Page 96 of Honor Requires

Lucien’s expression grew more serious. “At the conclusion of their conversation, Hargrave inquired after their ‘friend.’”

Darcy’s jaw tightened.

“Langford replied that Wickham is much the same,” Lucien said. “Hargrave added that his sister reports Mrs. Wickham remains at Pemberley.”

Silence fell. The name lingered, souring Darcy’s stomach. Wickham. His hands curled into fists at his sides. Alive, free and in possession of what is mine.

The carriage slowed as it approached Ashcombe House, but Darcy did not move.

At length, he said, “It is time.”

Lucien watched him.

“To locate Wickham,” Darcy finished. And in his voice, there was no hesitation—only purpose. His former friend needed to atone for his crimes.

Chapter Eighteen

Elizabeth had not known, until now, that astonishment could become a kind of torment.

It had followed her home from the musicale, sat with her in the carriage, climbed the stairs beside her, and entered her chamber with such persistence that it seemed almost to possess substance and will. Even now, with the door shut fast against the rest of the house and the fire burning low upon the hearth, she could not rid herself of the feeling that the world had shifted out of its proper course and left her standing somewhere between memory and reality.He was alive. The words rose again and again, each time bringing with them not peace, but renewed agitation. She had whispered them to herself, had pressed them into the silence of her room in the hope repetition might tame them, but nothing had lessened their force. She felt like a woman who had seen a ghost and then been expected to resume her ordinary life while pretending nothing had altered.

But everything was altered.

She stood at the window, one hand resting against the cool glass, though she saw little of the street below. Her thoughts returned, as they had all evening, to the Count of Vendicarsi—to the reserve of his manner, the careful way he had chosen each word, the restraint with which he had met her gaze and then turned away from it.

It is him.

Whatever doubts had once lingered were gone. The resemblance alone might once have unsettled her, but resemblance was no longer the question. It was the manner, the eyes, the deepening of his voice when he spoke seriously, the particular gravity that belonged to him and no other. Time and suffering had altered him, as time and suffering alter all people, yet nothing could erase the man beneath. She no longer wondered whether the Count of Vendicarsi was Fitzwilliam Darcy. What troubled her now was everything she did not know.

Then where had he been?

That question pressed most cruelly of all.

Where had he been while she believed him dead? What had happened to him? Why had he not returned openly under his own name? Why this title, this count, this carefully maintained foreign identity?

Elizabeth pressed her fingers lightly against the shell at her throat.

She wanted—more than wanted—she ached for him to tell her everything. She wanted him to come to her plainly, without reserve, and declare what had happened, how he had been lost and how he had been restored.

Every instinct told her, however, that whatever explanation existed, it was not one lightly given. There had been caution in him. Not reluctance, exactly, but necessity. He had spoken as a man who carried danger close at hand and could not set it down.

Things are not as they seem, nor are they easily explained.

The words had returned to her all evening, heavy with meaning. She had spoken to him almost in desperation, offering what little she could without exposing them both, and he had met her halfway—but only halfway.

He had trusted her enough to warn her, but not enough to confide. Doubt lingered, stubborn and unwelcome. Hope had once been taken from her with cruel finality. To surrender herself to it again without certainty felt perilously like inviting a second bereavement. If she was mistaken—if grief and longing had merely taught her to see Darcy where he did not exist—she did not know whether her heart could endure such disappointment.

Elizabeth drew away from the window and began to pace the length of the chamber, unable to remain still. The candlelight trembled faintly in the movement of the air, sending shifting shadows across the walls. Her room, so familiar and usually so calming, seemed strange to her now—as though it belonged to the life she had been living yesterday, not the one into which she had stepped today.

She had gone out the following evening with Jane and Bramley once more, though she had scarcely wished it. Another party. Another room full of light, jewels, titles, and carefully measured civility. More opportunity for London to gather and speculate and admire. The Count of Vendicarsi had, as Jane predicted, become the object of almost universal curiosity. Wherever he moved, attention followed him; wherever he paused, mothers angled daughters into his path, and gentlemen sought his favor with increasing eagerness.

Elizabeth had not spoken with him beyond his formal greeting to their party. He had bowed. She had curtsied. Nothing more. Instead of conversing, she had watched him. How could she not?

He did not resemble the man she had loved in every outward particular. His hair, once longer and inclined to curl where it pleased, was cut close now, severe in a way that altered the shape of his face. The beard—neatly trimmed, well kept, and entirely unsuitable to the Darcy of her memory—changed him further, sharpening what had once been more open, though never unguarded. There was a hardness in him now, not of cruelty, but of trial. He carried himself like a man who had learned to hold every part of himself in reserve.

Despite everything, his eyes were the same, as was the gravity of his expression when he listened. So was the serious, almost stoic manner that had once made others mistake him for proud when he was, in truth, merely careful. So was the command in the way he occupied a room without appearing to seek dominion over it.

She had watched him dance, converse, incline his head at the appropriate moments, and she had seen, beneath every change, the man she had thought lost forever.