He did not slow. His boot was in the water before her glance had finished reaching him; the cold went up his leg without asking, and he did not ask back. Between the bank and her he ceased to be the man who had run down with his clothes on his body and his preparation in his mouth—his boots filled, his coat went black at the hem, the preparation was undone, and he waded toward her because no other thing in him would do.
The bottom was uneven. He pushed against it. He should have made the mere into something other than its morning self by walking through it; the water at his thighs ought to have gone forward in rings, and the rings ought to have run out from his progress, and they did not. The surface ten feet from his shoulder was as still as if he had not entered it—as if the water had agreed not to record his coming. The bars of pewter and pearl stayed unbroken. He had no place in his head to put it.
He reached her, and did not at once speak or touch her, but stopped where the water between them was one water, not two, and stood there heaving.
She lifted her free hand and put it against the wet of his coat above the place his heart was.
The water at his thighs gave him his face—indistinct in the small movements of the surface, which were her movements, not his, because his progress had not disturbed it. He tore his eyes from hers and gazed down at the water.
And he saw what was not there… what had always been there.
It gave him the rest then.
He had been ten when he had asked his father why the under-housemaid was crying in the linen cupboard, and his father had received the question with grave disappointment: a gentleman’s son ought not to remark on servants’ theatrics, and to mistake the girl’s excitability for distress at ten was a failure of someone’s having taught the boy better. Darcy had taken his place at the desk and not asked another such question in some weeks.
He had been twelve when he had asked why his mother had begun to sleep through the morning into the afternoon, and his father had answered with the same grave disappointment. His mother was delicate; she had been encouraged by too much sympathy; the danger to her recovery was a son who treated her as if she were ill, which Darcy, by his question, had just done. Did Darcy wish to harm his mother? Did he not see that the question itself was the harm? Darcy had not seen it. He had been twelve. He had not asked again.
He had been fifteen when he had asked why the second footman had been dismissed without a character, and his father had taken the question as evidence of a softness Darcy had not been corrected out of. The footman had been a thief. The matter was closed. To remember the footman as Darcy remembered him—civil, soft-spoken, kind to the under-stable boy—was to have been deceived; and the deception had been Darcy’s, not the footman’s. He had carried out from his father’s study that afternoon a lesson aboutthe discrimination required of a man in his own house, and a less concluded question about whether his memory could be relied upon at all.
The question had been wrong each time. What he had seen had been wrong. What he had remembered had been wrong. The error had not been in any of the questions, his father had taught him to understand; the error had been in himself. Darcy had at length stopped asking. By nineteen his father had pronounced him a young man of admirable sense.
But he had learned to question his own judgment. So thoroughly did he question himself that he could not be sure of the last time he had stood confidently on truth.
He had been at school with Wickham, who had broken the windows of the master’s lodge and forged the master’s hand on a leave-note, and Darcy had taken the punishments for both. He had told himself it was loyalty. It had been the same deceit, the same blind trust, this time on Wickham’s behalf and against his own.
He had been two-and-twenty when he had discovered that the steward at Pemberley had been taking from him, and six months had passed before he had brought himself to dismiss the man. He had known by the second month. He had told himself he was being fair. He had been afraid to act on what he knew.
And this house. He had taken it on from a cousin who had broken it past saving by any rational reckoning, and his own first walk of the property had told him so within an afternoon. He had not sold it. He had, instead brought Georgiana with him and tried to make a home of the place. The judgment had been his own—which, his father’s lessons had taught him, was reason to set it aside. What looked like ruin must be a softness in him; what looked impossible, a want of discrimination in him. He had stayed. He had carried on. He had been waiting for his perception to come round.
Elizabeth’s eyes were on him. She had been there through it all—she had not turned away, and she had not asked.
He said it. He did not speak loudly. The mere had asked it of him.
“I have been deceived. I could not believe my own eye. The eye was made the offence in me before I was old enough to defend it.”
The confession went into the air between them and was not answered. The mere did not break around him. The water at his thighs lay as it had lain before he had spoken.
He had supposed the confession would be enough—that the mere, or she, or some kindness of the morning would relieve him of the rest. None did. The rest fell to him.
But one thing he had credited. One thing the mistrust had never undone. He had carried it out of the mere on a January afternoon with her blood on his coat, and he had carried it up the stair of this house every morning since, and through every interval of every day, and through the dryness of her tongue in the chamber, and the wit she had been able to speak even half conscious, and the silence she had kept about what was in her bag, and the morning at his study door when she had brought him an answer and taken it away again. He had not put a word to it. He had let it walk beside him in silence. He had let it walk beside him because he had not, in twenty years, trusted any perception of his own well enough to put a word to it.
This morning he would have to put the word to it. The water was not going to do that for him.
He had proposed to her two afternoons ago because he had not been able any longer to be in a room with her without speaking it. He had let the Colonel, and his aunt, and her own deferral interrupt what should not have admitted any interruption. He had spent the night and the morning since on the other side of every door she had stood at. He had told himself it was discipline—that, having proposed, he would not press.
It had not been discipline. It had been the older instruction, working in him still: that his own perception of what she was, and of what they were to one another, was not to be trusted against the louder voices in the house.
He brought his eyes up to her face with the deliberation his life had not allowed him in any matter that mattered.
“Elizabeth. Tell me I am right about you. Tell me that what I have carried since the bank in January is the truth of you, and that there is no version of the case in which I have been deceived about it. I cannot, this morning, take the chance of having been wrong. If you are not what I have carried, there is nothing in me strong enough to bear another correction.”
She had not moved her hand from his face. She had not moved her other hand from his coat above his heart.
“You are not wrong. But I have not been the person I ought, and I will no longer try to hide that. I have hurt my sister and called it kindness. I have broken the law and called it protection for a family who hardly know where I am. I have teased you and leaned on you and hidden my face from you and called it harmless. The amends are mine to make, and I have not begun them. But the water does not lie. Look down, Mr Darcy. It has shown me. It will show you.”
He looked down. The water gave him both their faces, set close, the cold of the morning around them and the breath between them moving the surface in small folds. He saw his own face without his father’s correction over it for the first time in twenty years. He saw hers beside it. And he saw, in the two of them set together against the grey, what neither could have alone—a healing that had been waiting in him for her, and in her for him.
The mere broke.
