowed once. He turned his glass on the cloth and kept his eyes on it and did not move.

Lady Catherine took the remark as her own and ran on with it — Mrs Collins a sensible woman who kept her house well and did not impose, the south beds that Grover had moved to good effect, the friend who had been walking in the park again.

Darcy gave her the portion of his mind he kept available for Rosings and gave the rest to the memory of Elizabeth Bennet that afternoon, stopped on the path with her head tipped back, laughing at something Fitzwilliam had said, her whole face open with it — and the way she had looked when she recovered and caught Darcy watching, and the laughter did not quite leave her eyes.

He had been carrying that look since it happened. He would be carrying it for considerably longer.

In the drawing room afterward, Lady Catherine settled herself and cast a look towards the instrument in the corner.

“It is a great pity Anne’s constitution never permitted her to learn. She would have been remarkable. The masters I would have engaged for her—” She gave a small sigh, as though the scale of what the world had been denied had only just struck her afresh. “But there it is.”

From her chair, Anne made no remark.

“We ought to have had the parsonage party to dine,” Fitzwilliam said, his eye going round the room with the mild dissatisfaction of an honest assessment.

“Mrs Collins’ friend has a most lively voice.

I find the evenings rather better for it.

” He said it to Lady Catherine. He did not look at Darcy. He did not need to look at Darcy.

Darcy’s collar was attempting to kill him.

“Miss Bennet sings tolerably,” Lady Catherine said.

“She would benefit from more practice and a better master, but she is not without feeling for it. I told her so. I do not hold with the sort who laughs at the world as though it were a good joke, and turns aside a set-down with no thought given to its merit. I find very little quality in her character, and she is not what one would call truly accomplished. But she converses well enough.”

Converses well enough. Darcy’s eye went to the fire. He thought of Elizabeth at the pianoforte three evenings ago, stopping mid-piece to say something about the composer so unexpected and so exactly right that he had laughed before he could stop himself.

He kept his eyes on the fire and his face still, and the tightness in his jaw his own private business.

Lady Catherine crossed to the far end of the room and settled herself beside Anne, full of things to say and her audience already chosen. Their voices were low and continuous — the comfortable monologue of twenty years’ talking at her daughter.

Fitzwilliam appeared at Darcy’s elbow with two glasses of port.

“We must press her to have the party from the parsonage tomorrow. They are good company,” he said, very quietly.

“Mrs Collins is a woman of sense.”

“Mm.” He offered a glass. “You did not mislead. And despite our aunt’s views, her friend does play with a great deal of feeling. For someone who claims she does not play well.”

“She plays Clementi’s Sonatina with more feeling than most who merely intend to show off their technique.”

“Does she?” He sipped his port. “You were at Netherfield in the autumn, I believe, when she played there.”

“I was.”

“And quite pleasing to look upon as she plays, I daresay.”

Darcy slid a narrow gaze to his cousin. “Fair. As any lady of regular features and a good-tempered countenance would be.”

“And yet back in London, when I asked whether she was pretty, you said she was ‘good company.’ I remember that distinctly. Clever, I think, was the other word you used.”

The fire crackled. Across the room, Lady Catherine’s monologue continued, unhurried and self-contained.

Darcy’s heart was doing something unacceptable.

He could feel it in his throat. He was seven-and-twenty years old and master of Pemberley, while his cousin sat beside him looking at the fire with an air of perfect innocence.

Darcy had never in his life wanted to be somewhere else quite so much and quite so little at once.

“I stand by both descriptions,” he said.

A sound escaped Fitzwilliam that in a less disciplined man would have been a laugh.

He drank his port and held his peace. Tomorrow morning, she would walk out early, as she always did, and Darcy had perhaps said more than he intended — and he found, with a clarity that startled him, that he did not mind at all.

His candle had burned a good third of its length by the time he accepted that sleep was not coming.

He had the evidence. The temperature had changed by degrees so gradual he might have missed them had he not been paying close attention, but he had been.

She had argued with him, properly, the way she argued with everyone she thought worth arguing with — a form of respect she did not extend casually.

With Elizabeth Bennet, an argument did not summarise the relationship.

It was a prelude to understanding, and she argued well. At least, she did with him.

And this afternoon, when he and Richard had called at the parsonage, she had almost smiled at him.

Not the polite arrangement of features she offered Lady Catherine.

The real one, the one that started in her eyes before it warmed her face.

She would not give it to him openly in her cousin’s drawing room.

She had given him what she could, and he was fairly certain he had not imagined it.

He sat up, pulled the writing table towards him, found paper. He had always worked better with a pen in his hand.

Miss Bennet, I hope you will permit me to say—

He set the pen down. It sounded like the opening of a bill for dry goods.

He was not writing about dry goods. He was trying to find words adequate to the fact that he had spent six months being quietly and comprehensively undone by a woman from Hertfordshire and had arrived, somewhere between dinner and the drawing room tonight, at the absolute and irrevocable certainty that he did not want to be any other way.

He tried it aloud, to the fire. “Miss Elizabeth. I am aware that what I am about to say may come as a surprise.” He drew breath. “It has rather come as a surprise to me.”

True, at least. She would know it was true. She had a nose for the true thing, Elizabeth Bennet — a disinclination to be handled or flattered that he had first seen at the Meryton assembly and had been seeing in sharper focus ever since.

He went back to the page.

