Page 9 of Faceless

His candle had burned a good third of its length by the time he accepted that sleep was not coming.

He had the evidence. The temperature had changed by degrees so gradual he might have missed them had he not been paying close attention, but he had been. She had argued with him, properly, the way she argued with everyone she thought worth arguing with — a form of respect she did not extend casually. With Elizabeth Bennet, an argument did not summarise the relationship. It was a prelude to understanding, and she argued well. At least, she did with him.

And this afternoon, when he and Richard had called at the parsonage, she had almost smiled at him. Not the polite arrangement of features she offered Lady Catherine. The real one, the one that started in her eyes before it warmed her face. She would not give it to him openly in her cousin’s drawing room. She had given him what she could, and he was fairly certain he had not imagined it.

He sat up, pulled the writing table towards him, found paper. He had always worked better with a pen in his hand.

Miss Bennet, I hope you will permit me to say—

He set the pen down. It sounded like the opening of a bill for dry goods. He was not writing about dry goods. He was trying to find words adequate to the fact that he had spent six months being quietly and comprehensively undone by a woman from Hertfordshire and had arrived, somewhere between dinner and the drawing room tonight, at the absolute and irrevocable certainty that he did not want to be any other way.

He tried it aloud, to the fire. “Miss Elizabeth. I am aware that what I am about to say may come as a surprise.” He drew breath. “It has rather come as a surprise to me.”

True, at least. She would know it was true. She had a nose for the true thing, Elizabeth Bennet — a disinclination to be handled or flattered that he had first seen at the Meryton assembly and had been seeing in sharper focus ever since.

He went back to the page.

There are aspects of this

of the connexion

that the world would perhaps consider

He stopped. Read it back.

That was the shape of an insult. He could feel it even on paper — how those words would strike her, how her chin would come up, her eyes going from warm to flat in the space of a single breath. He would undo in ten seconds what it had taken her six months to do to him, and would deserve every word she said in return.

He did not want to say it like that.

It needed to be said. He was not a dishonest man, and she deserved honesty; the alternative was silence on the subject of his family’s expectations and her family’s circumstances, leaving her to find it all from other quarters afterward, which would be far worse. But the manner of it was everything. Said badly, it became a man reciting a woman’s deficiencies as a prelude to graciously overlooking them, and the thought of her face if it came out that way went through him like cold water.

He tried once more, quietly. “When I set my family’s opinions beside what I know of you — your mind, your character, the way you simply are — I cannot make them signify.” He let it stand. “I have tried. Rather harder than I am going to admit to you directly.”

That last was true, and probably inadvisable, and would almost certainly come out of his mouth whether he planned it or not, which was either a disaster or the most honest thing he would manage to say. He had not yet decided which.

He lay back. Left the candle burning. Let the careful sentences dissolve into the bare thought of tomorrow morning — whether she would come out early, whether she would let him walk with her, whether he would find the nerve before his nerve found somewhere else to be. Outside, the Kent night was dark and very still; inside him, everything was the opposite — alive, decided, pointing in one direction. He did not want to sleep. He was almost asleep—

The knock at his door was hard and urgent and did not wait.

He was on his feet before the echo of it died.

It was one of the hall boys, still in his nightclothes, a candle guttering in his hand, his face muddled with the blankness of a servant delivering news he had not read and did not intend to speculate about.

“Express, sir. Just arrived.”

“An express! In the middle of the night?”

Darcy took the letter. His hand was already in his dressing gown pocket for a coin, the gesture so automatic he was barely aware of making it, and the boy was gone down the stairs before Darcy had turned the letter over to look at the seal.

He did not recognise it. He broke it anyway, moved to the candle, and read.

He read it twice.

“Good God,” he said, to the empty room.

He stood with the letter open in his hand, the candle burning, the Kent night very still outside the window, everything he had been thinking three minutes ago — the sentences, the fireplace, tomorrow morning, her face — receding so fast it was as though it had happened to someone else entirely.

Then he moved to the bell.