Fitzwilliam said something under his breath that no woman of his acquaintance had been meant to hear, and reached again for his coat.
“Not yet,” Darcy said. “Hadley has him in hand for the present, and Mrs Hadley turned him from the door before he so much as set a foot on the step. Let him go back to whoever sent him and report a stone.”
“And Miss Bennet?”
“I shall go to her now.”
“Now?”
“I have been waiting all morning to be able to.”
Fitzwilliam said, more gently than he had said anything yet, “Tell her the news of her sister first, Darcy. Whatever else you mean to tell her, that first.”
“That is what I have been waiting all morning to be able to do.”
Elizabethwasintheparlour alone.
The room still bore the morning’s rupture. Jane’s basket was forgotten by the window where she had set it down. The chair was slightly out of place where she had stood and not sat. On the small table by the sofa lay Georgiana’s music, unopened since the quarrel. The leg was supported on the cushion. Elizabeth sat upright, not reading, not sewing, one hand resting on the closed book in her lap as if she had lost the page and not admitted it even to herself.
She looked up when he came in.
The relief in her face at seeing him arrived and was schooled so quickly it might not have shown to another observer. Darcy saw it. Of course he saw it. That was part of the problem.
“Mr Darcy. Have you news of Jane?”
There. The first proof of her mind’s direction even now.
“She is safe at the Hadleys’. Mrs Hadley has had her since the morning. She is asleep at present, and Mrs Hadley is of the opinion that she will be fit to come home tomorrow but not today. Fitzwilliam has just come up from the cottage. He says she is eating, and weeping, and being asked no questions.”
Elizabeth closed her eyes once, briefly.
“Thank God.”
“Yes.” He shut the door behind him. “Though thanks may be divided among Mrs Hadley, the weather, and my cousin’s view that no woman should be left to the road because proud people had made a misery of a house.”
The dryness was there, but not ease. Elizabeth heard the difference at once.
“Something has happened.”
“I would have given you another hour with the news of your sister if I could.” He came farther in but not far. He stopped behind the chair Jane had stood at, and did not sit. “A second man has been asking questions in an order I do not like. He used the old name first. From there he got the house’s present name and enough of the village to identify us. Only then did he ask whether correspondence for Mrs Marsden had come here, and whether there were one lady under this roof or two. He did not inquire as a neighbour would, nor go away as an honest fool would. And he went to the Hadleys’ afterwards. Mrs Hadley turned him from the door before he could speak twice.”
Elizabeth had gone white by the second sentence.
“Who sent him?”
“I do not know. I know only that whatever time we had has shortened.”
She looked away toward the window. The curtains were half drawn. There was no road through them.
“Then you were right last night.”
The line was the only one he had not been ready for, and it took him for the count of two breaths. Last night she had given him every truth she had been keeping; this morning the rupture had not been about truth at all; and he could not in this hour, in this afternoon, take credit for having been right about anything.
“I was not sure of that an hour ago,” he said.
“You were right that it would not wait. That is what I meant.”
“Yes.”
