What she would say if he asked—what she would say if he came to take her—what she would say if he came down and said nothing at all and only stood at the door and looked at her—were three different sentences, none of them ready.
The fire she had built up twice in the night was low again. The candle was almost out. The window had begun to give her back the parlour in faint reflection, which meant the dark beyond it was thinning.
She heard the study door open at last.
That was Darcy’s footstep in the hall. She knew it at three paces. He had been crossing that hall toward her parlour for many nights of her recovery, and he was so plainly Mr Darcy on the bare boards that the second set of footsteps was halfway down the stair before she understood she was hearing a second set of footsteps at all.
Darcy’s step had not gone three paces in the hall before a second step came down the stair behind it; she had known it for Jane’s at the second tread, and for what it meant by the third—Jane had not been able to lie in her bed; Jane had come down to head her off; Jane was on her way to this room and would not be turned out of it.
By the time the two steps reached the parlour door together, Elizabeth had given up the morning she had been preparing for, and was waiting for whatever was about to come into her room instead.
Darcy was first at the latch. He opened the door and was in the room before he had marked the step behind him—dressed for the morning he had prepared at his desk through the night, with his coat on, the lines of the night still in his face, and his eyes meeting hers as if he had been keeping a piece of his own attention in this room for some hours.
“Miss Bennet,” he said. “Forgive me the hour. I would have come sooner if —”
Jane was at his shoulder before theif. She had pushed in close enough behind him that the door had not yet closed; her shawl was half off her shoulder, her hair had been pinned in haste, and the colour was very far out of her face.
Darcy heard her at last and turned.
“Mr Darcy.” Her voice was not Jane’s. It came out scraped and small and not quite under her, and Elizabeth saw her draw a breath against it and try the next sentence at a register she could trust.
“Mr Darcy. You cannot stand in this room alone with my sister at this hour.”
Her voice was small. The shame of having come down at all was audible in the smallness of it, and Elizabeth understood, before Jane drew her next breath, that the discipline Jane had been keeping since November was about to come undone here, in front of her, with no preparation given any of them.
“Mrs Marsden. I had thought you in your bed.”
“So I gather.”
Darcy turned to her properly then. Elizabeth could not see his face. She saw the set of his shoulder. “Please—sit down.”
“I have not come in to sit, sir.” Jane did not look at him. She looked at Elizabeth. “Lizzy. I lay in my bed half the night and walked the landing the other half, and I did not know whether I should hear officers in the hall or only the wind. And I could not come down, because I had told you last night I would not. So I lay there.”
“I did not know either, Jane.”
“No. You sat in this room and did not know, and I lay upstairs and did not know, and the only man in this house who knew shut himself into his study and did not put a word out the door.”
The shawl had slipped further from her shoulder. She did not catch it.
“And the man in your study, Mr Darcy—the man who has been in this house since the small hours, on whatever business he has brought—you have not been to her door with one piece of information, in those hours, that might have told her whether to expect to be in this room by morning, or in a carriage.”
“Mrs Marsden —”
Jane’s voice lifted at last.
“I have been with your sister and mine, sir, every day of these two months. And you cannot tell me, this morning—you cannot tell me—whether the man in the next room is here for my sister’s keeping? Or youwillnot tell me.”
The door of the parlour opened behind her, and a man Elizabeth had not seen before came two steps into the room and stopped.
He was in shirtsleeves and a waistcoat. His coat was over his arm. He had come in from the study at the lifting of voices; he stopped just inside the door at what was happening in the room.
He bowed.
“Forgive the intrusion. I —” He looked at Darcy. “I heard voices.”
Darcy’s face—Elizabeth could see it now, because Darcy had turned—went through three things at once and arrived, with what he had left of him, at a kind of formality. “Mrs Marsden. Miss Bennet. My cousin, Colonel Fitzwilliam. He came to me overnight from Matlock.”
The Colonel made his bow to each of the ladies.
