Chapter 40
Chapter Forty
He still stood at the mantel, one hand braced against the stone as though it anchored him there. The firelight caught the line of his shoulder, the careful stillness of a man who had mastered restraint by habit and now relied upon it too heavily.
Elizabeth did not look at the fire again, but kept her eyes on him.
“At the Assembly. I blamed it on a spark, because it was easier, and because I have two… perhaps three very silly young sisters.” She lifted a shoulder. “Everyone expects sparks at a dance.”
“I recall something of that.”
“And my injudicious words after, no doubt.” She winced. “But it was stronger than that. It struck through my arm—here—and ran down my back and nearly knocked the air from my lungs before I had time to decide how to stand.”
His brows raised. “So fearsome as that?”
“There were other moments,” she continued. “Small ones. Handing off a teacup, or when you would pass by me and accidentally brush my sleeve. Each time the same shock—less violent than the first, but still, like nothing I had ever experienced. As though something in me had been… rung.”
She stopped, then toyed with the stem of her glass in thought. “And yet,” she said, “it faded. Not at once, but over time. By the time you left Hertfordshire, it had become almost familiar. Rather pleasant, in fact.”
“Pleasant?”
“More like a…” She frowned. “Like a humming. Rather like the purring of a cat. Except you probably think that nonsense, for I doubt you have ever kept a cat as a personal pet.”
Then, her stomach dropped. Oh, dear, had she just told a man that her body hummed indecently at his touch? She half-lurched from her chair. “I am afraid, sir, that might not sound—”
“You need not explain further. I perfectly comprehend the intent. So, there was some… discomfort.”
“Yes, but only at first. It has been some while since I found your presence… troublesome.”
Darcy turned his head slightly and brought his hand to his mouth, as though to forestall another cough. When he spoke, his voice was level—but only just. “For me,” he said, “I should say the opposite was the case.”
She blinked, and her mouth dropped open slightly. “You…?”
“I felt nothing that first night. But since then, it has intensified. With time. With proximity.”
Elizabeth did not answer at once. She set her empty glass aside and rose, then checked herself, pacing two short steps before stopping. One hand lifted, then fell again. Perhaps she ought not to touch him just now.
“I believed it was only my own… peculiarity,” she said at last. “That whatever occurred between us was something I must simply endure, or outgrow. I did not imagine it could move in the other direction. Do you understand any of it?”
He turned fully toward her then. “Some.”
“And that is?”
“I know that it was not accident.” He paused, then continued, choosing each word with care. “Nor imagination. Nor illness, in the ordinary sense.”
He turned around to face her fully at last. “I know,” he went on, “that it is bound to my family. That somehow, I was committed to this… all of it… before I was ever born.”
“You speak as though it were some deliberate act of your father.”
“Not deliberate,” Darcy replied. “But not random.”
He turned away again, one hand flattening against the mantel as though the stone alone kept him upright. When he spoke, the words came slower, each one drawn up as if from somewhere deep and reluctant.
“There are old accounts,” he said. “Fragmentary. Incomplete. Preserved badly, if at all. They do not explain what is asked. They record only that there was…” he shook his head. “Some choice. Some moment of decision, and that something was refused. Or broken.”
Elizabeth took a step toward him without thinking, then stopped. The fire bent slightly in her periphery, the flame drawing closer to her skirts before settling back into itself.
“And you believe,” she said, “that we have arrived at such a moment.”
“I believe we are approaching it. But I do not know… why you? What sort of foul luck chose you, Elizabeth Bennet, for illness and blight and this terrible curse upon you?”
Elizabeth moved instead to the chair she had abandoned and rested her hand upon its back. “It has happened before. I am not unique.”
Darcy’s brow furrowed, and he stepped closer. “But…”
“Aunts. Cousins. Women long before the Bennets came, who remained near the land around Longbourn too long.” Her mouth curved, faint and unsmiling.
“I never knew this until recently, but my father says it has gone on for as far back as he can tell, and for no cause anyone understands. They were said to have delicate nerves. Overactive fancies. A tendency to exhaustion.”
“So…” He shook his head. “What happened to them?”
