Page 22 of Shadows Of Rosings Park: Part 2

He studied her. She let him look. She did not arrange her face into compliance or defiance or any of the prepared expressions she cycled through during their public displays. She simply stood in the churchyard with the smell of rain in the air and the daffodils nodding in the grass and looked back at him as Elizabeth Bennet, not the character she played, but the woman she was, and waited.

"Tomorrow at two," he said.

"Tomorrow at two."

They walked to Oakham Mount the following afternoon under a sky that could not decide between sun and cloud. Mrs. Bennet had waved away the question of a chaperone, declaring, "They're engaged, Mr. Bennet, and it's broad daylight!", with the pragmatism of a mother who saw no reason to supervise a match worth ten thousand a year. The path climbed through meadows still wet from overnight rain, the grass soaking the hems of Elizabeth's skirt, the ground soft underfoot. Darcy walked beside her in silence, a companionable silence, or its approximation, his stride shortened to match hers, his hands clasped behind his back.

Elizabeth had walked this path a hundred times. As a child, running ahead of Jane, her hair escaping its pins. As a girl, bringing a book to read at the top, sitting on the flat stone that overlooked the valley and feeling the wind in her face and the absolute, uncomplicated freedom of a body at the highest point in its landscape. As a young woman, walking here after Wickham's lies, after Darcy's insult at the assembly, after every hurt and confusion that her twenty years had produced, because the view from the top had a way of making everything smaller. Not better. Smaller. And sometimes smaller was enough.

She had not been here since Kent.

The summit was a broad, flat plateau of grass and exposed rock, and the view opened in every direction, Longbourn to the south, Meryton to the east, Netherfield's roofline visible through the trees to the north. The wind was strong enough to pull at her bonnet and press her skirts against her legs. Elizabeth stopped at the flat stone and stood and breathed and felt, for one moment, like herself.

Darcy stood beside her. He looked at the view with the assessing eye of a man who assessed landscapes as he assessed people: by their utility, their value, their position relative to his own holdings. But something in his expression shifted as he looked, an unlooked-for softening, like the place had communicated something to him that her words had not.

"You love this place," he said. Not a question.

"It's the only place where I can see everything and nothing can see me."

He turned to look at her. The wind had disordered his hair, dark strands falling across his forehead, and his eyes, in the grey light, were darker than usual, the amber flecks invisible.

"You feel invisible here," he said.

"I feel free."

Free. The word tightened the skin around his eyes. He could not deflect this reminder of what she had lost and he had taken.

"When we are married," he said, "you will have Pemberley. The grounds are extensive. There are places — hilltops, woodlands — where one can walk for hours without encountering another soul."

"You're offering me a larger prison."

"I'm offering you what I have."

Elizabeth looked at him. The wind pulled at her hair, at her dress, at the ribbon of her bonnet. He stood with his feet planted and his coat flapping and his face turned toward her with that expression she couldn't fully read, not desire, not calculation, but something that lived in the territory between them. Need, perhaps. Or something she did not have a word for, the expression of a man reaching for something he was not certain existed.

"This is where I would have brought you," she said, "if you had proposed to me properly. Without the blackmail. Without the body on the parlour floor. If you had simply asked, and I had been free to answer."

He froze. She saw it, the arrested inhale, the momentary freeze, and knew that she had said something unexpected, something that bypassed his defences the way a key bypasses a lock.

"And what would your answer have been?" he asked. His voice was rough. Stripped of its usual polish.

Elizabeth considered the question with genuine care. For once she neither dissembled nor calculated. On her favourite hill, beside the man imposed upon her, she weighed the only question that mattered.

"I don't know," she said. "That's the honest answer. I might have said no. I might have said yes. I will never know, because you took the question away from me."

He was silent for a long time. The wind blew. The clouds moved. Below them, the Hertfordshire landscape lay green and familiar and indifferent to the conversation being conducted above it.

"I'm sorry," he said.

Two words. She had not expected them. In all the weeks of their arrangement, the commands, the conditions, the careful management of her every movement, he had never once apologised. He had justified. He had explained. He had presented his actions as necessary, logical, the only rational response to an irrational situation. He had never said sorry.

"For which part?" she asked.

"For taking the question." His mouth compressed. "Not for the answer I would have demanded. For leaving you forever uncertain what you might have chosen freely."

The apology unsettled a certainty she had thought fixed. He appeared to understand what he had stolen even as he refused to return it. He would choose the same outcome again, but he could at least name its cost. Her hatred made room for that truth without forgiving him.

"We should go down," she said. "The rain is coming."