Chapter Eighteen
Elizabeth had not known, until now, that astonishment could become a kind of torment.
It had followed her home from the musicale, sat with her in the carriage, climbed the stairs beside her, and entered her chamber with such persistence that it seemed almost to possess substance and will.
Even now, with the door shut fast against the rest of the house and the fire burning low upon the hearth, she could not rid herself of the feeling that the world had shifted out of its proper course and left her standing somewhere between memory and reality.He was alive.
The words rose again and again, each time bringing with them not peace, but renewed agitation.
She had whispered them to herself, had pressed them into the silence of her room in the hope repetition might tame them, but nothing had lessened their force.
She felt like a woman who had seen a ghost and then been expected to resume her ordinary life while pretending nothing had altered.
But everything was altered.
She stood at the window, one hand resting against the cool glass, though she saw little of the street below.
Her thoughts returned, as they had all evening, to the Count of Vendicarsi—to the reserve of his manner, the careful way he had chosen each word, the restraint with which he had met her gaze and then turned away from it.
It is him.
Whatever doubts had once lingered were gone.
The resemblance alone might once have unsettled her, but resemblance was no longer the question.
It was the manner, the eyes, the deepening of his voice when he spoke seriously, the particular gravity that belonged to him and no other.
Time and suffering had altered him, as time and suffering alter all people, yet nothing could erase the man beneath.
She no longer wondered whether the Count of Vendicarsi was Fitzwilliam Darcy.
What troubled her now was everything she did not know.
Then where had he been?
That question pressed most cruelly of all.
Where had he been while she believed him dead? What had happened to him? Why had he not returned openly under his own name? Why this title, this count, this carefully maintained foreign identity?
Elizabeth pressed her fingers lightly against the shell at her throat.
She wanted—more than wanted—she ached for him to tell her everything. She wanted him to come to her plainly, without reserve, and declare what had happened, how he had been lost and how he had been restored.
Every instinct told her, however, that whatever explanation existed, it was not one lightly given. There had been caution in him. Not reluctance, exactly, but necessity. He had spoken as a man who carried danger close at hand and could not set it down.
Things are not as they seem, nor are they easily explained.
The words had returned to her all evening, heavy with meaning. She had spoken to him almost in desperation, offering what little she could without exposing them both, and he had met her halfway—but only halfway.
He had trusted her enough to warn her, but not enough to confide.
Doubt lingered, stubborn and unwelcome. Hope had once been taken from her with cruel finality.
To surrender herself to it again without certainty felt perilously like inviting a second bereavement.
If she was mistaken—if grief and longing had merely taught her to see Darcy where he did not exist—she did not know whether her heart could endure such disappointment.
Elizabeth drew away from the window and began to pace the length of the chamber, unable to remain still.
The candlelight trembled faintly in the movement of the air, sending shifting shadows across the walls.
Her room, so familiar and usually so calming, seemed strange to her now—as though it belonged to the life she had been living yesterday, not the one into which she had stepped today.
She had gone out the following evening with Jane and Bramley once more, though she had scarcely wished it.
Another party. Another room full of light, jewels, titles, and carefully measured civility.
More opportunity for London to gather and speculate and admire.
The Count of Vendicarsi had, as Jane predicted, become the object of almost universal curiosity.
Wherever he moved, attention followed him; wherever he paused, mothers angled daughters into his path, and gentlemen sought his favor with increasing eagerness.
Elizabeth had not spoken with him beyond his formal greeting to their party. He had bowed. She had curtsied. Nothing more. Instead of conversing, she had watched him. How could she not?
He did not resemble the man she had loved in every outward particular.
His hair, once longer and inclined to curl where it pleased, was cut close now, severe in a way that altered the shape of his face.
The beard—neatly trimmed, well kept, and entirely unsuitable to the Darcy of her memory—changed him further, sharpening what had once been more open, though never unguarded.
There was a hardness in him now, not of cruelty, but of trial.
