Chapter Eleven
Elizabeth was in the garden when Jane found her, cutting the first of the early daffodils with more force than the task required, and did not look up when her sister's shadow fell across the bed.
"There is a rider coming up the lane," Jane said. "Fast. Lizzy, I think it is him."
Elizabeth's hands stilled on the shears.
She had told herself, these three weeks since the rumor reached her, that she was done with hoping.
She had said as much to Jane, to her aunt, to herself in the cold hours before dawn when sleep would not come.
And still her heart betrayed her now, going hard and fast in her chest before she had even turned to look.
The horse came up the drive at a pace that would have scandalized her mother, and Darcy was off it before it had fully stopped, his coat dusty with travel, his hair disordered in a way she had never once seen him permit in public.
"Miss Bennet." He stopped a few feet from her, breathing hard, something raw and unguarded in his face that stripped away every careful distance he had maintained for five months.
"I have wronged you. I do not know how to begin apologizing for the whole of it, so I will not try. I will only ask that you read this."
He held out the letter. Elizabeth did not move to take it.
"You have not spoken ten words to me since October," she said, her voice tighter than she intended, "and now you arrive at a gallop with a letter and expect me to simply read it."
"Yes." He did not lower his hand. "Because everything I should have said to you five months ago is in these pages, and I let it sit unsent because I was afraid, and my fear cost us both something I cannot get back by explaining it standing in a garden. Please, Elizabeth. Read it."
It was the first time he had used her Christian name. She felt it land somewhere beneath her ribs, and reached out, finally, and took the pages from his hand.
She read them there, standing among the half-cut daffodils, Jane retreating tactfully toward the house, Darcy watching her with an expression she could not have named if asked, something between terror and hope held very still.
The codicil. The committee. Lady Catherine's letter, its author guessed at correctly the first time. His silence on the terrace, explained now as fear rather than indifference. The bookshop, Georgiana's illness, the unfinished sentence she had carried with her for months.
I have been afraid, and there is a difference, though I grant I have given you little means of telling them apart.
She looked up at him, the pages trembling slightly in her hand. "This was written in October."
"Yes."
"You have let me believe, for five months, that you were indifferent, or worse, engaged elsewhere, or worse still, ashamed of ever having wanted me at all. And this was written the whole time, true and finished, and it simply sat beneath a pillow."
"Yes." He did not try to soften it. "Georgiana found it yesterday. I have no excuse that does not sound exactly as poor as it is."
Elizabeth felt something rise in her, not quite anger, not quite grief, some tangled combination of both that had been building since a terrace in October and had nowhere else to go.
"Do you know what I have endured this winter, believing you cold?
Lady Catherine came to this very garden and told me you were promised elsewhere.
Mrs. Long said the same at a dinner I could not leave fast enough.
I heard, only three weeks ago, that you had called me an obsession you meant to be rid of. "
"I heard the same of you," Darcy said, quietly. "That you had called me a coward. I believed it enough to send a letter this very morning renouncing the trust entirely, because I could not see the use in fighting for something I thought you no longer wanted."
"I did call you a coward," Elizabeth said. "Once. In a letter I never sent, written in a temper, on a night I believed you had chosen a woman your aunt approved of over any regard for me at all."
Something flickered across his face, pain and understanding both. "Then we have spent five months believing the worst of each other, on evidence that was never whole to begin with."
"So it seems." She looked down at the pages again, then back up at him. "You renounced the trust."
"This morning. Before Georgiana stopped me from finishing it." A ghost of something almost like a smile touched his mouth. "She tore the letter to Hargreave in half and told me I would need considerably more than a fresh horse to fix what I had done. I begin to think she was right."
Elizabeth felt, despite everything, despite the raw hurt still sitting close beneath her ribs, something in her own mouth wanting to curve upward. "Your sister sounds a great deal more sensible than either of us have managed to be."
"She generally is." He took a step closer, close enough now that she could see the exhaustion beneath his eyes, the dust of hard travel still on his coat.
"Elizabeth. I do not ask you to forgive five months in five minutes.
I only ask you to let me try to earn it properly this time, without letters left beneath pillows, without silence mistaken for scorn. If you will have me."
She looked at him for a long moment, the daffodils forgotten at her feet, the cold spring air sharp between them, and felt the whole winter's careful armor finally, fully give way.
"You are going to have to do a great deal better than a letter and a fast horse," she said, "if you mean to earn back five months of silence."
"I intend to."
"Good." She held the pages against her chest, close, and something in her voice softened despite itself. "Because I find, Mr. Darcy, that I have missed you a great deal more than my pride wishes to admit, and I have very little patience left for waiting to hear it said properly."
He crossed the last of the distance between them then, slow enough to give her every chance to step back, and did not.
His hand came up, the same motion he had started and abandoned on a terrace five months before, and this time did not stop, his fingers brushing her jaw with a gentleness that made her breath catch.
"Elizabeth," he said, low, "I love you. I should have said it in October. I am saying it now."
She did not answer with words. She rose the small distance left between them instead, and let him close the rest of it himself, and the kiss that followed carried in it the whole of a winter's unsaid things, five months of silence undone in the space of a single unhurried moment.