He wanted to seize the words back. He wanted to explain that his heart was beating so hard it was bruising his ribs. But the words were gone, and the damage was done.
“I see,” she said, her tone cooling to match his own. “Then I shall not trouble you with it further. If you will excuse me, gentlemen, I believe I must locate my sister before she attempts to dance a reel with the entire regiment.”
She offered a final, perfectly executed curtsy—a masterful display of dismissal—and slipped away into the crowd, her skirts vanishing behind a sea of dancers.
Darcy stood rooted, feeling hollowed out, as though someone had taken a spoon and scraped out his insides. He had been handed a miraculous olive branch, and he had snapped it over his knee.
He turned his head to look at his cousin.
The Colonel was no longer smiling. The amusement had vanished from Richard’s face. He was not laughing at Darcy’s misery, not even offering a mocking quip about Darcy’s atrocious conversational skills.
Richard stood there, his arms crossed, watching his cousin with disappointment.
Darcy swallowed hard. The verbal mockery he could endure. But his cousin’s judging silence was infinitely worse than anything the man could have said. It was a confirmation of his own catastrophic failure.
The truce was over before it had even truly begun.
Without a word, Darcy retreated to his favourite spot by the wilting plant.
He pressed his shoulders against the cool plaster of the wall, closing his eyes against the glaring candlelight. The assembly room at the Ship Inn had fully transitioned from a social gathering into a humid, breathless endurance trial. He needed to focus. He was not in Sussex to drown in his own romantic incompetence. He had a purpose.
He opened his eyes and began to survey the room for George Wickham.
Locating a specific red coat in a room infested with red coats was a taxing visual exercise, but Wickham had an unmistakable stature. It was the posture of a man who firmly believed the world owed him its undivided attention,combined with the relaxed indolence of someone who had never paid a tailor’s bill in his life.
Darcy found him.
Wickham was standing in a recessed alcove near the tall, draughty windows.
Darcy’s gaze swept the immediate vicinity, his heart performing an erratic stutter as he searched for Miss Elizabeth. He found her on the exact opposite side of the room, trapped in conversation with a deaf dowager who was shouting at her about the price of mutton.
A wave of relief washed over him. Wickham was not anywhere near her.
The relief lasted exactly three seconds before it was murdered by horror.
Wickham was not alone in the alcove. He had successfully cornered Lydia Bennet.
Darcy observed the interaction with sickening clarity, exactly as if he were watching a carriage slowly roll to a cliff edge.
It was the Ramsgate design, unfolding before his very eyes.
Wickham had positioned himself perfectly. He stood with his back to the majority of the room, shielding Miss Lydia from casual observation while simultaneously forcing her to look only at him. It was a masterful display of predatory geometry. He was leaning in close—far closer than strict societal propriety allowed—his head tilted down to catch her every word, creating a fabricated bubble of intimacy.
The girl was tapping her closed fan rapidly against her chin, her eyes wide, her cheeks flushed. She let out a sudden shriek of laughter, tossing her curls back and leaning into his space.
Wickham did not flinch at the piercing volume. Instead, he smiled.
Darcy’s stomach executed a slow, dreadful roll. He knew that smile. He had seen it deployed in Derbyshire drawing rooms and London gardens for a decade. It was the smile that said:You are the only person in this room who matters. You are fascinating. You are understood.
With Georgiana, Wickham had utilised a gentle, melancholy approach, preying on a shy girl’s desperate desire to be useful and loved. Lydia Bennet required no such subtlety. Miss Lydia operated on a daily diet of vanity, and Wickham was feeding her with a shovel.
Darcy watched as he murmured something else. Miss Lydia gasped, swatting him playfully on the arm with her fan. Wickham caught her wrist.
It was a brief touch. A fleeting, inappropriate contact dressed up as a jest. But Darcy saw the calculation behind his eyes. He was testing the boundaries, measuring the girl’s resistance.
She had none. She looked at Wickham as though he had just invented the concept of joy.
Miss Elizabeth was still trapped with the dowager, but where was the appointed chaperone? Darcy’s eyes darted around the alcove. Where was Mrs Forster?
