His hand on the mantel was, and had been since he took the letter from his coat, and he had not stopped it because stopping it would have required a degree of attention he did not have any of to spare. He kept it where it was.
“I am aware.”
“Please—sit down. I cannot bear to look at you standing like that.”
“I… do not trust myself to the chair.”
“Stand, then. Only, do not stand over me.”
“I am sorry,” he said, “for the five days. Not for the rest of it yet. I will know whether I am sorry for the rest of it when I have heard you.”
“Mr Darcy—”
The change in her voice made him look at her. She had gone past white into a faint green—she was going to faint if she did not stop doing what she had been doing, and her hand on the edge of the writing-table was the only thing holding her upright.
“I must —” She did not finish. She had no breath spare to finish with.
He did not think. If he had thought he would not have done it. He would have waited the half-second to consider whether she would permit it, and in that half-second she would have fainted. He did not wait. He took her by the elbow and the opposite shoulder and lifted her out of the chair—the feel of her in his arms took the top off his anger in one pass—and got her the four paces to the settee before her knee had been asked to bear her at all. He laid her down on it. He fetched the cushion from the chair by the window and put it under her leg without asking leave.
He bent over her to set the cushion straight where she had not been able to set it for herself, and the bending brought his face into the immediate distance of her face. The warmth of his breath was at her temple. Her own breath went out of her body and did not come back. He moved his hand from the cushion because the hand had been the part of him most likely to make the thing happen if he did not first move it.
He straightened. When he had got her arranged he went back to the mantel, because she needed him not at her side for the next minute, and he knew it.
He stood at the mantel with his hand on the marble and the marble cold under his palm and the cold doing nothing for the fact that his hand was unequal to itself.
Her eyes were closed.
“Thank you,” she said, to the ceiling.
“Do not thank me.”
“Sit down.”
“Miss Bennet —”
“You will sit, Mr Darcy. I am not going to tell you what I have to tell you to a man looming above me like a magistrate. Sit down.”
He sat.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Shedidnot,inarranging her own mind to begin, look at him. She looked at the corner of the table by her elbow where the small pile of household letters lay. He waited. He had waited longer than this to know what she meant to tell him, and what was left to wait of it would not be a hardship.
She drew the small breath that was the breath the telling required, and gave it.
“After my father died, Longbourn went to Mr Collins. That part is no surprise, merely English law in its most domesticated form. My mother had her jointure, my sisters and I our very small portions, and all the gentility in the world with which to starve respectably if no better arrangement were made. Mr Collins offered for me before my father’s death. I declined him. Not wisely perhaps, in the strict mercantile sense, but with spirit at least. My father allowed himself the luxury of amusement at Collins’s expense. My mother did not. After my father died, what had been farce became ledger. Collins renewed his power not by renewing the proposal but through letters, through sanctimony, through hints that comfort and propriety might still be arranged if I showed a more humble mind regarding my refusal.”
A flicker passed over Darcy’s face at the wordhumble. “I take it you remained… disinclined.”
“I would rather have gone into service,” she said.
“I do not doubt it. I do have some passing acquaintance with the man.”
She looked away.
“My uncle Gardiner tried to help. Money where he could spare it without injuring his own children. A notion of companionate employment with a cousin’s connection. A scheme by which Jane might remain with us part of the year. It might have answered for a time, if Collins had not, in the interval, got wind—through Lucas Lodge, I believe, though whether by accident or design I cannot say—of a debt paper my father had left unresolved with a local lender. Small enough by gentleman’s standards. Fatal by ours.”
Her hand, which had been in her lap, went to the edge of the table. Darcy’s did not move from the arm of the chair she had put him in.
