Chapter 48
Chapter Forty-Eight
The morning had begun too quietly to feel honest.
Elizabeth sat near the window with her sewing laid aside—she no longer trusted herself with a needle.
At present, she was watching the light slide across the floorboards as though nothing in the world had shifted its course.
The sea lay beyond the houses in a broad, pewter sweep, its sound softened by distance and walls.
She had slept. She had eaten. Her head did not ache. Her limbs did not tremble. If she listened only to her body, she might have believed herself restored.
Yesterday, after all, had ended well enough.
Mary had been married, as far as they knew. The hour had passed. The vows had been spoken. The world had not cracked open in church or swallowed the road beneath the carriage wheels. And Mary would be on her way to Kent by now.
There had been no cries, no fainting fits, no unseemly spectacle to force acknowledgement.
Whatever had seized Elizabeth in that brief, terrible interval—whatever pressure had built until she could scarcely breathe—had loosened again.
By evening, she had been declared merely fatigued. Overwrought. Excitable.
A wedding, her father had said mildly, was enough to try anyone’s nerves. And so, the matter had been allowed to rest.
Her father sat with a broadsheet folded idly upon his knee, his spectacles lowered as he watched Jane move about the room.
Jane had insisted on setting the breakfast things to rights herself, though the landlady had offered twice.
There was a quiet satisfaction in her movements, a gentleness born of relief.
Elizabeth knew the look well. It was the look Jane wore when she believed danger past—when a thing had not happened loudly enough to require a reordering of daily affairs.
“You see,” her father said at last, glancing toward Elizabeth with a small, weary smile, “sea air and distance. I ought to have prescribed it years ago.”
Elizabeth returned the smile because she must. “Do not let it be said that you neglect your children’s health, Papa.”
Jane laughed softly and crossed to the hearth, where the remnants of last night’s fire still glowed faintly among the coals. “Shall I stir it up a little? It is damp this morning.”
Elizabeth opened her mouth to answer—and stopped.
The sensation came without warning. Not pain. Not dizziness. A tightening, low and insistent, as though something deep within her core had drawn a slow breath and found itself cramped by restraint. The room felt suddenly smaller, the air thicker, charged with an expectancy she could not name.
“Jane,” she said, too quickly, “perhaps—”
The poker rattled.
Jane paused, her hand still upon it. “How odd,” she murmured, smiling as she nudged it back into place. “I must be clumsier than I thought.”
Elizabeth rose at once. “Do not—please—do not stir it!”
Her father looked up. “Lizzy?”
The coals brightened. Elizabeth felt it then, unmistakable and horrifying: a pull, not toward the fire, but from it, as though the newly stoked heat had noticed her and leaned closer in answer. The warmth brushed her skin. Too warm. Too eager.
Jane had knelt and was reaching for a bellows when the flame leapt.
It did not flare wildly. It surged, clean and sudden, a tongue of fire snapping outward from the grate.
Jane cried out as it caught her shawl, the wool blackening in an instant.
Elizabeth was across the room before she knew she had moved, clutching at Jane’s arm, beating at the flame with her bare hands.
“Jane—Jane, let go—!”
Her father was shouting, the chair scraping violently as he lunged for the cold pot of tea beside Elizabeth’s chair.
Jane stumbled back, her face pale with shock, her breath coming in short, broken gasps.
The flame died as quickly as it had risen, leaving only the acrid smell of scorched cloth and the sound of Jane’s breathing.
“Are you hurt?” Elizabeth demanded, her voice breaking as she seized Jane’s wrist and turned it this way and that. The skin beneath the ruined sleeve had reddened fiercely, an angry mark already swelling across her forearm.
“It is nothing,” Jane said, though tears stood in her eyes now. “Only a fright. Elizabeth, please—”
But Elizabeth had stepped back.
The room was wrong. She could feel it with a clarity that robbed her of breath. The hearth crackled softly, settling, innocent once more. The poker trembled against the stones, just once, then stilled.
Her father set the pot down with shaking hands. “Twice...” he murmured. “How?”
Elizabeth’s gaze had fixed on Jane’s arm. On the burn. On the undeniable truth of it.
“I did that,” she whispered.
Jane frowned. “Lizzy, no—”
“I did.” The words tasted like ash. “I felt it. Before it happened. I knew.”
Her father stared at her now, truly stared, as though some long-dismissed notion had at last demanded attention. “Elizabeth…”
“I cannot stay,” she said, the sentence tearing free of her before she could temper it. “Papa, you must take me away. At once!”
