Darcy did not reply. He folded his arms with stiff discomfort, the movement tugging at half-healed skin. He turned his head deliberately toward the carriage window and fixed his gaze on the drab brickwork of the shops and façades they passed.
It was cowardice. He knew it. But still he refused to look.
The carriage turned.
He felt it in the curve of the wheels before he saw it. His throat closed.
Pemberley House.
He kept his eyes on the far side of the street. A milliner’s display flashed past—a garish explosion of ribbons and bonnets. Next, the butcher’s, and then the tobacconist. His reflection stared back at him in every shop window. Tight jaw, hollow eyes. Unflinching.
He did not look. But he could see it, anyway.
The pale, elegant façade. The gate with its spear-point finials. The ivy that climbed along the western wall. The gleam of brass on black iron.
And the sign.
He did not need to read it again. “FOR SALE. Inquire within.” A stranger’s hand affixed it. Wickham’s final insult.
The house his grandfather had bought. The one his father had loved. The one he had once imagined passing on to a son of his own. To Elizabeth’s son.
Darcy swallowed hard and clenched his gloved hand into a fist. If Richard noticed, he said nothing. The carriage wheels rolled past, and Pemberley House vanished behind them.
Only then did Darcy exhale. The carriage’s interior was stifling, or perhaps it was the maelstrom within his own mind that suffocated him. The broadsheet clipping Richard had shown him burned in his pocket, its words seared into his consciousness.
She refused a prince...
Yet, once, she had offered herself to a man stripped of title and fortune.
Would she still? What if he asked her… now—today, even?
The notion was absurd, reckless. To ask her to abandon her world, to accompany him to a foreign land where neither rank nor wealth could shield them. In Portugal, her titles would be whispers, her influence diminished.
But perhaps that might be what she desired—to escape the relentless scrutiny, the ceaseless gossip.
The thought was intoxicating, a vision of a shared exile where they could forge a new existence, unburdened by expectation.
Yet, she is not yet of age.
March 20th.
The date loomed in his mind, a barrier insurmountable. Without her father’s consent, marriage was an impossibility. And even if they waited, even if he dared to hope—
Eight months was an eternity in this world of alliances and strategic matches. By then, she would have moved on. Forgot all about him in favor of someone better suited to her.
The carriage jolted, the sudden halt snapping him from the dizzying reel of thoughts that had looped without mercy. He blinked, disoriented, as if surfacing from underwater.
Matlock House rose before them, prim and dignified in its symmetry, just as it had always stood. The same brass knocker on the black-lacquered door. The same climbing roses curling around the window frames. But something inside him recoiled. It was not the house that had changed.
It was him.
Darcy reached for the latch and paused. His hand trembled once before he willed it still.
This was farewell. One last duty to perform. One more mask to wear.
He stepped down. The cobblestones were warm beneath his boots, the air thick with London heat, and every muscle in his body ached with the knowledge that this might be the last time he saw his sister’s face in many years.
He drew a breath.
