The Lower Shrubbery #2
“He said you were not merely frightened by a fire. He said Mr Darcy came after you as though he already knew where danger would be, and Colonel Fitzwilliam asked questions no ordinary guest would think to ask.” Charlotte’s voice softened.
“Lizzy, if there is danger in this, you must not mistake silence for safety.”
“I know,” Elizabeth said, and she did. That was the trouble.
Darcy had heard her. He had heard very little else after it.
The path beyond the lower shrubbery is pleasant in the morning.
A harmless remark, offered at a door, in a room full of people who could not be allowed to understand it. Richard had understood it. Darcy had seen that much before they reached the gate.
At breakfast, Lady Catherine spoke of Easter, parish matters, Anne’s boys, Miss Stourton’s sister in town, and the failings of modern nursery discipline.
Miss Stourton sat quietly beside her, answering when addressed and observing far more than she was likely meant to observe.
Darcy answered when required. Richard, curse him, was amused.
Wickham was at Newmarket. That, at least, was the report.
A gaming acquaintance had invited him to Newmarket for the spring races, and Wickham, never able to resist sport when it came dressed as consequence, had gone north with two servants, three trunks, and more money than he ought to have possessed.
Richard’s man had followed him as far as Cambridge. From there Wickham meant to go on to a gaming friend near Bury St Edmunds, where there were horses to admire, money to lose, and company unlikely to ask how either had been acquired. Richard’s man was to send word the moment Wickham turned south.
It gave them a fortnight, perhaps three weeks if Wickham was winning or determined to pretend he was. No more. Long enough for Darcy to come to Rosings, if he moved carefully.
He did not go to the lower shrubbery immediately after breakfast. That would have been absurdly easy to mark.
Lady Catherine kept him half an hour over a letter from Anne, required Richard’s opinion on whether Lewis ought to be discouraged from climbing, and corrected Miss Stourton’s posture without looking at her.
At last Richard rose. “I need air.”
Darcy set down his cup. “I will come with you.”
Lady Catherine regarded them both. “Do not trample the beds.”
“We shall confine our crimes to the paths,” Richard said.
They had gone some distance before Richard slowed.
“I believe my aunt’s gardeners are committing an offence against symmetry.”
Richard’s mouth twitched. “Go on.”
“You are enjoying this too much.”
“I am enjoying being useful.”
He turned aside towards the flower beds, leaving Darcy to take the narrower path alone. The lower shrubbery lay ahead, quiet beneath new leaves. For several steps Darcy saw only the bend in the path.
Then Elizabeth Bennet came into view. She had been waiting for him.
Elizabeth had arrived too early, which was inconvenient because waiting gave a person far too much opportunity to reconsider.
Perhaps he had not understood her. Perhaps Colonel Fitzwilliam had understood and prevented him.
Perhaps there had been nothing to understand at all, and she had spent months making meaning out of glances, pauses, a book, and two words written beneath a note.
After August.
She walked to the bend in the path and back again. When footsteps sounded behind her, she stopped beside a young beech tree and turned.
Mr Darcy came into view alone. For a moment neither of them spoke. He stopped several paces away, as though distance might still be of use to either of them.
“Miss Bennet.”
“Mr Darcy.”
The formality ought to have made her laugh. It did not.
He looked thinner than he had at Longbourn, or perhaps only more tired. There was colour in his face from walking, but his eyes were too watchful for a man merely taking the air.
“You understood me,” she said.
“I have understood very little else since yesterday.”
He came a step closer, then another. Elizabeth did not move.
When he reached her, he took her hands in his. The gesture was sudden only because it was so careful, his fingers closing around hers as though he had no right to do so and could not help himself.
“You understood me,” he said.
Her breath caught.
“The book. The note. August. You understood.”
“Yes.”
His hands tightened.
“I feared you would think it cowardice.”
“I thought it pain.”
“The ballroom,” Elizabeth said. It was not a question.
“Yes.”
“You meant Mr Wickham to hear it.”
“Yes.”
She had known this. She had known it since the vestry, since the Cowper volume, since Charlotte’s quiet and you were at Hunsford. Knowing it and hearing him say it plainly were not the same thing.
“It worked,” she said.
“For a time.”
“And the cost of it?”
“You know the cost of it.”
“I want you to say it.”
“I said something cruel where you could hear it, because I needed Wickham to believe it, and I hoped, unfairly, that you might understand the danger before you believed the insult.” His voice was entirely even. “That was not a kindness.”
“No,” Elizabeth said. “It was not.”
“I told myself it was necessary.”
“It was necessary. That does not make it right.”
“I understand why you did it,” she said. “I have understood it for months. Understanding it did not make it hurt less.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. Because I have been carrying what it cost you every day since November, and I could not tell you so, and I could not undo it, and the only thing I could do was send you a book through Bingley like a coward and write two words in a note and hope that you—”
He stopped.
“Hope that I what?”
“Hope that you would still be here,” he said quietly. “When it was over.”
She had imagined this conversation a hundred times since November, in the lane, in London, in the narrow parsonage room with the Cowper volume on the table.
She had imagined being angry. She had imagined being composed.
She had imagined saying something precise and devastating that would require him to account for every silence.
She had not imagined this: standing in Lady Catherine’s shrubbery with his hands around hers, knowing he had carried her hurt alongside his own all winter. The anger she had kept carefully banked had not vanished, but it no longer occupied the whole of the space between them.
“I am still here,” she said.
His breath moved.
“I know more than you think. Your sister told me some of it. My uncle told me more. I know why you have been careful, and I know what it has cost. I do not mistake that care for coldness now.”
“Miss Bennet—”
“Elizabeth.”
“Elizabeth.” He said it carefully. “I cannot ask you to—”
“You have not asked me anything. That is rather the point. You have not asked, and I am still here.”
“Elizabeth, I cannot allow you to place yourself in danger for me.”
“You may tell me the danger. You may tell me what cannot be done before August. You may even tell me that you are afraid. But you may not decide for me what I am willing to risk.”
“And you told me you would explain after the ball.”
“You said it as though explanation were a debt you meant to pay, and then you disappeared behind silence.”
“I could not come to you.”
“No. But you let me wait for words you had promised. That was another kind of asking, whether you meant it to be or not.”
“You are right,” he said. “I did not intend it as a debt, but it became one.”
“What happened at the ball,” Elizabeth said. “Tell me. Not what you needed Mr Wickham to believe. What actually happened.”
He told her. Not everything. She could feel the shape of what he left out: the mechanics of the danger, the names, the legal details she already knew in fragments from her uncle and Mrs Wickham and three contradictory rumours in a London winter.
But he told her about the fire. Not her account of it, which he had already heard, but his own: what he had known beforehand, what he had feared, what it had meant to walk into that library and understand that Mr Wickham had not been preparing for the morning after at all.
He told her about the curricle wheel and the bridge.
He told her about Caesar drugged and the saddle tampered with.
He told her he had spent five years knowing something was wrong and unable to prove enough of it, and that knowing without proof was its own private prison.
He told her that when Mr Wickham said I like your Miss Elizabeth very much, he had understood in that moment that silence about her was no longer sufficient.
“And so you said it.”
“And so I said it.”
“That is not nothing.”
“No,” he said quietly. “It is not.”
His thumb moved once against her glove.
“Then do not call me Mr Darcy.”
“If you mean to stand here,” he said, “if you mean to tell me there is still something between us that Wickham has not destroyed, then call me Fitzwilliam.”
Her throat tightened. “Fitzwilliam.”
His head bowed over her hands, and his lips touched her glove.