Page 120 of Faceless

He gave a short huff.

“Although.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “For what it is worth. I would almost certainly have refused you.”

His jaw tightened very slightly. “Yes,” he said. “I have since considered that possibility.”

“Have you?”

“At some length.” The dry note was back, barely, underneath everything else. “I had no idea you found me frustrating and that I set you ill at ease whenever I was around. Imagine my mortification when I learned that! Half naked with my hand on your…” He swallowed and looked away. “You could have found no more efficient way to flatten my hubris if you had tried.”

“Perhaps, but as I recall, it did not stay ‘flat’ for long.”

He snorted an unwilling laugh and covered his eyes with his hand. “Good God, even now you tease me.”

“I am beginning to think that is what you like best about me. You must enjoy being tormented.”

“So it would seem.”

She held his eye across the grey morning light of the mural chamber, this man who had been rehearsing a proposal while she had been walking those same Rosings paths, finding him infuriating — the absurdity of it and the grief of it and all the months between that morning and this one — she could not make any of it resolve.

“Yesterday was the twenty-sixth of November.”

She frowned at him, the frown sending a small fresh ache through her brow. “What of it?”

“A year ago yesterday, I danced with you at the Netherfield ball.”

Her frown twisted into a reluctant warmth. “You recall that rather specifically. I would rather forget that evening.”

“Forget! Many times, I tried to, I will confess. You looked,” he said, and the words came slowly because the morning had begun to take its full price out of him, “as though you would rather have been doing almost anything else, and you spoke to me as though daring me to find anything in you to disapprove of, and I found nothing. I found the opposite.”

He pressed the heel of his hand briefly against the side of his head. “I had been telling myself for weeks before that night that I was watching you because I was merely fascinated by your ease and your quickness. I told myself it was not an attraction, certainly not love. The dance was where I stopped being able to tell myself that.

“The following morning, I rode out before breakfast with the intention of returning to Longbourn and asking you something I had no right to ask of any woman in your situation, with no permission from any quarter and no preparation of any kind, and somewhere on the road between the two houses I came to my senses.” His mouth moved without quite shaping a smile. “I told myself I had come to my senses. I followed Bingley to London instead, and convinced him there was nothing for either of us in Hertfordshire. You see the outcome of my folly there! By spring, I had heard you were expected to visit Rosings, and I could not stay away again.”

Her hand had come up to her mouth again without her knowing it. “All those months, I thought you despised me. And you were —” She made a helpless gesture with her hand, abandoned the sentence, and pressed her fingers against her eyes. “Fitzwilliam.”

“Yes?”

“I have such a head this morning that I cannot even be properly furious with you for it. I shall have to be properly furious with you tomorrow.”

“I shall hold myself in readiness. As soon as this blasted headache fades. Pray, no more Madeira at supper.”

She let out another small, unsteady laugh, and outside the ventilation slit, the morning came up the rest of the way over the sea.

When he spoke again, his voice was different. Slower. Heavier.

“I have something else to put to you.”

She lifted her head. “What more can there be?”

“I sat in this chamber yesterday, before I came to you, and I thought through what I had not let myself think through since July, and I came to a conclusion I do not like.” He pushed off the table and stood, pacing himself against the morning, his step unsteady.

“Webb is being traced. We have known that for some weeks. That means everything he has constructed for me may not hold. The defence I had imagined — that we would reach the clerk, that we would unmake Sterling’s case, that I would in some form return to the world as Fitzwilliam Darcy without a charge against my name — has been growing thinner with every dispatch from London. I do not now believe it is going to come right. I have not believed it for several weeks. I have only just permitted myself to say so.”

“Fitzwilliam—”

“I never imagined,” he said, and his voice was not steady, “a world in which I could not prove my innocence. I have lived my whole life on the assumption that the truth could be shown if one were patient enough to show it. That assumption may not be available to me. And if it is not — if Sterling holds, if the clerk cannot be reached, if Webb is taken — then whatever happens to me, the people connected to me will not be safe. You will not be safe. Not in this house. Not in Aberdeen. Not, perhaps, in England.”

She had already begun to shake her head.