And something in her face softened.
Pity.
He looked away first. Pity was the one thing he could never bear… most particularly not from her. He swallowed once. Hard.
“Strange lot, the whole company,” a voice was saying now. “Darcy, and that red-haired one—Bingley.”
“He is polite enough,” another offered, “but I would wager he knows something. Always flitting after the Bennet girl, that quiet one.”
“Miss Jane?”
“No, no, the other. The one who showed up out of nowhere.”
There it was.
Darcy did not move.
“…and she said she was a cousin, right? Only did you hear what that fellow Collins said yesterday? No one remembers Daniel Bennet ever having a daughter. Odd, that.”
A grunt. A shrug. Then— “Odd, nothing. Remember that afternoon—first day she was in town? Walked out of the inn half-blind and barely standing?”
“Aye, drunk as a lord, she was,” came the answer. “And it was him—Darcy—who paid her reckoning and bundled her off into a carriage. Told Carrick to keep it quiet. And gave him a purse fat enough to buy his silence.”
A pause.
Then a sharp intake of breath. “You are sure it was the same man?”
“Aye, the tall one. Darcy.”
The name passed between them like the first spark from a flint.
Darcy closed his eyes.
He could still see the flash of her pale face that first night, the way she clung to the doorframe, blinking into the lamplight, and how she looked at him with something like loathing.
Notathim, precisely—but at the rescue. At needing it. At what it said about her. And he—fool that he was—had thought that if he paid enough, concealed enough, covered his tracks well enough, kept quiet long enough, it would never follow her.
It had followed.
He opened his eyes.
A pair of young ladies hurried past behind him, hands clutched together, faces turned toward the green.
“…not even a cousin, they say. Invented the whole connection. Imagine the audacity—”
“Mrs. Blount told Mama it was some scandal in Town. That she fled from it.”
Darcy’s eyes snapped to their retreating backs.
Someone else whispered, “She’s ruined, surely. And him with her. What will come of Mr. Bingley, I wonder?”
Heads turned.
First toward Darcy.
Then toward Elizabeth.
A single ripple had become a flood.
