Page 33 of Shadows Of Rosings Park: Part 2

"It's how I prefer to see it."

"Preference and truth aren't the same thing."

"No." He held her gaze. "But preference is all I have to offer you at this moment. The truth would be less kind."

She studied him, his measured face, his careful hands, the guarded reserve of a man who had built his entire life on command and was discovering, slowly, that the one soul he most wanted to command was the one that could not be commanded without being destroyed.

"The truth," she said, "is that I'm sitting in a carriage with a man I didn't choose, leaving a father I love, and soon going to a city where my best friend may need me when I do not know if I can reach her. That is the truth, Fitzwilliam. It is not kind. But it is mine."

He said nothing. The carriage rolled on. The countryside passed. And the silence between them was not comfortable and not hostile but something else, the silence of two people who have spoken plainly and are now sitting with the consequences, waiting to see what the words would grow into.

CHAPTER 12

ELIZABETH

Sir William Lucas's note arrived the following morning at half past nine.

The stable boy who delivered it had ridden from Lucas Lodge with the desperate haste of a man carrying bad news and eager to be rid of it. Elizabeth received it in the breakfast room, where she sat across from Darcy and ate toast she couldn't taste and maintained the pleasant expression that had become her resting face.

She opened the note. Three lines, in Sir William's cramped hand.

My dear Mrs. Darcy,

I write in some distress. Charlotte has departed Lucas Lodge without farewell or explanation. Her rooms were found in disorder this morning. If you possess any knowledge of her plans, I beg you to inform me at your earliest convenience.

Sir Wm. Lucas

Elizabeth read it twice. Her chambers were found in disorder. The detail snagged. If the Colonel had planned this, and the Colonel planned everything, he would have ensured a clean departure. Bags packed, a note left, the fiction of a planned visit. Disorder meant haste, or it meant Charlotte. Charlotte, who was the most deliberate woman Elizabeth had ever known. Had haste defeated her care, or had she left the disarray for someone to notice?

She set the note on the table with a steadiness she did not feel.

"Charlotte is gone," she said.

Darcy set down his teacup. The gesture was unhurried, the careful placement of porcelain on saucer that, in another man, would be casual but in Darcy was a form of punctuation, the deliberate pause before a prepared response.

"Gone?"

"Sir William writes that she departed without farewell. Her rooms in disarray." Elizabeth watched his face. The mask was perfect. Not a crack. Not a seam. "Colonel Fitzwilliam has taken her to London."

"That's a considerable assumption."

"It's the only reasonable conclusion. Charlotte would never leave without saying goodbye. Not to her father. Not to Maria. Not to me." She held his gaze. "Unless she had no choice."

Darcy took the note, read it, folded it. "I shall write to my cousin for clarification."

"Where is she, Fitzwilliam?"

The Christian name, used as a blade rather than an intimacy, cut through social pretence and demanded the answer Mr. Darcy would deflect but Fitzwilliam might provide. His attention sharpened.

"Richard has taken a residence in London. Not far from our townhouse." A pause. "That is where she is being taken."

"There. In his house. In his keeping."

"Under his protection."

"You use that word the way other men use currency — to purchase compliance and call it generosity." She leaned forward. Her hands were flat on the breakfast table, her fingers splayed, the posture of a woman planting herself. "Charlotte didn't go willingly."

"Consent obtained under constraint⁠—"