Page 62 of Honor Requires

He leaned forward the slightest degree, his gaze fixed upon her as she passed the window. The children were speaking all at once, one trying to pull ahead, the other lagging to look back at something the footman had said. The lady laughed—delicately, perhaps, or perhaps he only imagined it—and drew them onward with patient command.

Not Elizabeth. How could it be? Five years had passed. London was full of women with dark eyes, with graceful figures, with an ease of movement that might recall another if one were fool enough to invite the comparison. Hope, memory, and loneliness were poor judges of resemblance. And she had come from Matlock House. Why would Elizabeth be there?

Darcy stepped back at once, his expression hardening with self-contempt.

Fanciful nonsense.

He had disciplined himself too long, survived too much, to indulge such weakness now. Elizabeth Bennet belonged to another life, one buried as surely as Fitzwilliam Darcy had been buried beneath accusation, falsehood, and stone. If she lived in London, if she had married, if she had children near the age of those little boys—what was that to him in this moment? He could not afford to start at shadows and call them by her name. Still, his heart protested his mind’s assertions.

Behind him, Lucien entered the room with the unconcern of a man who had never trained himself to read his friend’s face and had therefore become remarkably expert at doing so.

“You look,” he said lightly, “as though the walls have spoken.”

Darcy released the curtain he had not realized he was holding. “They have done nothing of the sort.”

Lucien glanced past him toward the window, then back again. “No?”

“It is nothing.”

“Ah.” Lucien moved nearer the fire, warming his hands. “Then it is, no doubt, something.”

Darcy gave him a look that would once have silenced most men. Lucien only smiled.

“At least tell me this,” he said. “Are you satisfied?”

Darcy let his gaze move once more over the room—the ordered elegance of it, the warmth, the view, the sense of readiness in all things.

“Yes. I am satisfied.” And he was. Ashcombe House stood ready. His servants were in place. Stone lived under his roof, near enough to report daily and be sent out at a moment’s notice. The world would now see the Count of Vendicarsi installed in proper style, established with enough wealth and consequence to excite curiosity without provoking disbelief.

Everything was proceeding as it ought.

If, in the space of a single heartbeat, he had mistaken a stranger for the woman he loved, that was no more than the mind’s treachery. He would master it, as he had mastered worse.

When he moved away from the window at last, he did so with the faint and unwelcome impression that some part of the life he had lost had just passed within a few feet of him, close enough to touch—and impossible to reclaim.

Chapter Fourteen

Elizabeth had not expected the move to Mayfair to be so…permanent.

Though she had resided in town for several seasons now, always in the comfort and elegance of her sister’s household, there had remained some private sense that she was only passing through—that her place, in some undefined way, lay elsewhere. Perhaps at Longbourn, perhaps nowhere at all. As she stood at the window of the chamber newly prepared for her in Matlock House, watching the orderly movement of carriages along the street below, she found that feeling altered.

She belonged here now. Not as a debutante to be admired, nor as a bride to be settled, but as something less easily named. Aunt, companion, observer. It ought to have felt like a narrowing of her world. Instead, it felt—if not expansive—then at least consistent.

Behind her, the murmur of voices carried faintly from the nursery. Jane was within, overseeing the settling of the children after their morning walk, her tone as gentle and collected as ever. Elizabeth smiled to herself at the sound. There was a time when she would have found such domestic constancy stifling. Now, she found it…comforting.

How strange that one may grow accustomed to what one never imagined desiring.

She turned from the window and crossed the room, her gaze falling briefly upon the small table near the bed. There, laid with gentle care, rested a familiar object—the shell necklace Jane had given her years before, removed briefly as she refreshed herself. She reached for it without thinking, her fingers brushing lightly over its smooth surface.

The memory it carried was as vivid as ever. Time had not dulled it. It had not dulled anything.

She fastened the chain about her neck, letting the shell rest just at her collarbone, hidden beneath the modest neckline of her morning gown. It was a habit now, as natural as breathing. An act of remembrance, or perhaps of stubbornness.

Nearly seven years, she thought, not without a trace of wonder. So long, and still—

She did not finish the thought. She did not need to.

The morning passed in its usual pattern. Elizabeth joined Jane in the nursery for a time, where the children—two boys of lively disposition—clamored at once for her attention. Their sister remained upstairs with the nurse.