Chapter Six
The fire wanted feeding, and Darcy fed it, because it was a thing his hands could do.
He had taken the night watch at midnight, over Mrs. Holt’s exhausted protest and Mrs. Collins’s more practical relief, on the reasoning that a man who could not sleep might as well be useful to someone who could.
The parsonage breathed around him. Above stairs, Mr. Collins slept the sleep of a man at peace with his own sermon title.
Along the passage the sheltered children lay in a row like spoons in a drawer.
In the back room the boy turned and muttered and did not wake, and his forehead, when Darcy laid two fingers against it, was warm but no worse than warm.
That was something, and he held to it. The fever had not climbed in two hours.
He could not sit still. He had tried the low chair and found his foot tapping against the flag. He had tried the window and found his thumb working at his knuckles. Now he crouched at the hearth and fed the fire a stick at a time and watched the boy’s chest rise and fall.
He did not know what he was doing here. Not the watch—the watch was simple.
He did not know what he was, in this house, on this night, three days into a disaster that had taken from him every ordinary means of being Mr. Darcy of Pemberley.
He could not ride away. He could not write a letter.
He could not arrange the world from a comfortable distance and let his consequence do the speaking for him.
He could feed a fire and hold a boy’s leg and carry barley up a hill, and he could not, for all his trying, stop thinking about a woman who had defended him to his aunt that afternoon as though the words had gotten loose before she could catch them.
A board gave in the passage. He turned too fast—and there she was in the doorway, a shawl pulled over her wrapper, her hair in a plait down her back, and a candle in her hand. His heart knocked once, hard, and he got to his feet because he did not know what else to do with himself.
“You should be asleep,” he said.
“So should you.” She came in. “I heard the fire.”
“You need not have taken the watch from anyone,” she added, looking at him as though the fact of him crouched at a parson’s hearth at one in the morning required some accounting. “Mrs. Holt would have sat up.”
“Mrs. Holt has not slept since the bridge went down. I have a great deal of practice at not sleeping, and she has none.” He had not meant it to sound like anything in particular. It came out sounding like something, and he turned back to the fire to be rid of the way she was looking at him.
She set the candle on the table and looked at the boy. “He’s cooler.”
“A little. Two hours steady.”
“Good.” She folded her arms into the shawl and stood looking down at the boy, and Darcy, who had spent the whole day learning that he could not predict a single thing she would do, waited to see whether she would stay or go.
She stayed.
“I keep thinking about Mrs. Poole,” she said.
“Not the danger of it. Nan is young and strong, and a great many women are brought to bed a stretch of water away from their mothers and come through it well enough. It is not the danger.” She frowned at the candle flame.
“It is that there is nothing to be done. She has packed her basket four times. She has the caudle made. And she sits on this side of a broken bridge with everything her daughter needs held in her two hands and no way to carry it across. That is the worst of it. Being useless with your hands full and your daughter out of reach.”
Her words landed somewhere he had not thought to brace, and his jaw tightened, but he kept it to himself.
“We may yet find her a way across,” he said instead.
“You said that this afternoon, too.” But she did not say it unkindly, and she did not go.
She pulled out the bench and sat instead, the candle between them, and for a while she watched the fire he had built and he watched her not watch him, and the house ticked and settled around the two of them like a ship at anchor.
“May I ask you something,” she said at last, “that I have no right to ask?”
“You may ask me anything.” It came out with more truth in it than he had meant to give.
She was quiet a moment. “Mr. Wickham.”
His jaw set before he had decided anything at all.
“I have believed, these past twelve months, that you wronged him,” she said.
She said it plainly—not as an accusation, but as a fact neither of them could walk around.
“That he was a steward’s son left a promise, and you broke it out of resentment or pride, though I could never decide which.
I believed it because he told it to me himself, and he told it very well.
” Her chin came up a fraction. “And then I watched you these three days. And the man Mr. Wickham described to me would not have stayed to carry timber for people whose names he would never trouble to learn. So I find I no longer know what I believe. And I would rather know than be comfortable. What happened between you?”
He could have told her all of it. The temptation came up suddenly and enormously—to give her every particular detail and watch the last of her certainty go down. He wanted her to know. He wanted it the way a man with a wound wants to show someone exactly where it hurts.
But the worst of it was not his to give.
So he gave her the part that was.
“He was left a living,” Darcy said. “My father’s favorite.
He meant Wickham for the church. When the living fell vacant, Wickham had already told me he had no intention of taking orders.
He asked instead for its value in money, to study the law.
I gave it to him—three thousand pounds.” His voice came level, and he was distantly surprised that it did.
“He did not study the law. The money was gone in three years, and when it was gone he came back and asked for the living after all, as though the bargain had never been struck. I refused him. That is the wrong he carries about with him. He was paid for a thing, he spent the payment, and he came back to be paid for it a second time.”
He stopped.
It was harder than he had expected, to have said even that much aloud—to have spoken a private grievance aloud to the one person in England whose opinion of him he could not stop weighing.
He had spent a year letting Wickham’s version stand in this county rather than defend himself.
