CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Lady Catherine reached Pemberley two days later, her temper undiminished by the journey, and found her nephew in the stable yard rather than the drawing room, which did nothing to improve her humor.
"I have been to Longbourn," she announced, before he had even finished handing off his horse. "I have seen the girl. I have demanded the document, and she has refused me, quite flatly, without a single scrap of the deference her situation ought to compel."
Darcy went very still. "You went to her directly. Without consulting me."
"Someone had to act, since you appeared content to let the matter fester.
" Lady Catherine's chin lifted. "I told her plainly what was at stake, and she informed me, with a great deal more insolence than good sense, that the document was hers to keep, and that if you wished it, you might ask for it yourself. "
Something in Darcy's chest, some careful, contained thing he had been holding steady for weeks, broke loose entirely.
"You went to her alone," he said, "and threatened her, over a paper that exists only because of a wrong I did her, and you expect me to thank you for it."
"I expect you to see reason. That paper is a danger to this family."
"That paper," Darcy said, his voice rising for the first time in his aunt's memory, "is the only honest record either of us possesses of the worst thing I have ever said to a woman I love.
I have spent two months trying to earn the right to answer for it properly, in person, without a single figure attached to the asking, and you have ridden into her home uninvited and made her defend it against you as though she were the one at fault. "
Lady Catherine's face went rigid with fury. "You would take her part against your own family."
"I would take her part against anyone who threatens her, madam, family or otherwise, and I am only now understanding how long overdue that particular resolution is." He turned toward the house, already calling for his horse to be resaddled. "I am going to Hertfordshire tonight."
"Fitzwilliam Darcy, if you go to that girl now, in this manner, you will disgrace this family beyond repair."
"I have disgraced this family a great deal already, aunt, simply by taking two months to understand what I ought to have known the moment I met her: that she deserved a man who told her the truth plainly, the first time, without waiting to see whether honesty could be dressed up as something kinder afterward.
" He swung back up into the saddle before the groom had fully finished the girth. "I will write when I have news."
He did not wait for her answer, and rode out through the gates before the light had fully left the sky, his aunt's furious voice carrying after him until the trees swallowed the sound entire.
He rode through the night, changing horses twice, and reached the outskirts of Meryton as the sun was climbing fully over the fields, road-dusted and unshaven and entirely unfit for a formal call, and did not care in the slightest.
He did not go to Longbourn directly. He stopped first at the small inn to send word ahead, a note carried by the innkeeper's boy, asking only whether Miss Elizabeth Bennet might be persuaded to walk out that morning, alone, to the grove nearest the Longbourn boundary, if she were willing to hear him.
He waited by the stile at the edge of the grove for the better part of an hour, and had begun to believe she would not come, when he saw her at last, coming down the path with a quickness that suggested she had not stopped to consider the propriety of the errand any more carefully than he had.
She stopped a few feet away, breathless, her bonnet slightly askew, and looked at him for a long moment without speaking.
"Your aunt came to my home," she said finally, "and demanded I hand over something that belongs to me, as though I were a debtor who had failed to settle an account."
"I know. She told me herself, with a great deal of pride, as though she expected me to be grateful.
" He came a step closer. "I am not grateful, Elizabeth.
I am ashamed, and I have ridden through the night to tell you so in person, because I have learned, finally, that the things which matter most cannot be entrusted to a letter or a servant or a well-meaning silence.
They have to be said plainly, to your face, while I still have the courage to say them. "