CHAPTER 4
MR. DARCY
Darcy had not slept.
This was not unusual. He had not slept properly since arriving in Kent, since the first evening at Rosings when Elizabeth Bennet had walked into his aunt's drawing room and the ground beneath his carefully ordered life had shifted in a way he could neither control nor reverse. He had spent every night since then in the same condition — lying awake in the dark of his bedchamber at Rosings, turning over the precise quality of her laugh, the angle at which she held her head when preparing to say something devastating, the way the candlelight found the curve of her neck above the collar of her dress.
It was absurd. He was aware that it was absurd. Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley, ten thousand a year, master of an estate that employed two hundred souls, undone by a country gentleman's daughter with fine eyes and a talent for insolence. He had tried to reason himself out of it. He had compiled mental inventories of her deficiencies — her family's vulgarity, her lack of fortune, her mother's nerves, her younger sisters' wildness. The inventories were thorough and entirely useless. She livedin his mind the way a splinter lives in a thumb — small, sharp, impossible to ignore.
He dressed before dawn and rode. He always rode when he could not sleep. The horse was a black gelding borrowed from his aunt's stables, ill-tempered and fast, and Darcy pushed him hard along the bridle paths, the cold morning air stinging his face and the rhythm of the gallop providing the only approximation of peace his body could manage.
He returned to Rosings at eight, handed the horse to a groom, and went to his rooms. The tea he had ordered was cold. He drank it anyway, standing at the window that overlooked the park, watching the light strengthen over the manicured grounds that his aunt maintained with the precision of a military campaign.
He should leave Kent. He knew this with the same clarity with which he knew the contents of his bank accounts and the condition of his tenants' roofs. Every day he remained was another day's evidence of an attachment he could not afford and should not pursue. Elizabeth Bennet was unsuitable. Her connections were inferior. Her family was a liability. Her mother was — well. The less said about Mrs. Bennet the better. Every rational consideration demanded his departure.
He poured another cup of cold tea and remained exactly where he was.
At half past nine, he walked to the parsonage.
He told himself it was a courtesy call — the natural obligation of a gentleman staying in the neighbourhood to enquire after the health of his aunt's clergyman's guests. He told himself this with the same conviction with which he had told himself, at theMeryton assembly, that she was merelytolerable. The lie was no more convincing now than it had been then.
The parsonage sat in its small garden with the modest self-importance that characterised everything associated with Collins. The flower beds were overwrought. The path was swept. A pot of geraniums flanked the front door in the manner of sentries guarding a position of no particular importance. Darcy knocked and waited.
Charlotte Collins opened the door, and Darcy knew immediately that something was wrong.
She was pale — not the fashionable pallor of a lady who avoided the sun, but the grey-white of shock, of sleeplessness, of something that had drained the blood from her face and left the skin stretched tight over the bones beneath. Her hair was disordered. Her eyes were red-rimmed. She held the door at an angle that blocked the hallway behind her, and her free hand gripped the frame with enough force to whiten the knuckles.
"Mr. Darcy." Her voice was admirably steady. "What a surprise."
He was not a man given to intuition. He dealt in observation, in evidence, in the careful assembly of facts into conclusions. But something — call it the cumulative weight of every small detail he had noted over the past fortnight, every moment of Charlotte's careful stillness, every flicker of Elizabeth's protective concern — made him look past the performance of normalcy and see the thing beneath it.
He looked down. There was blood on the hem of her dress. A small amount, easy to miss, already darkening to brown against the grey muslin. She had not noticed it, or had not had time to change.
"Mrs. Collins," he said. "Is Miss Bennet at home?"
"She is unwell." Too quick. "She is resting upstairs. I'm afraid she cannot?—"
"And Mr. Collins?"
The pause was fractional — a half-second's hesitation that a less attentive man would not have noticed. "He is in his study."
"Then perhaps I might speak with him."
"He is... occupied. With his sermon."
Darcy looked at the blood on her dress. He looked at her face. He looked at the hand that gripped the doorframe as though it were the only thing preventing her from collapsing.
"Mrs. Collins," he said quietly. "Let me in."
Something broke in her expression. Not dramatically — Charlotte Collins was not a woman built for drama — but with a small, tired fracture, like a crack spreading slowly through china. Her hand fell from the doorframe. She stepped aside.
Darcy entered the hallway. The smell hit him first — copper and something sharper, medicinal, the particular scent that blood leaves when it has been exposed to air for some hours. The hallway was dim. A single candle burned on the side table, casting long shadows up the walls.
He followed the smell to the parlour.
Collins was on the floor. He lay on his side in a posture of absolute stillness, one arm bent beneath him, his face turned toward the door with his eyes closed and his mouth slack. The blood had come from behind his left ear and had pooled on the carpet in a dark oval the size of a dinner plate. It was no longerspreading. Whatever had been done to William Collins had been done some hours ago, and the body had already begun to cool into the particular heaviness of death.
Elizabeth sat in the chair beside him. She had not moved, clearly, for a long time — her posture had the rigid quality of someone who has been holding the same position until their muscles locked. Her face was turned toward the door, and when Darcy saw it, he stopped.
