Chapter 43
Elizabeth stood. Had she remained in her chair with her hands folded in her lap as though this were still the will reading, she would cry before she had asked a single question. And she had so many questions! She was already dangerously close to crying.
She tried anger instead. Anger was useful. It kept her upright. “Why did you not tell me?” Her voice sounded less steady than she liked.
He still stood where he had stopped, but the expression he wore was unexpected.
She had braced herself for eloquence, for the diplomat’s practiced phrasing she had watched him deploy a dozen times at Longbourn.
Instead, he looked the same as he had in the hallway after Jane’s cry had shattered everything: stripped bare, exposed. Honest.
“If I had told you—” He stopped. His jaw worked. “If I had introduced myself as Fitzwilliam Darcy, would you have allowed me to—”
He did not finish the question. She did not need him to.
“No,” she said. “I would not.” She looked away, ashamed at the admission. But she expected complete honesty from him, and so she would give him nothing less.
How confident she had been all those years in the righteousness of her resentment.
How certain that if she ever met the man her father had promised her to, she would see him clearly and judge him fairly.
How easily she had lied to herself. She pressed her lips together and took a deep, shaky breath.
“I would have avoided you. And when we were forced to speak, I would have seen only faults. I would have found them in everything you did, and I would have made up my mind about you before you had a chance to display your character.”
She had done exactly that with Robinson, only from the other direction.
His impression was one of humility, hard work, and respect.
She had looked at Darcy and saw the shadow of an arrangement she despised.
Two names. One man. One she had loved and the other she had resented, and now she knew they were the same.
The understanding, while accurate, was unhelpful and did nothing to ease the hurt in her heart.
It made it more complicated, which was worse.
“I could not have expected otherwise,” he said quietly. “I do not feel myself worthy of your forgiveness, but I will apologize. From the depths of my being, I am sorry for keeping this secret from you. It was—” He exhaled. “I was afraid.”
“Afraid? Of me?” Her voice cracked. “Am I so terrifying?”
“No!”
“Have I not proved myself trustworthy?”
“The blame is mine. All of it. I am the one at fault.”
“Then explain to me why you did not tell me the truth!” She crossed her arms, trying to calm her breath, holding herself steady.
“I was afraid that if I presented myself to you as Darcy, you would have difficulty seeing beyond the obligation of our arranged marriage. I feared you would not see… me.”
Dressed and groomed as he was before her, like a gentleman of the upper crust and with a name amongst the first circles, she could not contradict him. She would have judged him. She wrapped her arms around her stomach and looked away, determined to let him explain.
“I had lived as Robinson for ten years. My life was real, and I built a reputation under that name, earned and without the benefit of being a Darcy. When I came to Longbourn—” He stopped again, seemingly choosing his words the way a man picks his footing on uncertain ground, testing each one before trusting it with his weight.
“I needed you to see me. Not the inheritance, not the obligation, not the arrangement. Just me.” He stood, hands hanging down at his sides, head bowed, openly confessing, unreservedly apologizing, vulnerably admitting his fears to her.
Elizabeth had to remind herself to breathe.
“I cannot apologize sufficiently for my deception. I kept the truth from you, and I was wrong to do so. I will not ask you to excuse it, only hope that you might understand what I was afraid of losing.”
“What?” The word came out small, barely a whisper.
“You.” No preparation or performance, just one syllable that rocked Elizabeth to her core.
“Your good opinion. Your laughter. The way you listened to me. The way you argued with me. I had never been seen that way before.” He looked at the floor; his hands balled into fists. “I was a coward. Selfish.”
Elizabeth uncrossed her arms. She had not decided to do so; her body made the decision before her mind caught up. “Was it your plan from the beginning?” she asked. “To come to Longbourn as Robinson?”
“No!” He looked up at that, with enough swiftness that she believed him.
“When I landed and learned of my father’s death, I intended to turn around and board the next ship back to the continent.
I believed my father had amended the will, had removed the arrangement entirely.
It was the reason I had left in the first place.
” He rubbed his hand over his face. “I had been eighteen years old and furious, and I believed that if I left England and stayed away long enough, my father would have no choice but to change his will and give you your freedom. I thought I was being noble.” The word came out with a dry self-contempt that she recognized—that same precise edge he turned on himself when he thought he had not been good enough.
“I gave myself everything you were denied. I had a choice. You did not. And I did not know, for ten years, that my leaving had not freed you at all.”
She was quiet for a moment. The fire settled in the grate. Through the window, the park lay still and pale under the November sky. “What made you stay?” she asked. “At Meryton. You said you intended to leave.”
Again, he rubbed his hand over his face, hesitating to reply.
Finally, he shook his head like a man resigned to his fate.
“You,” he said plainly. “I watched you redirect those boys at the market—turn their mischief into labor, their labor into praise—and I could not leave.
Reynolds and Richard had suggested I observe from afar before I made any decision, and I had refused.
Disguise of every sort is an abhorrence to me, and I had no intention of watching you when you did not have the same advantage.
“But then the King's Messenger arrived at the inn. He asked for directions to Longbourn. He named your father.” He held her gaze steadily. “And I understood immediately what it meant, and I could not go.”
He had stayed to help her. Elizabeth felt her anger slip. “So you presented yourself to my uncle as Robinson.”
“As Darcy, I had wealth and a name and a measure of influence. As Robinson, I had skills that could help you resolve the problem from its origin. That felt—” He stopped. “It felt like the only honest thing I had to give.”
She looked at him for a long moment. The man in front of her—clean-shaven, black-coated, commanding, every inch the master of Pemberley—looked back at her with the same eyes that had listened to her in her father's cramped study, and handed her the Italian letters, and made her tea exactly as she liked it without being told.
The same hands that had split wood in the kitchen yard while her sisters watched from the window.
The same voice that had described the Mediterranean to her, that had told her, very seriously, that once you stopped fighting the water it would hold you.
“Tell me something,” she said. “All of it—everything that passed between us at Longbourn. Was any of it real?” Her eyes prickled and burned.
“Every bit of it.”
The urge to reach out and touch him was so strong, she clasped her hands together in resistance. She believed him. But believing him and knowing what to do about it were two very different matters. Standing six feet away from him was too close, and Pemberley was too full of him.
She needed to go home. She needed to be somewhere she had known herself before he arrived and rearranged everything she had thought she understood about her own heart.
“I loved Robinson,” she said. The words came slowly, drawn from the depths of her soul.
“I could have married him happily. Freely. With my whole heart.” She met his eyes.
“I do not know yet if I can love Fitzwilliam Darcy the same way. I do not know if I can reconcile the two of you, or whether I need to do so. I only know that I need time to understand who you truly are.” A pause, softer. “And who I am when I am with you.”
He did not try to persuade her. He did not reach for her hand or offer reassurance or construct an argument. She waited for it, but it did not come. Finally, after some time, he said quietly. “I have waited ten years to come home. For you, I would wait longer.”
She understood what he was not saying. That waiting was a choice. The will gave him two years, and he was offering however many years more, without condition or pressure, regardless of what that cost him. He was willing to lose his inheritance for her.
She turned before she could say anything she was not yet ready to say and walked to the door.
Mr. Wrayburn waited in the corridor, precisely where she had half-expected him to be. He met her eyes with a slight incline of his head and held out a letter. It was sealed, her name written in a bold, formal hand. She took it without opening it.
Charlotte was waiting outside their chambers, their cloaks already over her arm, Papa ready beside her. An hour later, they walked out of Pemberley into the cold November afternoon and alighted their carriage bound for Longbourn.