CHAPTER EIGHT
He did not sleep at all.
He sat instead in the widow's front room long after the fire had burned down to embers, listening to the rain ease toward midnight and then toward something gentler still, and turned over, with the particular relentless precision he brought to every problem he could not immediately solve, the thing he had said to her.
I think you already know, and I think it frightens you rather as much as it frightens me.
He had not planned to say it. He had planned, if he was honest with himself, never to say anything of the kind at all, to allow the months of her residence to pass in careful, controlled proximity, and to let whatever feeling had taken root in him simply exist, privately, unexamined, the way a man might tend a garden no one else was permitted to see.
He had built an entire life on the principle that desire, openly admitted, was desire made vulnerable to exactly the kind of calculation Anne Forster had practiced upon him, and he had sworn, in the bitter aftermath of that discovery, never again to hand anyone the particular power that came with knowing exactly what he wanted.
And then a sudden storm had stranded him in a tenant's cottage with Elizabeth Bennet, and he had watched her voice shake as she described the cruelty of strangers, and something in him, some long held discipline, had simply given way.
He did not regret it, precisely. That was the strange part, sitting alone with the embers and his own racing thoughts.
He had expected, if he ever said such a thing aloud, to feel exposed, diminished, as he had felt in the worst months after Anne.
Instead he felt, absurdly, lighter, as though he had set down some weight he had been carrying so long he had forgotten it was a weight at all.
He thought of his father's note in the old ledger, the one Elizabeth had described with such unexpected feeling at dinner that first week, B.
a good man, proud, will not ask twice. Do not press him on it.
He thought that his father had understood something he himself was only now beginning to grasp, that there was a kind of dignity in restraint and a kind of cowardice in it too, and that the difference between the two was not always as clear as a proud man liked to believe.
He had spent years cultivating the second kind, mistaking it for the first.
He thought, too, of Georgiana, and the conversation he had not yet had with Elizabeth about what had happened at Ramsgate, the near disaster with Wickham that his sister had not yet found the courage to confide in anyone outside the family, and felt a fresh weight settle alongside the lightness, the particular guilt of a man who understood his own wounds had shaped his guardedness in ways that had, without his fully intending it, shaped his sister's silence as well.
He had taught her, by example, that confidences were dangerous things, best kept locked away even from those who loved you.
He was beginning to suspect that lesson had cost her more than it had ever protected her.
He did not know, sitting there in the dying firelight, whether Elizabeth Bennet would ever permit herself to want him as plainly as he had just admitted, in one unguarded sentence, that he wanted her.
He knew only that he had said the truest thing he had said to another person in perhaps three years, and that whatever came of it, he did not think he had it in him to take the words back.
When the rain finally stopped, somewhere near dawn, he went to the small window and watched the sky lighten over the widow's modest garden, and allowed himself, for the first time since Anne Forster's letter had taught him the cost of hoping, the small, dangerous luxury of hope.