Page 23 of Yearning

“Well, I know not. She says it’s because she cannot fall in love with him in the same way she loves you.”

He nodded slowly, and that both soothed and enraged him. “Then I am still in the way of her living a full life! I am still causing her pain and suffering! This is what I wanted to avoid. I want her to be happy, to have a real marriage, and to be—”

“She wants you, Darcy. Would you simply tell her you want her back? Fight for her?”

“Fight for her?” Darcy lifted his one arm. “How?”

“Oh, you know what I mean,” said the colonel.

Darcy shook his head. “Would you tell her to find someone else, please?” He glared at him. “Would you ask for her hand yourself?”

“I shall do neither of those things. Get her back. You are being very obtuse, and you will regret it forever if she goes.”

Darcy thought it over that night, lying awake in his bed, because it was harder to sleep without so much laudanum. The pain, though, it was not nearly as bad as he had been warned it would be. In truth, he found it steadying. It was there, and it was real, and he wanted that reality more than anything.

I want life on its actual terms, he thought. I do not want some pleasant fantasy.

Any idea that he could have a good marriage with Elizabeth was really only that—a pleasant fantasy. Perhaps if they both believed it, they could even convince themselves of it for a time, or in moments, here and there, but the truth would bubble up, in every other moment, when they must face what had become of him.

He would not do that to her.

When she came to see him the following day, he did not wait for her to say anything to him about it, he came right to the point. “I do not wish you to marry someone you can’t love.”

She blinked at him. “What are you talking of?”

“This old, titled man that you are thinking of being with, I do not want that for you, Elizabeth. I want you to have a full and good life, with a man you truly adore. I want everything for you.”

“Is that so?” She shook her head. “Damn Richard Fitzwilliam, damn him to the depths of Hades.”

“Such language, madam.”

“Oh, you can bear it,” she said, and now her lower lip was trembling. “So, this is your objection, then? Not that you wish me to stay, but that you wish me to marry someone younger?”

“What I wish is not to be a hindrance to your happiness,” he said. “I want you to have everything that you deserve to have. I don’t want you to settle for some half life because of me. And not marrying me and marrying someone you can never love is the same thing as simply marrying me and struggling through our existence together.”

“It is not,” she said. “If you would but say to me that you wanted me, Fitzwilliam, if you would but convince me that you still desire me, then I would do anything for you. I would face any hardship to remain at your side. But I need us to be together on this. I cannot do it all on my own anymore.”

He hesitated, and she was so beautiful, and he knew that he could have her with him, and that she would not abandon him, that she would stay, but… “You would grow to resent me over time, and I cannot bear that.”

“I would not.”

“There is so much I cannot give you, Elizabeth. Right now, you might not care, but someday, you would look back on your life, and you would wish for it. You do not want to live out a whole life and never… never be truly… never be loved in the way a husband should love a wife,” he finally settled on. “You would wish to have had the experience before you die.”

She bit down on her bottom lip. “And there is nothing left there, for you? You have no interest?”

“Interest is only pain. I would rather not be interested.”

She nodded, looking away.

“And there’s more, so much more than that, which I cannot do for you. I cannot give you children, and I cannot… God in heaven, Elizabeth, if we were ever in danger, I would not be able to do anything for you. I could not protect you.”

“In danger from what, sir?” she said.

“I know not. Bandits or bears—”

“Bears, sir?” She glared at him. “Are there many bears in England?”

“There are dangers in the world, and I am useless against them.”