Chapter Eleven
She encountered Colonel Fitzwilliam alone three days later, on her favorite walk through the grove that edged the park, and found him unexpectedly good company for a solitary afternoon.
"You walk here often, I think," he said, falling into step beside her. "My cousin mentioned it."
"Did he." Something in that small detail, that Darcy had noticed her habits closely enough to remark on them to his cousin, sat oddly warm in her chest. "I did not think Mr. Darcy paid such particular attention to the movements of houseguests."
"He pays a great deal of attention to a great many things he does not speak of." Fitzwilliam smiled, easy and unguarded. "It is his chief fault, I think, along with a certain stubbornness of temper. He has always been immovable once his mind is settled, for good or ill."
"I have some small experience of that stubbornness myself."
"I do not doubt it. He is at his most obstinate, in my experience, precisely when his own comfort is threatened by changing his mind.
" Fitzwilliam glanced at her, something curious in the look.
"You seem, if I may say so, remarkably unafraid of him, Miss Bennet, where most people find him rather forbidding. "
"I do not frighten easily, Colonel."
"No," he said, "I begin to see that you do not."
They walked a little further in comfortable silence before he spoke again, in a tone she almost missed, so casually was it offered.
"He has been unusually pleased with himself of late, over some business in the summer. I confess I do not know the whole of it, only that he congratulated himself, rather smugly, on having saved a friend from an imprudent marriage."
Elizabeth's steps did not falter, though everything in her had gone suddenly, sharply attentive. "Did he say who the friend was?"
"He did not name him, and I did not press for it, thinking it none of my business.
Only that the lady in question had connections he considered objectionable, and Darcy took it upon himself to remove his friend from the neighborhood before matters progressed further.
" Fitzwilliam shrugged, entirely unaware of what he had just laid at her feet.
"I only mention it because he seemed so pleased with his own management of the affair.
I confess I thought it rather high handed, myself, deciding another man's happiness for him. "
"Yes," Elizabeth said, and her voice came out steadier than she had any right to expect, given the roaring in her ears. "It does seem rather high handed."
They spoke of other things after that, the weather, Rosings, Lady Catherine's opinions on the proper management of poultry, but Elizabeth heard almost none of it.
She was thinking of Jane's face by the window, reading Caroline Bingley's letter.
She was thinking of Bingley's easy, obvious warmth at the Netherfield ball, and how completely it had vanished within a fortnight of his departure.
She was thinking, with a fury that felt almost physical, of every kindness Darcy had shown her at Netherfield and in the hallway after the ball, and measuring it now against the fact that he had, at nearly the same time, taken it upon himself to destroy her sister's happiness without a single word of consultation or care for what it would cost.
She excused herself from Fitzwilliam as soon as courtesy allowed, and walked the rest of the way back to the parsonage with her hands clenched at her sides, and shut herself in her room, and did not come down until she had mastered her face enough to be seen.
She was still mastering it, imperfectly, the following afternoon, seated alone in the parsonage's small sitting room with a letter from Jane she had read three times without absorbing a word of it, when the door opened without warning and Mr. Darcy walked in.
"I understood the ladies were all within," he said, stopping short at finding her alone, something flustered crossing his face that she had never before seen him wear.
"Charlotte and Maria are walking to the village. I stayed behind."
"I see." He did not leave, though every correct instinct should have sent him back out the door immediately. He stood there instead, hat still in hand, looking at her with an expression she could not read, though it made her pulse do something unsteady and quick.
"You may sit, Mr. Darcy, if you intend to stay. I promise not to bite."
He sat, though he looked, for a man who commanded every room he entered, remarkably ill at ease in this small one.
He asked after Rosings, after her sister's health, after her opinion of the parsonage's garden, in a string of questions so unlike his usual economy of words that she began to suspect something beneath them, something he was circling and had not yet found the courage to say directly.
"You are unusually talkative today, sir."
"Am I." He set down his hat, picked it back up. "I confess I do not entirely know what has brought me here."
"Then perhaps you ought to have waited until you did."
Something in his face shifted at that, and for a moment she thought he might actually leave, might retreat back into the correct, guarded silence he wore so easily around everyone but her.
Instead he leaned forward slightly, his eyes finding hers with an intensity that made the small room feel considerably smaller.
"I find," he said, "that I cannot stay away from wherever you happen to be, Miss Bennet, however much good sense tells me I ought to."
The words landed somewhere beneath her ribs, in the exact place the assembly's cruelty had once lodged itself, and for one unguarded second she felt something in her chest lift toward him before Colonel Fitzwilliam's revelation rose up behind it like cold water, and she remembered, with a clarity that hurt, precisely what this man had done to Jane while wearing that same warm, searching look at Netherfield.
"That is a very great deal to say, Mr. Darcy, to a woman you have already decided is not handsome enough to tempt you."
He flinched, visibly, and she was glad of it, glad in a way that did not feel entirely fair even as she felt it.
"I have told you I regret that."
"You have told me a great many things you regret. I begin to wonder how much regret a man may accumulate before it stops meaning anything at all."
Charlotte's voice sounded from the garden path, cheerful and unknowing, and Darcy stood abruptly, color rising along his jaw, and made his excuses and left before Elizabeth could decide whether she had wanted him to stay long enough to finish whatever he had come to say.
She sat alone afterward with her heart pounding in a rhythm that felt entirely too close to hope, and hated herself a little for it, given everything she now knew.