“I have been under considerable strain,” he continued, his voice low. “The situation with Georgiana, and these letters… another was left for me. On my bed this time.” He paused, visibly shaken. “I very nearly dismissed my valet. I—” He broke off. “There is no excuse. But I want you to know I am not a man given to rage. I do not—” He stopped again. “That is not who I am.”
Elizabeth nodded slowly. “I believe you.”
They walked a few more steps in silence, gravel crunching beneath their shoes.
He stopped walking.
A gust of wind rustled through the hedges, tearing the last golden leaves from their branches and sending them tumbling to the gravel path at their feet.
“It is what I believe,” he said at last. “I know my tone was beyond what was appropriate, but my words were accurate. Ispoke my convictions, but I expressed them very poorly. I can only apologize profusely for that.”
Elizabeth turned her face from the wind, but not before he caught the flicker of sorrow in her eyes.
“And you truly believe it is—what did you call it? A perversion?” she asked softly. “You would look upon someone who feels those affections and see nothing but sin?”
He flinched. “I believe it is a disordering of natural law,” he said carefully. “Not merely a personal defect, but a rebellion against the order God Himself established. I do not say such things lightly.”
“No,” she said. “I do not suppose you do anything lightly, Mr. Darcy.”
Her voice was quiet, but the words struck him like a blow.
They walked a few more paces in silence. He could see their breath curling in the cold air, hear the steady crunch of gravel beneath their boots, and yet it all seemed very far away.
Elizabeth’s hands were tucked into her muff, but he saw the tension in her shoulders. The storm was not over—it had only just begun.
“I cannot accept your courtship,” she said abruptly, stopping mid-path.
He turned, stunned. “What?”
“I cannot,” she repeated, her voice firm, though it trembled at the edges. “It would not be right.”
His pulse surged. “Why not?”
She opened her mouth to answer, then closed it again. A flush rose in her cheeks, not from cold, but from something like anguish.
He stepped toward her. “Tell me.”
Her eyes searched his face. “Because I would always be afraid of you.”
The words stunned him into stillness.
“Not because I believe you to be cruel,” she hurried to add. “Not in the usual sense. But because I have seen your anger, and I have heard your condemnation. And I have imagined—truly imagined—what it would be to be bound to someone who might one day turn that judgment upon me, or upon someone I love.”
His brows drew together. “Elizabeth, I would never harm you.”
“Not with your hands, no. But words can do their own sort of violence.” Her voice was rising now, her cheeks bright. “What would you do if someone in your own family turned out to be… like that? What if it were your cousin? Or your child?”
“I would not allow such a scandal to attach itself to my name.”
She drew back. “But it may not be something you can control. How can you be so proud, so arrogant as to think so?”
He felt a flare of heat rise in his chest. “I have already said I was wrong in how I spoke to you—”
“This is not about that day,” she interrupted, her voice breaking. “This is about what it revealed. I thought I knew you. I thought you could be—”
She stopped herself. The wind swept between them like a wedge, cold and cutting.
“I know about Mr. Wickham,” she said at last.