There are aspects of this

of the connexion

that the world would perhaps consider

He stopped. Read it back.

That was the shape of an insult. He could feel it even on paper — how those words would strike her, how her chin would come up, her eyes going from warm to flat in the space of a single breath.

He would undo in ten seconds what it had taken her six months to do to him, and would deserve every word she said in return.

He did not want to say it like that.

It needed to be said. He was not a dishonest man, and she deserved honesty; the alternative was silence on the subject of his family’s expectations and her family’s circumstances, leaving her to find it all from other quarters afterward, which would be far worse.

But the manner of it was everything. Said badly, it became a man reciting a woman’s deficiencies as a prelude to graciously overlooking them, and the thought of her face if it came out that way went through him like cold water.

He tried once more, quietly. “When I set my family’s opinions beside what I know of you — your mind, your character, the way you simply are — I cannot make them signify.” He let it stand. “I have tried. Rather harder than I am going to admit to you directly.”

That last was true, and probably inadvisable, and would almost certainly come out of his mouth whether he planned it or not, which was either a disaster or the most honest thing he would manage to say. He had not yet decided which.

He lay back. Left the candle burning. Let the careful sentences dissolve into the bare thought of tomorrow morning — whether she would come out early, whether she would let him walk with her, whether he would find the nerve before his nerve found somewhere else to be.

Outside, the Kent night was dark and very still; inside him, everything was the opposite — alive, decided, pointing in one direction.

He did not want to sleep. He was almost asleep—

The knock at his door was hard and urgent and did not wait.

He was on his feet before the echo of it died.

It was one of the hall boys, still in his nightclothes, a candle guttering in his hand, his face muddled with the blankness of a servant delivering news he had not read and did not intend to speculate about.

“Express, sir. Just arrived.”

“An express! In the middle of the night?”

Darcy took the letter. His hand was already in his dressing gown pocket for a coin, the gesture so automatic he was barely aware of making it, and the boy was gone down the stairs before Darcy had turned the letter over to look at the seal.

He did not recognise it. He broke it anyway, moved to the candle, and read.

He read it twice.

“Good God,” he said, to the empty room.

He stood with the letter open in his hand, the candle burning, the Kent night very still outside the window, everything he had been thinking three minutes ago — the sentences, the fireplace, tomorrow morning, her face — receding so fast it was as though it had happened to someone else entirely.

Then he moved to the bell.

His valet arrived in a state of dishevelled alertness that suggested he had not been deeply asleep either, and Darcy was already at the wardrobe. His night clothes were thrown atop the trunk, and he was already in his breeches.

“We are leaving for London. Now!” He had one boot on, the other half-drawn. “Have my trunk packed — only what is necessary. We are not staying.”

“Sir.” The valet, who had been with Darcy long enough to know that now meant now, was already moving. “Shall I wake Colonel Fitzwilliam?”

“No.” Darcy dragged his coat on; the sleeve resisted, and he forced it. “Do not wake him. On no account wake him.”

“The carriage, sir — it will take a quarter-hour at least to—”

“Then it takes a quarter-hour! Have it ready.” He picked up the letter from where he had set it on the nightstand.

Read it a third time, as though the words might have altered.

They had not. He folded it. Put it in his pocket.

His hands were not where he needed them.

“We cannot wait for morning. We will not wait.”

The park had been empty that morning. She had walked the south path its full length and met no one, and come home to breakfast without remarking on it. Charlotte had met her eye once, over the rim of her cup, and made no remark either.

Colonel Fitzwilliam arrived at half past eleven with his hat in his hand, plainly having had an odd morning and not wishing to say so directly. He admired the parlour, accepted tea, and folded himself into the chair across from Maria with all the ease of long campaigning.

“We had not heard that Mr Darcy had left Rosings,” Charlotte said, setting down her cup. “Was it sudden?”

Fitzwilliam turned his cup in its saucer. The movement was brief and controlled; it did not escape Elizabeth.

“He was called away in the night,” he said.

“I knew nothing of it until this morning — found a note at breakfast. Some urgent business in London. I imagine it is a dull affair — a difficulty with an account, perhaps.” He gave a faint huff that might have been amusement.

“If it had been anything of consequence, I flatter myself he would have seen fit to wake me. Clearly, he concluded I should have been no use to him, which I find difficult to argue with before noon.”

“Lady Catherine must have been displeased.”

“Lady Catherine had expectations of Darcy she had hoped he would answer before the visit concluded.” He said it evenly. Then his eye came to Elizabeth.

She reached for her tea.

His eyes stayed on her — not intrusively, not long enough to constitute anything she could reasonably object to, but with an attention that had a shape to it, as though he had said something and was watching to see what it had done.

She thought of Anne de Bourgh’s still face at dinner, of Lady Catherine’s very decided opinions about Pemberley’s future mistress, and she returned her cup to its saucer.

“I hope the business resolves itself. He struck me as a man who attends to his affairs very capably.”

“He does,” Fitzwilliam said.

He stayed only as long as civility required. At the door, he turned to her last. “Miss Bennet.” He bowed; Charlotte walked him out; Elizabeth remained by the window, her eye on the lane.

Charlotte came back and took up her needlework.

“He watched you,” she said — no accusation, only a fact, offered in her manner, the manner of one long since resigned to the world being as it was.

“He had to look somewhere,” Elizabeth said. “I would not presume to make anything of it.”