CHAPTER SEVEN
Darcy did not sleep.
He sat at the writing desk in his room at Rosings until well past midnight, three false starts crumpled and thrown into the cold grate, before he found the sentence that let him begin.
Be not alarmed, madam, on receiving this letter, by the apprehension of its containing any repetition of those sentiments which were last night so disgusting to you.
He wrote through the night, stopping only to trim the candle, and when he read the finished pages back in the gray light before dawn, he did not recognize the man who had written the first half of them, cold, defensive, still half convinced he had done nothing wrong beyond the manner of saying it.
He struck through three paragraphs entirely. He left the rest.
He told her of Bingley and Jane, of his conviction, at the time honestly held, that her sister felt nothing beyond ordinary pleasantness, and of his later doubt that the conviction had been fair.
He told her of Wickham, the whole of it, the living, the debts, Georgiana, sparing himself nothing and sparing Wickham even less.
He did not mention the list again. He could not think how to answer six numbered items with anything that would not sound, on the page, exactly as cold as it had sounded aloud.
He sealed it at first light and walked out to the grove himself rather than send a servant, because he could not sit still with it undelivered a moment longer than necessary.
He saw her before she saw him, coming down the lane with quick, unhappy strides, clearly walking off something she had not yet worked out how to sit with. He stepped into her path.
"I have been walking here in hope of meeting you." He held the letter out. "Will you do me the honor of reading it."
She looked at the folded pages, then at him, and something guarded crossed her face, quick and gone. "Another accounting, Mr. Darcy?"
"Read it," he said, "and judge for yourself what it is."
She took it. Their fingers did not touch, both of them careful of that, and he bowed and turned back into the trees before either of them could say anything further that might undo the whole fragile transaction, a letter for a chance, nothing more promised than that.
Colonel Fitzwilliam found him an hour later, still walking, boots wet through with dew.
"You look," Fitzwilliam said, "considerably worse than yesterday, which I would not have thought possible."
"I proposed to her. Badly. I have since written to explain myself, and I have delivered the explanation directly into her hands, and I have no earthly idea whether I have made things better or simply given her a second document to despise me by."
Fitzwilliam's easy expression sobered. "Proposed how badly."
Darcy told him. Not all of it, he could not bring himself to repeat the list aloud a second time, but enough. Fitzwilliam listened without interrupting, and when Darcy finished, his cousin was quiet a long moment.
"You catalogued her family's faults," Fitzwilliam said finally, "in the middle of a proposal of marriage."
"I intended it as honesty."
"Darcy." Fitzwilliam's voice had gone unusually gentle, which was somehow worse than mockery would have been.
"There is honesty, and there is cruelty wearing honesty's coat because it is a more respectable garment.
I have watched you do sums since we were boys together.
You have never once been wrong about a column of figures in your life. You were wrong about this one."
"I know it," Darcy said, and found, saying it aloud for the first time, that the admission cost him less than he had feared and considerably more than he had expected.
"I knew it before I had finished speaking.
I watched her face while I said it and I could not stop myself finishing the list regardless, as though stopping halfway would have been the greater dishonesty. "
"That is not honesty, cousin. That is habit. There is a difference, and I think you have spent so long mistaking one for the other that you no longer see where the line falls."
Darcy said nothing to that. He walked the rest of the way back to Rosings in silence, and did not touch the estate ledgers waiting on his desk, and found, for the first time he could remember, that he had no appetite whatsoever for arithmetic.