In the far distance, just beyond the white blur where the hills curved away, she imagined the road to Pemberley—imagined him taking it. Would he bring his new bride there soon? Show her the west gallery, the lake, the climbing roses she had once teased him about? Would the woman admire the marble bust in the hall and pretend not to know the stories that hung in the air like old perfume?
No, surely not. Darcy would do his duty, and just now, his duty was in London. Correcting public opinion. Redeeming the Darcy family reputation and showing off his new bride.
He would not be at that house somewhere over the western horizon, with a warm plume curling lazily to the sky from the hearth. There would be no triumphant couple there yet, canoodling in the library, taking a little sweet wine before bed… so she did not have to imagine it, did she?
Miss Ashford probably never entered a library in her life anyway. Elizabeth pressed her fingertips to the cold windowpane until her breath fogged her view.
The desk stood nearby, a sturdy little thing tucked beside the sill. A proper Derbyshire desk. Unpretentious. Respectable.Infinitely tempting. It held a neat stack of pale stationery and a freshly trimmed quill resting in its holder, as though awaiting a conscience too restless for silence.
She had not meant to write anything ever again. Not after the last time. Not after everything she wrote had come back to burn her. But her fingers itched.
Just a line.
No—better not.
Another breath passed. She stared at nothing until her vision blurred.
She did not mean to pick up the pen. But she did.
And once she had, the words arrived without her permission:
Memo: On the precise ways one might vanish entirely without alarming one's relatives, alerting the neighbors, or attracting further satire.
She paused.
Then added,
Possibly: fake death via sleigh accident, flee to Scotland, become governess. Optional: eye patch.
Her mouth twitched despite herself.
She stared at the page.
Then, with great dignity, she crumpled it and tossed it in the waste bin.
But it was hardly her fault that there was another blank sheet staring up at her beneath the first. She twirled the quill around her fingers, letting her eyes flick toward that window. The one that faced toward the west.
And she wrote.
To Whom It May Concern (which is no one, and let us not pretend otherwise):
I have escaped London with all the elegance of a clumsy footnote. The satire has grown teeth, the gossip a pension. I am now more infamous than fashionable and less amusing than convenient.
I plan to marry a snowdrift. It is cool, silent, and unlikely to demand explanations.
Kindly forward any inquiries to the hedge on the west lawn. He listens, but never interrupts.
Elizabeth stared at the ink as it dried. Then crumpled this page, too, and tossed it into the waste bin.
The laughter sat hollow in her chest.
She had not written for days. Not truly. Not since the man she should have married met another woman at the altar. Not since she imagined the vows being spoken—not by her—and heard them echo in the space behind her ribs.
She leaned back in the chair.
Darcy was married now. And she… was nearly herself.
At least, in the kind of place where no one knew to doubt it.