Elizabeth drew her lower lip between her teeth and turned away. “The lucky ones were married off, if they could be. Others were confined. Or hidden, passed among family who could bear with their predictions and strange visions and collapsing insanity.”
“And you?”
“Oh, I am sure I was meant to be no different. Only I was struck by some sort of physical illness, not just…” She frowned. Dropped her eyes to the floor. “Madness.”
Darcy stepped an inch closer, a strange light growing in his face. “You were chosen.”
She shrugged. “I think I was just… next.”
“No.” He shook his head vehemently. “Nothing about this—any of this—is mere accident. Nor will it simply go away because we find it inconvenient. Something is expected… demanded of us. And I will be damned if I can find out what it is.”
The words he had used—unvarnished, sharp with strain—still hung between them, at odds with the careful room and the gentleman who had spoken them. She had never heard him speak so, not even when provoked. It frightened her more than the admission itself.
Elizabeth folded her hands upon the chair’s back and found that she had gripped the wood hard enough to blanch her knuckles.
She loosened them deliberately. Her mouth opened, closed again.
Any comfort she might offer seemed barred from use, as though even sympathy would exact a toll he could not afford.
And she could not touch him. She knew that much with an instinct she trusted.
“Well,” she said at last, and stopped. Tried again. “I imagine—” Her lips pressed together, then curved despite herself. “I imagine Miss Bingley would give a great deal to be so thoroughly entangled in a mystical calamity with Fitzwilliam Darcy.”
The silence that followed lasted no longer than a breath. He looked at her as though uncertain he had heard her rightly; something flickered across his expression—disbelief, then reluctant comprehension.
Then he laughed.
Not the restrained exhalation of amusement she knew so well, but a genuine sound, surprised out of him, as though it had taken him unawares. He turned his head aside at first, one hand lifting to his brow, and then laughed again—shorter, softer, until it broke on a cough he choked back manfully.
“I ought to have known,” he said, when he could speak, “that you would find some means of making sport of even this. It was foolish of me to expect otherwise.”
Elizabeth allowed herself a small, careful smile, relief loosening something tight behind her ribs.
He looked at her then—not as he had before, guarded or searching or braced against consequence—but openly. The firelight caught his expression and held it there: warm, intent, touched with an admiration she could not mistake. “At least, I am glad of one thing.”
“And that is?”
“That you have recovered your wit. It would be a far darker business indeed without it.” Darcy’s mirth faded then, though the warmth did not leave his face at once. He studied her a moment longer, then let his hand fall from the mantel.
“You said yourself that you feel better here. Not merely housed and supped, but… altered. Have you any notion why London should effect such a change?”
Elizabeth’s smile drew downward. “You have not discovered that already? Why, it is you, of course.”
She saw his throat bob. “Me? But I thought… you just said—”
“Yes, but that was in the beginning, and I am not so certain it was you… directly. More like a sort of reckoning, or sensibility awakened. I puzzled over it for weeks, you may be assured. Then, when Mr Collins came to stay with us, I thought his voice alone should be the end of me.”
“Mr Collins?” Darcy narrowed his eyes. “Interesting.”
“But then I discovered that the proximity of certain company dulled it. I had narrowed that company to… well, what I thought was quite another person entirely, but all along…”
“But surely, you should have improved when Mr Collins left Longbourn.”
“I would have hoped. But no. I grew worse by the day after the ball.”
He swallowed, looked away. “After I left. I… egad, I was wrong. What does your father think? Surely, he must have some knowledge or opinion on the matter.”
She dropped her eyes and, after a moment’s hesitation, reached into the pocket of her gown. The paper she drew out was creased from having been folded and unfolded more than once.
“I supposed you would ask. And I did not wish to answer you unprepared.” She held the express between them, offering it, but he made no move to accept it.
“My father writes with concern, as you may imagine. He is relieved—grateful, even—that I am improved under your roof.” Her fingers tightened slightly on the paper. “But he has not been content to trust that alone.”
Darcy’s brow knit. “Meaning?”
“He has consulted Mr Wickham, the only man whose counsel has proved in the least helpful or accurate.”
The name had scarcely left her mouth before Darcy turned away, a sharp sound breaking from him—low, involuntary, edged with disbelief. “Wickham?” he muttered, the word bitten off like an oath.