“Nettle!”
The voice came from the garden bench. Elizabeth stood there, her morning dress a soft, pale splash of color against theverdant green. She was breathtakingly undone. Her hair, usually confined with such rigorous precision, was a dark, tumbling mess around her shoulders, and she had pulled a thin, ivory shawl over her shoulders against the morning chill. She looked ethereal, unformed, as if she had just stepped out of a dream and realized she had forgotten how to play the lady.
She moved toward the gate with a grace so unstudied it could only be unconscious, her skirts swirling at her ankles as she broke into a run.
“Where is she going?” Darcy called out, his own heartbeat suddenly echoing in his ears.
“I have no idea. She has never done this!” Elizabeth didn’t stop. She passed through the gap in the fence, her shawl fluttering behind her like the wings of a white butterfly.
Darcy followed. He followed because Elizabeth was running, and because pursuit—toward her or after her—had become the singular order of his existence. The fields beyond blazed with late-spring gold and green, and as they crested the rise, the rest of the world obligingly vanished.
They walked quickly, then slowed, then fell into an awkward, pulsing rhythm. Nettle had slowed to a trot, leading them up a narrow, neglected path that Darcy did not recognize—a track lined with a tangled, impenetrable hedge of hawthorn and blackthorn, wild and indifferent.
Elizabeth walked beside him, breath quick, color high in her cheeks. She did not look his way, but he felt the warmth of her presence as surely as if she had.
“This is the path to Oakham Mount,” she said, her voice breathless. “Nettle and I have walked it a hundred times. She knows every rabbit hole between here and the summit, and she has never once bolted this way without me.”
Darcy looked at her then—truly looked—and saw the wildness in her hair, the brilliance in her eyes, the shawlclutched to her chest as if it concealed some precious secret. It struck him, with a thrill equal parts terror and delight, that they were entirely alone.
His heart resumed its clamor, and he wondered if this was the moment to speak. But Elizabeth, rather than pause, darted toward a bank of hedgerows.
“Nettle! Where are you?”
The terrier had vanished. Darcy pressed a hand to his hat, lest it join the missing, and searched the dense hedge—a wall of thorns and green. Nettle’s nose poked beneath the lower branches, her tail wagging with the satisfaction of one who has discovered a confidante.
“Nettle, what did you find?” Elizabeth bent over to peek, and Darcy lowered himself at the same time.
Their heads bumped, and his hat fell to the ground.
“Pardon me,” he muttered, though Elizabeth’s gasp owed nothing to injury.
At the base, half-hidden by a curtain of new growth, was a hollow, a small dark space where the roots had formed a natural shelter, and Nettle was pushing through the undergrowth toward it with the single-mindedness of a creature returning to a place she knew.
She deposited the ball in the shadows, then sat beside it, looking back at Elizabeth with a solemn, unwavering gaze.
Elizabeth’s hand flew to her mouth, her fingers trembling against her lips. “This is where we found her,” she whispered, the sound thick with a sudden, aching fragility. “Two winters ago. She was in that hollow, shivering—nothing but mud and bone. Mamma told me to leave her. She said she was nobody’s dog, a scavenger. But I… I knew.”
She turned to Darcy, and the morning light caught the side of her face, illuminating the raw, unguarded expression he hadbeen searching for through months of silence and pride. It was the face of a woman who had finally run out of witty defenses.
“I carried her home,” Elizabeth continued, her voice fracturing. “I dried her by the kitchen fire and named her Nettle because they are wild, and they sting, and they are generally hated by people who have never troubled to learn their virtues.”
She gestured toward the hollow. “She brought the ball here, Mr. Darcy. She brought her favorite thing to the place where she was found.”
“Dogs do not assign symbolic meaning to locations, Miss Bennet.”
Elizabeth let out a short, wet laugh, her eyes flashing with a sudden, familiar spark. “You and your cold, immutable facts. This dog does. She chose you long before I did. She has been right about everything—about my sisters, about the path, about you.”
She stepped closer to him, the distance between them shrinking until he could smell the damp earth and the lavender on her shawl. “If you tell me that animals do not possess judgment, I will remind you that Nettle bit your trousers the day you arrived at Longbourn. She has since decided you were acceptable, and her assessment has proven far more reliable than mine. She required one afternoon to know you, Darcy. I required two months.”
“Miss Bennet?—”
“Do not speak.” Her voice was shaking. Not with anger, not with the controlled fury of Hunsford, but with something he had never heard in Elizabeth Bennet’s voice before, something that sounded like courage assembling itself for a leap. “I have something to say to you, and if you speak, I will lose my nerve, and I have very little nerve remaining.”
Darcy did not speak. He stood beside a bank of wild hedge with a terrier sitting in a hollow, and the woman he lovedtrembling with something that was not anger. And so he closed his mouth because he had spent months honoring what she asked.
Elizabeth squared her shoulders. The gesture was familiar—the same stance she had taken at Hunsford before she demolished him. But the face above the squared shoulders was open, and terrified, and brave.
“Mr. Darcy.” Her gaze held his. “Be not alarmed, Sir.”
