“And you have, but you are still blind?”
He stared, then shook his head. “No, impossible. You are mistaken.”
“I am not mistaken, Darcy. I knew it inside a minute. I knew it across the room before you had even properly introduced her. I knew it before she had spoken three sentences. I knew it from how she saidMr Darcywhen she asked you abide by her decision. It was as plain as the nose on her face.”
“No, no, no! You are wrong. Fitzwilliam. I have never. I have never given that woman one syllable that could have been taken in such a sense. I havespoken to her at table about her late husband’s hounds and her sister’s health and the price of coal. I have never led her on! Never. Once.”
“Darcy. Listen to me. Listen.”
“I am listening.”
“I do not say that you have given her one syllable or a glance. I do not say that you have made her any inducement, that you have crossed any line, that you have looked at her once except as a widow, a guest in your house. I say only—and only—that she has been two months in this house with you, with no man in it but a doctor who came twice a week and a drowner who never comes indoors. You have been kind to her in your way. You have put a roof over her, given her dignity and purpose, asked nothing of her in return. She has taken account of all of it, Darcy. She could not have helped taking account of it.”
“You make her sound desperate.”
“I make her sound human. I do not say she is desperate. I say she is two months a widow in your home and you are Darcy of Pemberley and you have not once spoken a sharp word to her. She did not require seduction. She required kindness, and you gave it.”
Darcy began to walk on, then stopped again. The smoke at Hadley’s chimney went on rising.
“She told you this.”
“She told me her story when I walked her down. It was enough.”
“And you concluded —”
“I concluded what eleven years in a regiment full of married soldiers and widowed sisters has taught me to conclude in such cases. I concluded that Mrs Marsden has, for some part of the winter, been quietly and very politely in love with you, and that the discovery yesterday morning that you intended to marry her sister broke her.”
“I—I have not—I cannot—I have not the faintest —”
He could not finish the sentence. He turned away from the smoke. He turned back. He had nowhere to put what his cousin was telling him; it went, of itself, into the place yesterday morning had left empty in him—the parlour where the door had closed on Mrs Marsden as she walked out into the cold rather than stand in it a further minute.
“Ask Miss Elizabeth.”
“What?”
“Ask Miss Elizabeth. She has known it. She must have known it. She has been in this house with the two of you the whole autumn. If I saw it across a room, she has seen it across a season. You may rely on her to confirm what I am telling you.”
Darcy did not speak for some time.
“How could I have missed it? Two months… how could I have missed it for so long?”
His cousin closed the distance and took hold of his shoulder; he did not shake him, did not move him, only kept the hand there.
“You missed it because your eyes were elsewhere, Darcy. You have been looking past every other person in this house since January. You cannot see what you are not looking at.”
“That is no excuse.”
“It is not an excuse. It is the cause. You are too hard on yourself by half for missing a thing you were physically incapable of seeing. I am telling you so that you do not, in your kindness, do her the further injury of being kind to her this week as you have been kind to her all winter.”
“I shall not. I shall keep out of her way.”
“You shall. I will go to call on her this afternoon. I am rather more harmless than you.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
ThelawarrivedatNorthmere in a plain brown coat and muddy boots.
Ellison, Wainwright’s clerk, had a face that discouraged frivolity. His hair was thin, his cuffs neat despite travel, and his mouth so habitually compressed that Darcy approved on sight. He removed his gloves in the study, accepted neither sherry nor idle pleasantry, and listened while Darcy laid out the matter with a completeness impossible two days earlier.
