“I would never!” Wickham grinned, holding up his hands in mock innocence. “You have made your feelings perfectly clear.”
Darcy’s pulse thudded against his collar. His hand twitched—fingers curling as if to crush the paper package still in his grip.
“Do not presume to know my feelings.”
“Oh, of course.” Wickham’s tone oozed false deference. “Perhaps I should try another regiment. Since you seem to have staked your claim in Meryton?”
Darcy said nothing. His jaw was locked tight enough to ache.
Wickham shrugged, adjusting his gloves with lazy elegance. “I suppose your stay here has not been entirely uneventful. Small towns love their mysteries. And a stranger who will not dance is always good for a whisper.”
Still no reply.
“Of course,” Wickham said, his voice casual, his eyes sharp, “you may have found a way to endear yourself in spite of your natural… economy of words.”
Darcy breathed once, shallowly.
“Oh, but I forget myself. The second Miss Bennet seems to have you well understood. Sharp girl. Very observant.”
There it was. The hit beneath the smile.
Wickham waited. Too still. Measuring. Waiting for Darcy to flinch.
He did not. But it cost him.
“She does like to observe,” Wickham said softly. “And she is very good at it. She had one or two rather sharpish things to say about you, I will say. Fear not, old friend—I defended your honor most nobly.”
Darcy’s vision tunneled, just for a moment. “I do not require—”
But Wickham was already turning, waving his fingers. “Oh, of course. You need nothing. Well then, I shall leave you to your errands.”
And he vanished, boots clapping over the cobbles.
Darcy stood on the step, hand trembling around a parcel of sealing wax, breath slow and deliberate—because if he let it slip for even a moment, he might run after that man andruin him. Right there. In the street.
Instead, he stared at the empty place Wickham had left.
And wondered what, exactly, Elizabeth had said. And whether the truth, in her mouth, would hurt less than the lie.
She should not havebrought the good paper.
The pages had been meant for letters—real ones, carefully folded, sealed in wax, possibly even respectable. Instead, she had filled nearly half the first sheet with an overlong sentence about a man she did not like, written in a handwriting that had become alarmingly romantic in style the longer she went on.
She stared at it now, pen hovering.
There is a certain loneliness in being seen too clearly by someone you do not wish to impress, and yet cannot escape thinking about.
She made a face.
From the hallway came the uneven rhythm of familiar chaos: the thump of hurried feet, Mary’s voice halfway through a quote she was convinced applied to every crisis, Kitty’s over-enunciated attempt to tell Lydia not to take her gloves without asking.
Mrs. Bennet’s voice rose above it all. “That hem is still too high, and you cannot wear rose with coral—Kitty, do not argue, you are not the one who will be blamed!”
It was maddening.
But it was also—comfortingly so—the usual.
Elizabeth tapped her pen against the edge of the page until a small puddle of ink formed.
