Page 132 of Homeless

The music room was on the first floor at the back of the house — a bright, pretty room got up in yellow. Lady Honoria Vane was at the pianoforte when he came in, playing something soft and Italian that she broke off the moment the footman announced him.

“Mr Darcy.” She rose and came a few steps toward him, and gave him her hand. Her smile was warm and well-bred and entirely without guile. “You are returned. We had all been so anxious — Papa most of all, though he would sooner be flayed than own to it. I am very glad to see you safe.”

“Lady Honoria.” He bowed over her hand and released it. “You are kind. I hope I find you well.”

“Very well, I thank you.” She resumed her seat and gestured him to the chair nearest. “I hope your journey was pleasant.”

“It was… memorable.” He answered all her questions — whether the crossing had been very rough, whether Spain was as hot as people said, whether it was true the roads were as bad as one heard — and he could not help the comparison, though he despised himself a little for making it.

There was a likeness.

He had noticed it in the winter, and he still noticed it now: the dark hair, the fine dark eyes, a certain quickness about the brows. It was very probably why — why, when Marchwood's eye had lit on him as a match for this particular daughter, that he had not walked away at once. Why the thing had gone as far as it had, and why Darcy had endeavoured to persuade himself that the match might serve.

But the likeness stopped at the surface, and stopped hard. This was a pleasant, accomplished, sheltered girl, who had never in her life walked twenty miles on an empty stomach, never sewn coins into a hem against disaster, never faced down three armed men on a mountain road with her chin up and lies tumbling off her tongue fast enough to save a man’s life.

She was lovely. But she was nothing apart from that. He answered her questions, but all he could think of was Elizabeth, with an ache so sharp it was nearly anger. He could not sit here another quarter of an hour pretending, and Honoria Vane did not deserve to be deceived.

“— and I am so glad you are come back,” Honoria was saying, brightening into a subject that plainly pleased her, “for it has been very dull, and now it need not be. There is a dinner at the Ashfords' next Tuesday — a small, good sort of party, not a crush, you would not hate it, I think. I could see that you were sent a card, it would be the easiest thing, and then —”

“Lady Honoria, forgive me. May I ask you for a moment of plain speaking, and your discretion with it?”

She stopped, and something wary came into her face. “Of course.”

“I cannot come to the Ashfords' dinner. I cannot come to any such thing — not as your father would wish it understood, and not as you have, I think, been encouraged to hope.”

She knotted her hands in her lap. “Oh?”

“You are a gentlewoman of great merit, and I have nothing in the world to say against you, and it is for that reason above all that I will not do you the discourtesy of letting a false thing stand between us for even another week. There was an understanding, or the beginning of one, before I went abroad. I must tell you honestly that I cannot honour it. It would be wrong of me to encourage any sentiment in you, or to let any be supposed, when I am not free to return it.”

Her colour rose, and her chin came up a little, but to her great credit she did not look away, nor did she weep. “You are not free?”

When his face confirmed it, she exhaled softly. “I see. Your heart is engaged since you went away.”

“It is. I will not give you particulars, and I must beg you not to ask them of me at present. But yes. It is wholly engaged, and it will not change, and I could not stand up at a dinner beside you under any pretence of courtship without doing violence to that, and to you, and to myself. I am sorry. If I have caused you any pain, or any embarrassment, the fault is entirely mine, and I ask your pardon for it with my whole heart.”

She was quiet a moment. She took it like a sensible woman and not like a wounded vanity. There was disappointment in her face, real disappointment, but nothing of the wild or the injured sort in it.

“Well,” she said at last, and even managed a rueful smile. “I will own I am disappointed, Mr Darcy. I will not pretend otherwise — it would be missish, and I hope I am not missish. I had thought… but no matter what I had thought. It was never very far advanced, whatever Papa may have —” She stopped herself, and the little pause said a great deal about what her papa had made of a thing that had never, on her side, been much more than an agreeable possibility. “I shall recover from it before the week is out, I daresay. One does. I am not heartbroken, Mr Darcy, whatever it may flatter you to imagine.”

“I imagine nothing so flattering.”

She looked towards the window and caught her lower lip between her teeth, in a gesture that did, after all, remind him a little of Elizabeth. When she spoke again, it was more soberly. “My father will be very disappointed. More than disappointed, I think. He had set a great deal on it — more than I quite understood, perhaps, though I am not such a fool as to have understood nothing. I know that he wished me well married and thought I would be suited by a man of your character, but there was also something to do with some business you had with Papa. I never asked. One does not ask Papa.”

“No,” he said gently. “I would not expect… most ladies do not prefer to meddle in such affairs.”

“I do not suppose he knows this, or he would not have sent you up here to greet me.”

Darcy’s gaze focused on her again. “You are very perceptive, Lady Honoria. No, I felt my explanation was due to you first.”

“Well,” she said again. “It is not my business, and I shall not make it so. But since we are speaking plainly, you would do well to be careful how the thing is broken to him, and by whom. He does not like to be crossed in a matter he has settled in his own mind. He is not a man who forgets a reckoning, and I should not like to think I had been the occasion of trouble for you. Or for anyone.”

“You have been the occasion of nothing but courtesy and good sense,” he said. “The trouble, if there is trouble, is none of your making. And I am more grateful for your plain speaking than I can well express.”

She studied him another moment, then her face broke into a smile. She rose and put out her hand. “Then let us part friends,” she said, “and I will ask you for one thing only. One day, you must introduce me to her. I find I am very curious to meet the woman who could make Fitzwilliam Darcy refuse an earl's daughter to her face and never once look sorry about it. She must be quite extraordinary.”

“She is. I fear my words could not do her justice.”

She pressed his hand and let it go. “Then I am pleased for you. And until it becomes unavoidable, I shall say nothing to my father. He will learn of it soon enough, but hopefully it will come from you, and not me.”