Chapter Ten
Colonel Fitzwilliam found his cousin in an uncharacteristic state of restlessness that evening, pacing the length of his own study with the particular agitation of a man who had spent the day composing and discarding a dozen versions of a conversation he had not yet found the courage to have.
"You will wear a track in your own carpet, Darcy, and accomplish nothing else by it. Sit down, and tell me what has you in such a state, for I have rarely seen you this unsettled even in the worst of the present business."
Darcy stopped his pacing, though he did not sit.
"I have arranged to call on Miss Bennet properly, Fitzwilliam.
Tomorrow, at her uncle's house, with Mrs. Gardiner present to satisfy the proprieties.
I have rehearsed what I mean to say to her perhaps a hundred times since the arrangement was made, and I find myself no closer to satisfaction with any version of it than I was when I began. "
"That sounds a promising development, cousin, whatever agitation presently accompanies it.
Why do you not simply speak plainly, as you did in your letter?
You told me once that letter cost you more honesty than you had ever given another person; I do not see why the same honesty, spoken aloud rather than written, should prove so much more difficult to summon. "
"Because a letter may be composed in solitude, revised until it says precisely what one intends, and sent without the immediate consequence of watching the recipient's face as she reads it.
A conversation offers no such shelter." Darcy sat at last, heavily, and pressed a hand briefly to his eyes.
"I do not fear that she will refuse me again, Fitzwilliam, though God knows that fear sits beneath everything else I feel.
I fear that I will say the wrong thing, in the moment, and do further damage to a situation already fragile enough without my clumsiness compounding it. "
Fitzwilliam was quiet a moment, and something in his expression, when Darcy finally looked up, gave him pause: a discomfort that did not belong to the conversation they had been having, but to something else entirely, some private matter Fitzwilliam appeared to be working up the courage to raise.
"What is it," Darcy asked. "You have the look of a man with something to confess."
Fitzwilliam did not answer at once. He crossed to the window, and stood there a long moment with his back to his cousin, before he spoke.
"I have not been entirely forthcoming with you, Darcy, about how the story of Hunsford first came to be known beyond my aunt's household."
Darcy felt something cold settle in his stomach, the particular dread of a man sensing bad news before it has been fully spoken. "Say it plainly, Fitzwilliam. You have never in your life required my patience for a difficult truth; do not begin the practice now."
"It was I who spoke of it first." Fitzwilliam turned to face him, and his expression carried a guilt Darcy had rarely seen him wear.
"Not to a stranger, not with any intent of harm, you must understand that, Darcy, but to my own valet, the evening we quit Kent, in a moment of careless irritation I have regretted every day since.
I said only that you had proposed to a lady and been refused, and that the refusal had put you in a black temper for the whole of the journey home.
I thought it a private remark, between myself and a servant of many years' trusted service.
I did not think of how such a remark might travel, through his own connections, until it reached ears considerably less discreet than his own. "
Darcy stood very still, absorbing this, and felt, beneath the shock of it, a slow-building anger he had not expected to feel toward the one person who had stood beside him, unwavering, through every difficulty of the past weeks.
"You knew this," he said, finally, "and you did not tell me. You let me spend weeks believing the story had escaped through some parsonage maid's idle gossip, entirely beyond anyone's control or fault, when in fact it began with you."
"I did not tell you because I did not know how, Darcy, and because I feared, rightly it seems, precisely this reaction.
I have watched you carry the weight of Hunsford these past weeks with a guilt already considerable enough without my adding to it the knowledge that your own cousin's carelessness set the whole business in motion. "
"You should have told me regardless." Darcy's voice had gone hard, harder than he generally permitted himself with Fitzwilliam, who had been, for the whole of his life, the one relation he trusted absolutely.
"I have been navigating this catastrophe blind, Fitzwilliam, making decisions about how to protect Miss Bennet without the full knowledge of how the danger first arose, and you let me do it, week after week, while carrying the truth of your own part in it silently. "
"I know it. I have known it every day since, and I am telling you now because I can no longer bear the weight of the omission, whatever it costs me in your good opinion to confess it.
" Fitzwilliam's voice, when he continued, carried a rawness Darcy had rarely heard from him.
"I am sorry, Darcy. More sorry than I know how to say adequately.
I have watched you and Miss Bennet both suffer the consequences of a carelessness that was entirely mine, and I have said nothing, out of cowardice I am not proud to admit to, and I do not know how to make it right beyond telling you the truth now, however late, and asking that you believe the sorrow behind it is genuine. "
Darcy was quiet a long moment, the anger in him warring with a lifetime's habit of trust in a man who had never, until this moment, given him cause to doubt it.
"I believe the sorrow is genuine," he said, at last, though his voice remained cool.
"I do not know, yet, how quickly I can set aside the anger that accompanies it.
I have trusted you above nearly every other person in my life, Fitzwilliam, and I find I require some time to reconcile that trust with the knowledge of what you have withheld from me these several weeks. "
"That is fair," Fitzwilliam said, quietly.
"More fair, I think, than I deserve, given the circumstances.
I will not press you for a forgiveness I have not yet earned.
I ask only that you believe I never intended the harm that followed, and that I will do whatever lies within my power, going forward, to help set right what my carelessness set in motion. "
Darcy said nothing further that evening, and Fitzwilliam, understanding the silence for what it was, took his leave with none of his usual ease of manner, leaving Darcy alone with a fresh and unwelcome complication layered atop every other difficulty he had been laboring to resolve: the knowledge that even the ground beneath his most trusted relationship had proven, this past month, considerably less solid than he had believed it.