The Hunsford Bridge (The Hunsford Variations #1)

Chapter One

Elizabeth had begged off Rosings with a headache, and the headache was real enough, but it was not the sort that tea and a darkened room could mend. It had a name. The name was Darcy.

She paced the small parlor of the parsonage because sitting had become impossible.

An hour ago, walking the lane with Colonel Fitzwilliam, she had learned the truth of her sister’s broken heart from the very mouth of the man’s friend and cousin.

Mr. Darcy had lately congratulated himself, the Colonel said, on saving a friend from a most imprudent marriage.

He had not named the friend. He had not needed to.

There was only one friend, and only one marriage, and only one gentle, wounded sister in Hertfordshire who had done nothing to deserve it but love a man who proved too weak to keep his own mind.

So Jane’s misery had an author too, and his name was the same as her headache.

The knock at the door was nothing. Charlotte’s maid, she supposed, or some parishioner come about a hinge. She did not turn from the window until the door opened without ceremony, and she turned to find the last man in England she wished to see.

“Mr. Darcy.” She did not curtsy. Her hands found fistfuls of her skirt. “Mr. and Mrs. Collins are at Rosings. I am quite alone.”

“I know.” He had come in already wet at the shoulders from the spring damp, his hat still in his hand, and he set it down on the table as though he had every right to the table. “I called to inquire after your health. I was told you were unwell.”

“A headache. Nothing of consequence.”

He did not leave. That was the first wrong thing. A gentleman inquired, received his answer, and withdrew. Mr. Darcy crossed instead to the cold hearth and stood there a moment with his back half to her, his shoulders braced and rigid, like a man preparing to walk into weather.

When he turned, his face had gone pale and strange.

“I have struggled,” he said. “I have struggled against this, and I can struggle no longer. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”

The room tilted. Elizabeth gripped the chair-back and said nothing, because nothing in her education or her experience had prepared her for the sight of Fitzwilliam Darcy declaring himself in Charlotte Collins’s parlor with rain on his coat.

He took her silence for encouragement. That was the second wrong thing.

He spoke of his feelings, and they were, she could not doubt, real and violent feelings—but he could not speak of them without also speaking of everything that stood against them.

He spoke of her inferiority. He spoke of the degradation of so unequal a connection, of the want of consequence in her family, of a mother whose conduct he could scarcely bring himself to name and sisters who wanted only sense and restraint to disgrace themselves entirely.

He named these things plainly, as obstacles his judgment had set against his heart and his heart had been forced to trample, and he expected her to honor the trampling.

He laid his struggle before her as though the struggle were a gift—as though she ought to be grateful that a man of his consequence had brought himself, at last and against the loud objection of his own better sense, to overlook the whole vulgar pack of them for her sake.

Every sentence was an injury wrapped in a compliment, and he did not appear to know it.

Heat gathered beneath her skin. By the time he reached his confidence in her answer it had risen into her throat and scalded there, and beneath the scald a fury kindled that she had never in her life felt for any living person.

“In such cases as this,” he finished, “it is usual, I believe, to express a sense of obligation. But I cannot. I have never been able to feign a sentiment I do not feel, and I will not begin now. I ask you to be my wife.”

He waited. Color had come into his face at last, the color of a man who has staked everything and expects to collect.

Elizabeth made herself breathe.

“You wish me to feel obliged,” she said. “You have just told me, sir, in considerable detail, that you have admired me against your will, against your reason, against your very character. You have counted my family’s unworthiness like a man counting out coins. And you imagine I should be grateful.”

“I have been honest with you—”

“You have been insulting to me, which is not the same thing, though I see the two are easily confused by men who have never been refused anything.” Her voice shook, and she let it shake.

“I am sorry to give pain to anyone. I have no doubt the sentiment was involuntary—you have made that abundantly clear—and I trust it will be of short duration. My answer is no.”

His head went back as though she had struck him.

“And this is all the reply I am to expect.” His voice flattened. “I might wonder why, with so little attempt at civility, I am thus rejected. But it is of small importance.”

“I might wonder,” she returned, “why you chose to tell me you liked me against your reason and against your character, if you wished me to think well of you. But that is of small importance too. I have other provocations. You know I have.”

“I know of none.”

“Do you suppose any consideration on earth could tempt me to accept the man who has ruined the happiness of my most beloved sister?” The words rushed out of her now without permission, hot and unstoppable.

“Do you deny it? Do you dare deny that you separated them—that you congratulated yourself upon it—that you set your friend against Jane and left her grieving while you went off to boast of your cleverness to your cousin in a country lane?”

He did not deny it. He did not so much as look away.

“I have no wish to deny it,” he said. “I did everything in my power to separate my friend from your sister, and I rejoice in my success. Toward him I have been kinder than toward myself.”

The honesty of it stopped her breath. She had braced for a wriggling, a gentleman’s evasion, and instead he handed her the knife and closed her fingers round the hilt.

“You take a generous view of your own conduct,” she said. “But Jane is not the only injury you have done. Or do you imagine I do not know how you have used Mr. Wickham?”

