CHAPTER FIVE
Darcy walked back to Rosings in wet boots and did not feel the cold.
He had gone to the Parsonage that morning with a specific intention, one he had turned over for three sleepless nights until it had worn a groove in his thinking he could no longer step around: he meant to propose.
He had told himself the arguments against it so many times that he had begun to suspect he was rehearsing them not to convince himself but to have something ready to say aloud, as though the objection itself were part of the courtship, a debt he needed to settle before he could claim what he wanted.
The rain had interrupted him. He was grateful for it and furious at himself for being grateful, because gratitude implied he had not been ready, and he did not care to admit that a storm had more courage in it than he did.
Colonel Fitzwilliam found him in the library that evening, still in his damp coat, staring at nothing in particular.
"You look," Fitzwilliam said, dropping into the chair opposite, "like a man who has lost an argument with himself and is deciding whether to demand a rematch."
"I nearly proposed to Miss Elizabeth Bennet this morning."
His cousin did not laugh, which Darcy had half expected, and half dreaded more than laughter would have been. "Nearly."
"The rain came. We stood under the eave at the Parsonage. I found I could not say it standing that close to her, with nothing but weather between us and no dignity left to retreat behind." He turned the empty glass in his hand. "I have never in my life failed to say a thing I had decided to say."
"Then perhaps," Fitzwilliam said carefully, "you had not decided what you meant to say. Only that you meant to say something."
Darcy said nothing to that, because it was, uncomfortably, close to true.
He had built the speech the way he built every argument that mattered to him: beginning with the difficulty, so that the eventual yielding would carry more weight for having overcome resistance.
He would tell her he loved her against his judgment.
He would tell her, honestly, what that judgment had catalogued against her, so that she would understand the full weight of what he was setting aside to want her anyway.
He believed, with the particular confidence of a man who had never once been wrong about arithmetic, that laying out the whole ledger, the family's want of connection, her mother's want of conduct, the uncle in trade, and then declaring it all overruled by feeling, would prove to her the depth of the feeling more completely than any softer speech could.
He did not, sitting in Rosings' library with his boots still wet, examine the flaw in this reasoning closely enough to see it.
He examined instead the memory of her under the porch roof, rain-soaked and breathless and entirely unguarded, looking at him as though she had, for one unrepeatable moment, wanted to be looked at in return, and he decided the moment had been real enough, and the feeling behind it strong enough, that the accounting would not matter once she understood what it had cost him to make it.
"You are wrong, you know," Fitzwilliam said, watching his cousin's face with the particular patience of a man who has watched Darcy think himself into trouble before. "Whatever it is you are deciding right now. You have the look of a man drafting a legal brief for a woman who wants a love letter."
"I have never written a love letter in my life."
"No," said Fitzwilliam, standing, "and it shows."
He went to the Parsonage the following morning while Charlotte and Mr. Collins were out and Elizabeth was alone in the small back parlor, writing to her sister. He had not sent word ahead. He had not, if he were honest with himself, given himself the chance to reconsider.
She rose when he entered, startled, the letter still in her hand. "Mr. Darcy. I had not expected callers."
"I did not intend to call as one." He shut the door behind him, aware, distantly, that the gesture was improper and unable to stop himself making it.
"Miss Bennet, I have struggled against this.
In vain. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed.
You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you. "
She stared at him. The letter slid from her fingers to the table, forgotten.
"I have fought it since Hertfordshire. I told myself the connection was unsuitable in every particular your family presents, and I believed, until very recently, that I could reason my way clear of it." He took a step closer. "I could not."
For one unrepeatable second, standing in the small warm room with the rain-washed light coming through the window, she looked at him as though she might say yes.
He had one sentence left to speak, and every instinct he had ever trained told him to speak it, to finish the accounting so she would understand its full weight.
He spoke it.