To speak now was to hand her a weapon she might use against him if she chose, and he found he did not care. He wanted her to have it.
She was watching him too closely to miss what he had not said. “That is not the whole of it,” she said. Not a question.
“No.”
“You will not tell me the rest.”
“I will not.” He made himself hold her eyes.
“Not because the silence costs me nothing—it costs me a great deal. The rest is the worst of what he has done, and it would end your argument tonight, and you would never wonder again. But it is not my hurt to spend. It happened to someone who did no wrong and who is not here to be asked, and I will not lay it out on a kitchen table to win a point against Wickham—however much I should like to win it.”
She did not press him. He had braced for it, but she did not do it. The mercy of it wrong-footed him more completely than accusation would have done.
The candle guttered and steadied between them. Then, finally, to the table and not to him: “I believed him because he told me what I already wanted to think.”
It struck him harder than any defense of Wickham could have. His chest tightened, his throat closed, and something pushed hot behind his eyes that he had not felt since he was a boy.
She had not defended herself. She had not asked him to prove a single word. She had simply said she had been wrong, and made herself sit there under it.
He had never once managed that. He had proposed to her and laid his refusal at her family’s door. He had made his insult her deficiency, his arrogance her obstacle, his failure of humility her want of gratitude.
Elizabeth looked up, asking him for nothing.
It was not an apology, and that was what undid him. An apology he could have refused.
He found his voice, and it came rough. “Wickham tells everyone what they wish to hear,” he said. “That is his art. You are not the first he has deceived, and you had less cause than most to doubt him.”
“Do not.” She shook her head. “Do not make it easier for me. I was glad to believe the worst of you. I decided at Meryton that you were proud and disagreeable, and it pleased me to be proved right at every turn—it is a great deal more comfortable to dislike a man than to wonder whether one has misjudged him.” A short breath that was nearly a laugh.
“It is a humbling thing, to find one’s enemy inconveniently improved. ”
“I am not improved.” The words were out before he weighed them. “I am the same man who said what I said in that parlor. I have only had three days in which there was nothing to do but be useful, and no one to be it for but the people in front of me.”
She looked at him a moment as though that admission interested her more than all the rest he had said that night, and he wished, too late, that he had kept it behind his teeth.
He saw the next question before she asked it.
Of course it would be Jane. Wickham was not the only charge between them. He had known that from the moment she threw her sister’s grief at him in the parsonage parlor. He had known it for three days, and still his stomach tightened when her breath caught on the edge of it.
She drew breath as if to speak. Her mouth opened on it.
Then she closed it again.
He watched her decide not to ask. She set the question down, deliberately, and left it between them where they could both see it plainly. There was Bingley, and Jane Bennet, and what he had done there.
He could have answered anyway.
The words were ready. He had arranged them and rearranged them for three days. Bingley’s uncertainty, Miss Bennet’s composure, his own certainty, his own error. All the reasons, all the explanations, every piece of the defense.
And that was the trouble.
It would be defense.
She had just sat across from him and owned her wrong without sheltering behind a single excuse. He would not answer that by reaching for his own.
They sat a while longer with the fire and spoke of smaller matters—whether the boy would take broth in the morning, whether the surgeon would come by noon, how many days Dawes truly meant when he said a day and a half—and underneath every easy word, Jane remained unanswered.
At last she gathered herself and rose. She took up her candle.
“It is late,” she said. “Thank you. For telling me what you could. And for not—” She stopped, and did not finish it, and he was glad, because he did not want to be thanked for the silence. The silence was the only decency he had managed in twelve months.
“You should sleep while the fever holds steady,” he said. “I will wake you if it turns.”
“You will wake Mrs. Holt, and Mrs. Holt will wake me.” But she said it almost gently, taking the order and handing it back in a way that made sense, the way she did with everyone, the way he had watched her do for three days. She went to the door.
She paused there, one hand on the frame, her back half to him, the candle throwing her shadow long across the flags.
She did not turn around.
“You have been very good to these people, Mr. Darcy.”
And then she was on the stairs before he could answer, which was as well, because he could not have answered.
His throat closed. His eyes stung—stung like a boy’s—and he set his jaw against it and felt it climb anyway, hot and graceless and impossible to stop. All because of one kind sentence, given on her way out a door and wanting nothing back.
She had not even turned round to watch it land.
A door closed softly overhead. The house went quiet but for the boy’s breathing and the small collapse of the fire.
He should feed it.
Instead, he sat down on the bench she had left warm, his elbows on his knees and the heel of one hand pressed hard against his mouth, and let the coals sink, staying exactly so while the boy slept on and the long night wore itself down around him.
Admiration had followed him all his life. For his name, his house, and his ten thousand a year.
But this?
Elizabeth thinking him good to these people, saying it aloud, then leaving him no way to answer?
He did not know what to make of that. He did not know what it meant she now thought of him, or whether he had any right to reach for the possibility.
He knew only that he would not sleep now, and did not wish to.
She had said he was good to these people. As if she admired... him. Not his name, his house, or his income. Elizabeth had seen something worthy in him as a man.
Of course he would not sleep. He had no need for sleep with that to sustain him.