He carried himself like a man who had learned to hold every part of himself in reserve.
Despite everything, his eyes were the same, as was the gravity of his expression when he listened.
So was the serious, almost stoic manner that had once made others mistake him for proud when he was, in truth, merely careful.
So was the command in the way he occupied a room without appearing to seek dominion over it.
She had watched him dance, converse, incline his head at the appropriate moments, and she had seen, beneath every change, the man she had thought lost forever.
When she had returned home, she had not gone first to bed.
Instead, she had gone to the drawer where she kept his miniature.
The small likeness lay where she had left it, protected from light and casual handling, its painted features so familiar that for years it had been both a comfort and a torment.
She took it out and held it near the candle.
The younger face looked back at her—unshadowed by beard, fuller in cheek, gentler perhaps in outward aspect. But the eyes, the brow, the line of his mouth when at rest—
“There is no doubt,” she whispered.
She sank into the chair by the fire, the miniature still in her hand.
A faint sound at the door of her chamber made her lift her head.
Bruno.
The great dog ambled toward her with the solemnity age had not entirely diminished, his brindled coat gleaming in the firelight.
Though no longer quite the unruly giant puppy he had once been, he had retained enough of his old affections to know when his mistress was distressed.
Without ceremony, he came to her side and placed his head upon her lap.
Elizabeth’s expression warmed at once.
“Oh, Bruno,” she murmured, setting the miniature aside and laying one hand against his broad head. “You are wiser than most of the world.”
His tail thumped once against the carpet.
She stroked him slowly, feeling the warmth and reassuring weight of him, and for a little while she spoke as though to a friend who might answer if only he possessed words enough.
“I think he lives,” she whispered. “No—I know he lives. I know it, and still, I scarcely dare believe it.”
Bruno’s ears shifted at the sound of her voice.
“What has happened to him?” she asked. “Where has he been all these years? And why should he come back in such a guise, unless something dreadful lies beneath it?”
The dog sighed and settled more heavily against her.
“I am afraid to hope too much,” she confessed. “Do you understand? I thought my grief settled. I thought I knew the shape of my life. And now he stands before me, changed and unchanged, and I do not know whether I am meant to rejoice or tremble.”
Her hand paused against the dog’s head.
“He looked at me with the familiarity of a man who knew me well. Like someone who remembered. But he said so little.”
Bruno whined low in his throat.
“Yes,” she said, with the faintest broken smile. “You think I ought to demand the truth at once. You always were a creature of action.”
She bent and rested her cheek briefly against his head.
“I cannot. Not now. He is hiding something, and I think he has reason.” She closed her eyes. “I only pray it is not too terrible to be borne.”
The fire burned lower, and the shadows danced around her.
At length, Elizabeth replaced the miniature and rose.
Bruno followed, unwilling to let her go unguarded even within her own chamber.
When she at last prepared for bed, she did so with the strange sensation that sleep belonged to some lesser, more ordinary soul than the woman she had become in the space of two days.
Fitzwilliam Darcy lived. And the certainty of it had made the whole world unfamiliar.
The following day dawned bright and deceptively peaceful.
Elizabeth had slept little, and the air outdoors seemed preferable to confinement within walls where every object reminded her of what she could not resolve.
She had taken Bruno out herself, preferring the exercise and solitude of an early walk in the park to the cheerful bustle of the household.
The dog, delighted by any excursion, investigated everything within reach of his nose with grave enthusiasm, pausing at intervals to inspect shrubs, boots, carriage wheels, and whatever traces the morning had left upon the paths.
Elizabeth, however, saw almost none of it. Her thoughts were elsewhere, circling the same questions with no more success in daylight than they had found in the dark. She walked with one hand upon the lead and the other tucked into the folds of her pelisse, her gaze unfocused and her mind full.
If he wished me to know him, surely he would have spoken. If he did not, why meet my eyes so plainly? And what, in Heaven’s name, am I to do with this knowledge?