“Lizzy, you have only just arrived,” Jane said, reaching for her with her uninjured hand.
Elizabeth flinched back as though struck. “Do not touch me!”
Jane froze, wounded more by that than by the burn.
Elizabeth pressed her palms to her skirts, suddenly aware of the heat still prickling along her skin, of the way the fire had answered her without command or consent. Jane had been injured… she had not. Her heart was racing now, not with weakness, but with terror so sharp it made her light-headed.
“I cannot be here,” she said again, more urgently. “I cannot be anywhere like this! You see what happens. No, perhaps I do not faint. I do not grow ill. I make things—” She swallowed hard. “I make things worse!”
Her father crossed the room in two strides and caught her shoulders. She did not pull away from him. “Elizabeth! Stop this talk. You are merely overwrought. You have frightened yourself.”
“No!” She shook her head, tears spilling now despite her effort. “I frightened her. And next time it will be worse. I can feel it! Something is building, Papa. I cannot stop it!”
Jane’s voice trembled. “What are you saying?”
Elizabeth’s breath came fast and shallow. “I am saying that if I remain, I will hurt you. I will hurt someone else! I do not know when or how, only that I will.”
Silence fell, heavy and terrible. Her father removed his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. “Elizabeth…”
“Take me home!” she pleaded. “To Longbourn. I will lie in my bed and not move. I will be ill. I will be quiet long enough to die without harming someone. Or take me to London—to Mr Darcy! He knows what it costs. He would bear it. He could keep me from harming others, and he would not—” Her voice failed. “He would not be surprised.”
“Elizabeth, you do not know what you are asking.”
“I do.” She met his eyes, desperate and resolute all at once. “I am asking you to choose the danger that can be borne over the one that cannot. I am asking you not to make me stay where I might kill the people I love!”
Jane sank into a chair, pale and shaken, clutching her burned arm as she watched Elizabeth with dawning fear. “But Lizzy, you said Mr Darcy, too, was… vulnerable. To you.”
Elizabeth drew her hands together, as though she might hold herself in place by force alone. “But he knows. He understands the cost. Please,” she said. “Please, Papa. Before it happens again.”
And somewhere beyond the walls, the sea struck the shore with sudden, thunderous force, as though in answer.
Darcy did not wait for dawn to soften the decision.
The house was still when he ordered the carriage, the lamps in the passage burning low and steady as though they, too, were holding their breath.
He moved through the rooms with a deliberation that felt almost ceremonial—selecting the coat fit for travel, the boots already broken to his step, the papers he did not expect to consult and yet could not leave behind. Each choice was plain.
Each felt final.
Harrowe was waiting in the front hall, hat in hand, satchel already slung across one shoulder. There was ink on his fingers and a rawness about his eyes that suggested the night had been spent in argument with men long dead and was no closer to yielding.
“You’re going to Hertfordshire. It won’t work.”
Darcy walked past him to the waiting footman. “And still, I am going.”
“Without her? That’s not courage, Darcy. It’s blindness.”
Darcy turned from him to be helped into his coat. “You have had your say. Repeatedly.”
“You mistake me if you think I speak for comfort. I’ve studied this longer than you’ve borne it. And I’ve seen what follows when a man believes desire will answer for deed.”
Darcy crossed to the door. Brutus already sat there, already alert, as though he had been waiting for the decision to be spoken aloud. Darcy laid his hand at the dog’s neck, feeling the heat there, the life, the simple faith.
“Stay.”
Brutus made a low, protesting sound and did not move. Did not even blink.
Darcy closed his eyes once. “Oh, very well. Come, Brutus.”
The dog was on his feet at once, bounding to his side with a loud bark.
Harrowe’s voice broke through the space between them. “You’re not listening! If you mean to carry on like this—”
“I have listened,” Darcy said, sharply now.
“I have listened while Parliament dithers and men starve. I have listened while soldiers march barefoot into ground that breaks beneath them. I have listened while you tell me what pagan horrors must be done and my aunt tells me what is ‘proper,’ and all the while the cost is paid by people who never agreed to any of it!”
“Hold there, Darcy. I never said you oughtn’t act. I only meant you cannot succeed alone.”
He straightened, hand dropping from the dog’s neck. “I am the only one answerable at present, and I will not wait for another failure to be recorded in your margins.”
Harrowe shook his head. “But the land only answers blood—”