“I need to write a letter to my father,” Elizabeth announced to Mr. Darcy one night, as she changed the bandage.
Mr. Darcy frowned. He rubbed a hand over his completely smooth face—John insisted on shaving him twice a day.
“No declaration that you are happy to see me make an effort to reestablish family concordance?”
Darcy blinked twice in the candlelight. He tilted his head. He looked steadily at Elizabeth.
She wished that she was a man so that she could angrily swear. What was he trying to tell her?
“I assure you, I do not mean to put myself as an excessive burden on him.” Elizabeth stopped looking at Darcy.
Elizabeth nearly said that she had a scheme to make her own money, but she hesitated. Mr. Darcy would ask what she meant to do, and then shewould need to explain her intention to become a hired nurse—it might make him at present think of her as less of a gentlewoman already, and she did not want that.
Worse, he might offer her some sort of charity that she would have to refuse, all the time being aware that a simple ‘yes’ would make her life incomparably better.
“I do not worry about that. You do not depend on others so much as you ought. I only—I hope you do not mean to leave soon. I thought…I expected that you would be here.”
“Oh, I certainly shall not leave until you are well healed, and the wound is closed over.”
Darcy frowned. His lips pressed together with emotion. “That is so soon.”
“Time moves on.”
“For the living.” Then Darcy chuckled slightly. “That sounds awfully morbid. I promise to not wallow in the habit of self-loathing that you have discovered in me.”
When Elizabeth sat down the following day to write the letter to her father, her hand shook.
A stone growled in her stomach.
She couldn’t.
Elizabeth scratched at the paper with the tip of the pen. She tore it to bits—this was another way of enjoying wealth: the wasteful, delightful, sensual pleasure of being a lady of leisure. She could tear an offending piece of paper into tiny bits. She did not need to worry about the price of a lushly pressed piece of paper.
She still couldn’t write to Papa.
Elizabeth took Emily and George out for a long walk.
They went to the park. They visited the churchyard where Mr. Wickham was buried. She broke one of her remaining shillings to buy George and Emily treats from the market sellers. When at last they returnedto Nelson’s Crescent, Mr. Darcy looked at her in a way that showed that he still perceived her unsettled mood.
Thankfully, he did not ask her to explain.
Colonel Fitzwilliam with his sardonic eye, and his judging ways would have been difficult for Elizabeth to speak in front of.
And Elizabeth thought her difficulty in writing was shameful. There was a task in front of her. A simple task. She had decided to write a simple letter to her father. She would simply ask for help. A little amount of help. A reasonable amount of help.Noone, she thought, would claim that this was an unreasonable request.
No, no. There were unreasonable persons, and one of them lived within Elizabeth’s own mind, who claimed that this was an unreasonable request.
Elizabeth could not.
Once more, Elizabeth discovered that while there were similarities between her true character, and who she thought herself to be, there was only similarity.
That night, after Elizabeth had been woken to change Mr. Darcy’s bandage, he asked, “Mrs. Wickham, I beg you to tell me what has made you so unhappy today.”
“You think something has been upon my mind?”
“You stand to the side and frown. You took such a long walk, you refused the chocolate that you always drink, and your eyes often have been staring to the side. Are you filled again with grief about him?”
Elizabeth blinked. “Do you mean my husband—Mr. Darcy, you think more about him than I do—I may become jealous of his affections.”
