Under other circumstances Darcy might have ordered him out. Today the rebuke struck too close to truth to dismiss.
“She is alarmed,” he said. “And recently hurt again in an attempt to leave the house—”
Fitzwilliam sat up sharply. “To leave?”
Darcy regretted the admission instantly.
“She thought to go for our sake. Mine, Georgiana’s, the house’s. She did not get farther than the south lane.”
Fitzwilliam studied him with an almost irony-stripped look.
“And you brought her back. Of course you did.”
Fitzwilliam set the glove on the arm of the chair. “Very well. Let us set aside all decoration and speak plainly. If this lady is under some legal or quasi-legal threat, and if you have already sheltered her without reporting it because you judge the threat unjust or at least unclear, then your position may yet be defensible. If, however, you continue without acquiring facts necessary to protect Georgiana and yourself, your position becomes not chivalrous but reckless.”
“You think I do not know that?”
“I think you know and do not like the knowledge because it arrives too late to keep your feelings in order.”
That struck. Darcy turned away lest his face betray too much.
Fitzwilliam said more quietly, “Do you love her?”
The question entered with such bluntness that for an instant all the lesser tensions—the legal danger, gossip, household arrangements, even Georgiana’s position—went into the background.
Darcy hesitated only because the truthful answer required not thought but surrender. “Yes.”
Fitzwilliam closed his eyes briefly, not with surprise, but resigned to a fate he had suspected and disliked on practical grounds.
“Then we are all in deeper water than I hoped.” The words might have been comic from another. From Fitzwilliam, who had ridden north instead of waiting to be proved right from a distance, they came almost kindly.
“Does she love you?” he asked.
Darcy thought of Elizabeth in the lane, shaking with pain and fury in his arms. Of her wit guarded under dread. Of the quiet wound on her face when he refused her truth of Fitzwilliam’s letter. Of the lie she told him yesterday with her voice unwavering and eyes full of what the voice denied.
“She may,” he said. “Or she may be too entangled by gratitude, circumstance, and habit to distinguish one feeling from another.”
“That is the most hopelessly honourable answer you could give and probably the truest.”
Darcy nodded. “You have judged the matter rightly.”
Thecandleshehadlit at some hour she had stopped counting was on its second wick and burning crooked.
She had heard wheels in the gravel sometime after midnight, and Darcy’s tread cross the hall to the door—a voice not Hadley’s, not the village, answering his, then receding with him into the study. The door had closed after them. In the four hours since, no one had been to her door to put a name to the voice she had heard.
She had spent her hours in the chair turning over what she did not know: whether she was waiting for the question she wanted asked or the question she had no answer to. The first version of the visitor—most patient, most plausible at one in the morning—was a magistrate. Some man in a coat with the kind of patience the law cultivates, sent for from Bakewell, willing to receive his cold supper in the study while he waited for the household to wake. The second was a friend Darcy had not named to her—a steward, a solicitor, a relation. The third was that whoever had come had nothing whatever to do with her, and the carriage in the dark had simply been somebody arriving on Northmere’s other business, and her hands were cold for nothing.
With every quarter that passed without a knock at the parlour door, the magistrate began to thin.
A magistrate, having travelled by night, would not have suffered to be put off until breakfast. A magistrate would have stood in the hall and waited for her to be brought down. He would have wished to have her at first light, when the household was asleep, so that the going-out of him from the house with her in his keeping would not be witnessed. There had been no such moving. The house had been still since the front door had closed.
She did not trust the thinning. Hope was as dangerous to her, this morning, as fear.
She was waiting because Darcy had told her, in the room where she had told him every truth she had been keeping, that he would speak to her again before the household was awake. The household was not yet awake. He had not come down.
She loved him.
She had stopped pretending, even to herself in the dark, that this was anything else.
