She did it this time—she reached for him, slowly.
He did not flinch. But his expression turned inward, as if refusing to accept comfort from her.
“Perhaps it is human nature to try to claim one knows where it all went wrong. To place blame on the victim, saying if they had only seen… been more aware…” He shook his head. “I have spent the last ten years trying to be nothing like him, and yet everything like him. Trying to atone for a crime he did not commit, but there is no wiping that stain from my family’s name.”
She blinked, recalling something. “Your sister… what of her?”
He gulped a long breath of air and walked away from her, leaving her hand dangling after him. “She manages. She ought to be one of the diamonds of theton—like you—but not now. I think she rather likes being invisible. My aunt and uncle took my sister in to be one of their own daughters, though I am distressed to hear of my cousin’s… behavior towards her.”
“It was not all that terrible,” Elizabeth inserted. “She did not mock her or make her sweep the floors or anything so insulting. She just treated her as a bit of a… a novelty, I suppose. And truly, if I had a cousin living with me who could play as well as your sister does, I think I would want others to hear her as well.”
“You needn’t make excuses for my cousin Julia. I know very well who and what she is. Still…” He lifted one shoulder. “I hardly have any right to complain after everything else. The earl and countess have been kind—were it not for them, and for Richard, I would not even have been allowed to finish school. My uncle advised me to take up at the Home Office, vouched for me to secure the place, and I was able to work my way up from there. I only wish… well, I suppose there is nothing to be done now.”
“Oh, now, you cannot stop there. What do you wish?”
He glanced up once, then turned away, as if it all had become too heavy to face her. He swallowed, and was a moment in replying.
“I thought… if I could serve the Crown, if I could carry out work that mattered—quietly, effectively—then perhaps I might restore some portion of what was lost. Not the land. Not the title. Those are gone. But perhaps the honor.”
“But that…” She sucked in a breath. “Oh! Iknewyou had something personal—some secret that made you particularly beholden to the Prince. You—you have been trying to clear your father’s name, have you not? It makes sense now.”
He gave a bitter half-smile, facing the hearth now, not her. “I have worked rather diligently to make myself ‘useful.’ And my plan seemed to be working, too. My petition was noticed, my character and work esteemed just enough to make me a curiosity. The Prince promised me an audience shortly after he was made Regent. Suggested he might be willing to review the ruling—quietly, of course. ‘Informally.’ It was the first hope I had been given in years.”
Elizabeth wetted her lips, leaning forward and holding her breath. “And did he?”
“You saw the man. He laughs at everything. Including that promise. He dangled it in front of me like a reward, and yanked it back the moment I asked him to make good his word. Not for the first time, either.”
Her hands gripped the edge of the table, knuckles white.
“So yes,” he said, turning slowly. “That is what they meant. That is the scandal. The disgrace. That is what Lady Catherine used to cast me out of Meryton. What Mr. Collins will whisper to every parlor and pew. That my father was a sodomite, and I—the shameful heir—am likely no better.”
Elizabeth stepped toward him. “There is nothing ‘shameful’ about you, and the truth is what matters.”
He shook his head, dark eyes flickering with something like pain. “You do not understand. It does not matter what I am. Only what they believe. That scandal lives beneath every interaction, every invitation withheld. Every door quietly closed.”
She took another step. “But it is not true.”
“No,” he said simply. “But truth was never the point.”
“Well… whatis? Surely, His Highness knows the truth. Why would he keep…teasingyou like this? For his own amusement?”
Darcy lifted a shoulder. “Very likely.”
She shook her head, snorting in disgust. “I do not understand. How are you supposed to appease him enough to make him keep his word? Are you supposed to… to dance a jig? Come bathe his feet for him, feed him grapes while someone strums the harp,what?What the devil does he expect you to do?”
He closed his eyes, biting his top lip between his teeth. “Ruin you.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Ruinme? As in…ruin?The… you know. The—” Her hands shaped in the air and gesticulated somewhat crudely. “Everything?”
Darcy swallowed. He turned from the fire and pressed both hands to the back of the chair between them. “That is what he would prefer.”
Realization dawned slowly. “You mean—thisentire time—he meant for you to…?”
“Yes.”
Elizabeth’s breath left her in a slow, stunned hiss. “No, no. I was there! I heard his command. He said he wanted meprotected.”
