XXXV Small Talk #3
He had set himself a line and held it. He would not take her body until she had enough of him to be making a real choice.
He had broken it, mended the line, and then broken again when she had begun, sentence by careful sentence, to assemble him for herself — and she said she loved what she had, and begged to hold what he could give her. That she deserved that much from him.
He had let himself believe her. He had gone to her bed on the strength of having been told, by a woman whose word he trusted without reserve, that she had assembled enough of him to be choosing him.
And then, over supper, she had told him otherwise.
Not by reversing herself. The pieces she had named had been honestly named — but the whole, the man she would meet when at last he stood in his own face, was the man she had said she was not even comfortable being in a room with.
That ground had broken open again; no amount of rationalization would make it right.
Then she had climbed into his lap.
He had every intention in the world to refuse her. He had not been able to. He had let her find what she had wanted to find, with the words of supper still in his ears.
He could not say he had not known.
She had not even liked him.
He had been the third in her catalogue of exasperating gentlemen — the one she had made room for after Mr Collins’s standing lecture and Fitzwilliam’s well-meant disqualification — and she had handled him in a few disinterested sentences and dispatched him in one.
He died. Her voice had lowered, only so far as courtesy required, and she had moved on to seduce him with her teasing words, her mouth on his throat, and her hands on… Good Lord.
He had walked into Rosings on the assumption that the question was almost answered, that he had only to choose his hour and his words and be heard.
He had had eight weeks of attention in Hertfordshire and a fortnight more in Kent.
He had stood across from her in the dance at Netherfield, thinking himself perfectly legible — knowing the wall had given way for as long as the music lasted, knowing she had marked it, knowing she was now in possession of him to a degree she had not been an hour before.
He had gone to sleep that night believing himself read.
She had been reading the wall.
She had been reading the cold government of himself in company that he had drilled himself for twenty-seven years to maintain — the silences that preserved his civility at the expense of any warmth, the eyes that travelled too often to her face and were not warmed by the travelling, the courtesies that conceded nothing because they had been issued to defend rather than to offer.
She had been correctly informed by every part of his bearing that his attention was not for her.
She had been right. By the time he had broken his own training — by the time he had at last given her something worth reading — she had quite reasonably taught herself to refuse the trouble of reading him.
She would have refused him at Hunsford. He had been spared the answer only by having died.
The cruelest of it was that her old dislike was the only thing keeping her from naming him.
She had been close. He had heard it, evening after evening at the small table — the silences that meant she was assembling something, the half-finished sentence that broke off because she had grasped the answer too clearly to want to say it aloud, the way she sometimes turned her head towards him in the dark with whatever she had been about to say held in her throat.
She had to have been reading the resemblance for weeks.
She had not allowed it to complete itself, perhaps not even in her own imagination.
The completion required her to believe that Fitzwilliam Darcy had loved her — had loved her enough to arrange a faceless marriage from a dead man’s estate, to spend three dark months in a tower house in Aberdeenshire, becoming real to her in a black room six feet at a time.
The Fitzwilliam Darcy she remembered had pronounced her barely tolerable in a Meryton ballroom within an hour of being introduced, and that word had carried round the room in less time than it took for Lydia Bennet to drop her lace.
His own pride was the lock on her recognition. But that would not hold indefinitely, and his calendar grew shorter by the hour.
Webb’s last had borne the cadence of work in motion — every page since August had narrowed, the names tightening, the captains’ positions becoming clearer, the Home Office suspecting he was still alive somewhere, the witness who would close the matter now within Fitzwilliam’s reach if he chose to extend it.
It had a season now. He could feel its weather.
He was going to have to be alive again.
He was going to have to stand before her in actual daylight, after three months of dark, and say — with whatever portion of his voice he could call upon at the time — that George Carlisle was Fitzwilliam Darcy.
That the man whose constancy she had taken into her arms and answered with all the tenderness of her wit and the warmth of her body was the man she had pronounced confusing, and proud, and not of sufficient interest to mourn.
She would have to forgive him for being Fitzwilliam Darcy.