But Elizabeth was not Bingley, nor Jane, who found sunshine in every equation. Elizabeth drew the darkest conclusions, judged with a critical eye, and rarely changed her mind. She had already revised her opinion of me once, but like mine, her good opinion—once lost—was nearly impossible to regain.
“At the musicale,” she said, and the pivot surprised me. “Caroline forced you to introduce Bingley to Miss Audley. She threatened you, didn’t she?”
I nodded, watching her eyes sharpen.
“And so, you complied but not quite. You introduced Jane and me alongside of Bingley, why?”
She would have made a formidable solicitor, dispensing the cross-examination I so richly deserved.
“I wished to protect your sister. To show Miss Audley that the introduction was merely friendly—of new acquaintances—and not a presentation in the social sense.
“But Miss Bingley was not pleased, was she? I saw her displeasure, and at the time I was surprised by your complicity. But now, I understand completely.”
“I am not sure you do.”
Her gaze hardened. “You were protecting yourself. Protecting the narrative in which you are the man who repairs things rather than the man who broke them.”
The sentence sliced like a blade between the ribs, and I did not flinch, because she was right.
“Miss Elizabeth?—”
“What concerns me,” she continued, and her eyes met mine, and what I saw in them was not the anger I had feared or the contempt I had dreaded but something worse: disappointment, with sorrow threaded through it, “is not the confession itself.You did a terrible thing. You acknowledged it. You attempted to correct it. That is—” She pressed her lips together. “That is more than many men would do, and I recognize it.”
“But.”
“But you were compelled. Caroline held a blade to your throat, and you complied. You introduced Bingley to the woman she had chosen as a replacement for my sister because Caroline threatened to tell me the truth, and you could not afford for me to know it, since you had not yet told me yourself. And I am left to wonder, Mr. Darcy—” Her voice cracked, just slightly. “What else can you be compelled to do? What else have you arranged, managed, controlled, to maintain a version of events that serves your purposes? If Caroline could force your hand with a single threat, what would someone with real power do to you?”
“Nothing. No one?—”
“You say that. But you also said you would step back and allow Bingley to make amends, and instead, you introduced Bingley to Gracechurch Street, accompanied him.”
“I wanted to see you and the tortoise.” My bleat was as laughable as any sheep caught with its head between fence rails.
“So you say, but perhaps even the attention you paid me was part of the arrangement—to ease Bingley back into Jane’s life. To keep the sharp sister occupied.” She drew a breath, and it shuddered. “I was merely part of the plan for a man who decides what other people need and then provides it, regardless of whether they have asked. I have spent my entire life watching my mother do precisely that, and I know where it leads.”
“You were never planned, and I resent that comparison.”
Indeed, the comparison stung more than anything else she had said, because it was true in ways I had not considered, and because it linked me to the very qualities in her family that I had once cited as grounds for objection.
“And yet it is true.” She skewered me, pointing a finger at me. “Because back in Meryton, I was not part of your plan. You had no need for me, and you could not even spare me a glance. Perhaps I was an impediment, since you yourself told Bingley that he was dancing with the only handsome woman in the county.”
“That wasn’t what transpired.” A cold feeling slid down my spine. “Miss Elizabeth, I … I have no excuse.”
“And yet, what you had said was authentic, as you had not meant for me to overhear, although you did catch my eye, and then you dismissed me. Barely tolerable, not …” Her face flushed, and she pressed her hands flat over her skirts, and the gesture was the mirror of what I did to keep my hands from shaking.
“I did not mean to injure you, Miss Elizabeth. I was only?—”
“I refused to be wounded,” she cut me off. “I laughed at your words and told anyone who would listen that they did not signify. But you, Mr. Darcy, you were a man of consequence delivering a verdict on a woman of no consequence, and the verdict was that she was beneath your notice. I carried that verdict with me from Hertfordshire to London, and every time you looked at me as though I were extraordinary, I heard the echo ofnot handsome enough, and I could not reconcile the two.”
“Miss Elizabeth, those words were deplorable. If I could take them back?—”
“You cannot because you meant them. You had no reason for my good opinion. Now you do, because of Bingley and Jane and repairing the rift.”
“If you believe that?—”
“I am not finished.” Her eyes were bright, but she did not weep. This Elizabeth—this particular, devastating Elizabeth—did not weep in front of the man who had hurt her. She heldherself together with the same fierce, trembling composure that Jane held at Hursts’ door, and the similarity between the sisters had never been more apparent. “You have been kind to me. You have been attentive, generous, and unexpectedly warm, and you have shown me a version of yourself that I admire very much. But you withheld the truth for weeks—not because you were searching for the right moment, but because you wanted me to love you before I knew the worst of you, and that is a kind of management too.”
She said the wordlove, and I saw the instant she realized she had dropped her feelings, as sure as I saw the moment she had fallen—at Gunter’s, watching the strawberry ice melt. I saw the widening of the eyes, heard the indrawn breath, and then she looked away, blinking too fast at what she had said, and I would hold onto it, because she could not unsay it.