“You take an eager interest in that gentleman’s concerns.” The contempt in it scalded worse than anything yet.

“Who that knows what he has suffered could help taking an interest? You have reduced him to poverty—withheld the advantages designed for him—and you can speak of his misfortunes with contempt and ridicule.”

“And this is your opinion of me.” Darcy’s voice dropped very low. “This is the estimation in which you hold me. I thank you for explaining it so fully. My faults, by this reckoning, are heavy indeed.”

“Your faults are nothing to your manner.” She had come round the chair without knowing she meant to, both fists buried in her skirt to keep her hands at her sides, and the heat that had scalded her throat now raged the length of her arms and shook in her shoulders and left her trembling with the force of it.

“From the very first moment of my acquaintance with you, your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain for the feelings of others laid such a foundation of dislike that I had not known you a month before I knew you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed upon to marry.”

The silence after it had weight enough to lean on.

“You have said quite enough, madam.” He was perfectly steady, and the steadiness was worse than shouting.

“I understand your feelings, and have now only to be ashamed of what my own have been. Forgive me for having taken up so much of your time, and accept my best wishes for your health and happiness.”

He took up his hat. He bowed. He was gone before she found a single word more, and the front door shut behind him with a soft, final click that was somehow louder than any slam.

Elizabeth stood in the middle of the empty room and shook.

She had won. She knew she had won. She had said every true thing and let none of it soften in her mouth, and the man who had ruined Jane and wronged Wickham and insulted her family in the same breath he used to propose had walked out with his pride in pieces, precisely as he deserved.

Triumph ran through her, bright and savage and complete.

It was complete for perhaps a full minute.

Then the room was only a room again, too small and too quiet, the rain whispering at the glass and the cold hearth keeping the shape of where he had stood, and she could not remain in it another moment.

She seized her bonnet and did not trouble with the strings.

She went out the back, past the kitchen garden, into the gray wet afternoon, walking fast toward the village because her legs demanded it and her blood demanded it, and there was nothing else to be done with so much heat but spend it on the road.

The lane ran down toward the stream and the little stone bridge at the edge of Hunsford.

She had walked it a dozen times in her weeks here.

She walked it now without seeing it, refusing the small treacherous voice that crept up behind her satisfaction—had he only behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner—and stamping it flat each time it rose, because she would not, she would not, grant that man a single backward thought.

Ahead, the ordinary afternoon went on without her.

A carter was bringing a loaded wagon down onto the bridge from the village side, the horse picking its way, a man walking at its head and a smaller figure trotting alongside the wheel.

Smoke leaned from a chimney. The stream ran high and brown and fast beneath the arch, swollen with the thaw and a week of rain, loud enough that she did not hear whatever the carter called out.

She was perhaps thirty yards off when the world made a sound she had never heard.

It was like a gunshot, but wrong—too large, too deep, a single enormous crack she felt in her teeth before her ears made sense of it.

Then came the grinding, a long low tearing groan of stone giving up its hold on stone, and the central span of the bridge simply folded.

The roadbed dropped out from under the wagon.

The horse screamed and lunged. The cart slewed and went over half into the gap, one wheel spinning at the sky as a slumping rush of stone and timber and brown water swallowed the rest. A cloud of gray dust and grit punched up out of the hole and rolled toward her along the lane.

The dust reached her where she stood, gray and gritty and smelling of cold river-mud and broken stone, and her ears rang with the after-silence of it.

For one whole second there was no other sound.

Even the stream seemed to hold its breath.

The horse’s harness creaked. A single stone, dislodged late, knocked down the ruined face of the arch and dropped into the water with a small flat slap.

Then, thin and high and tearing through everything, a child began to scream.

Elizabeth was running before she had decided to. Her bonnet went off her head. The dust met her and grit stung her eyes and she ran into it, down the slope toward the broken place, where the lane simply ended now in raw stone and open air and the fast water below.

Doors were opening behind her now, up the lane toward the village.

She heard a woman’s voice rise into a question and break off, heard boots, heard the horse’s panic going on and on.

The carter was on his knees in the muck on the near side, hauling at the harness with both hands, shouting something hoarse and wordless at the animal thrashing half over the edge.

The wagon lay canted and ruined at the lip of the gap, its load spilled down into the water.

Beyond it the far bank stood cut clean off.

A man over there had come down to the very edge of the broken stone, and he was shouting a name across the gap, again and again, his arms out and his face wrenched open—too far, much too far, the broken ends of the bridge too widely parted to jump and the brown current between them too deep and too quick for any man living to wade.

And there, fallen among the stone at the near end where the roadbed had come down, half on the bank and half in the wet, small and twisted and shrieking, was the boy.

He could not have been more than seven. One leg was bent beneath him in a way a leg should not bend, and he was screaming for his father, and his father was on the wrong side of the water with nothing but air between them.

Elizabeth did not stop to weigh whether she could reach him. She was already going down the broken bank toward the sound. The proposal and the triumph and Mr. Darcy himself had been burned clean out of her head as though they had never been.