Page 104

I sit down beside her.

She goes very still. She is looking at me sideways, the way she looked at me on the first morning of our walks at Rosings. Wary. Hopeful. Not quite daring to believe.

I take her hand. Her glove is off. I do not know when she took it off. Her fingers are cold, and they are shaking, and so are mine.

"Miss Bennet," I say.

She draws in a breath.

"Just this once," I tell her. "Because it is in the speech. After this, never again, if I can help it."

She nods. She does not trust herself to speak.

"I have no fine speech," I say. "I had one. I composed it all the way round the lake, and it was a very bad one, and it was all about myself. I threw it away when I saw you under the willows."

Her fingers tighten on mine.

"Miss Bennet," I say, "I have been happier in an hour of your company than in a year of anyone else's."

She closes her eyes.

I watch her face while I say it. I watch it go through her. I have heard these words before. I heard them first in her voice, at my aunt's house, while I lay in bed with a bandage round my head and listened as though I were being given the crown jewels. And I said to her then, it does not sound like me.

It sounds like me now. I find it is the truest thing I have ever said.

"I would rather be laughed at by you," I say, "than admired by the whole world."

A tear slides out from under her closed lashes and runs down her cheek.

"I do not ask you to think me good. I know you have every reason not to. I said things to you at Hunsford that no gentleman should say to any woman. I said worse in your father's garden. I struggled against loving you, once, as though it were a disease." My voice is not steady. "I have not struggled since. Not for one moment. Not since I woke up in my aunt's blue bedchamber and asked where you were."

She opens her eyes. They are swimming.

"I do not ask you to think me good," I say again. "I only ask you to let me try to become so."

The clock on the mantel ticks. Out on the lake, the swans are calling.

I take a breath.

"Elizabeth," I say. "If you can bear to have me—"

"Yes."

She says it before I can finish. Exactly as she said I would. Exactly as she invented it, in my aunt's sickroom, with her hand in mine and her heart breaking. It comes out of her fast and fierce and certain, as though she has been holding it behind her teeth for six weeks and cannot hold it one moment longer.

"Yes," she says again. "Yes, Fitzwilliam. Yes." Her voice breaks. "I told you once that you were the last man in the world. I was wrong about that too. You are the only one."

I cannot speak.

I told George Wickham she would never refuse me. I stood in the yard of the Red Lion and laughed in his face. I was wrong, then, about the past. I find I was right about everything else.

***

"There is one more thing," I say at last, when I can. "In the speech."

She knows. I can see that she knows. The color is coming up slowly from her collar, the way it did at my bedside, when I asked her the same question and she lied to me so beautifully.

"May I kiss you?" I ask.