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“I will accept,” Elizabeth said without preamble. She had used up her supply of composure in her father’s study and had very little left for ceremony. “Having accepted, I, too, shall do my best to offer the unadorned truth. This is not what I would have chosen. But the alternative does harm that cannot be undone. To me, to my family. To Jane.”

She had not intended to mention Jane, and having mentioned her, she did not elaborate. Likely she did not need to. Mr Darcy was not a stupid man, and Mr Bingley’s attachment was not a secret to anyone who had been at Netherfield.

Mr Darcy nodded once. There was something in his face she could not read, something that moved through it briefly before his composure reasserted itself. “I will do everything in my power to make this as easy for you as it can be made.”

It was, she thought, a careful and a decent thing to say. Not a romantic thing, or sentiment that pretended to be more than the situation had produced.

She received it as it was intended and felt, beneath her misery, the faint and complicated stirring of something she did not yet have a name for.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

Outside the window, beyond the wet garden and the lane, Meryton was going about its business. It would know of the engagement before supper. It would call it a happy ending because the story it had built required one, and it would not trouble itself with what the ending felt like to the people inside it.

Chapter Seven

Silence stretched between them, and if not a comfortable silence, neither was an unbearable one. Elizabeth could be grateful for that much, at least. They had shared worse silences in the study, and those had eventually resolved themselves into something functional. She supposed this one would, too.

She looked at him directly. He had his composure back, which she had catalogued over a week at Netherfield, that careful steadiness she had once mistaken for indifference and now read as something more like self-discipline. Beneath it, if she looked, there were signs of a poor night’s sleep. She suspected she bore similar signs, though she had no intention of drawing attention to them.

“I believe I owe you my thanks,” Elizabeth said at last, keeping the bitterness out of the words as best she could. “Both for myself and for all my sisters. Society being what it is, the damage to my reputation could have been the ruin of us all.”

Mr Darcy shook his head. “No, you must not thank me for doing what is right. I would have insisted that another gentleman do as much for my sister in similar circumstances. How could I do less myself?”

Elizabeth looked at him, a little surprised. His words had been plain and unlovely, yet surprisingly generous. It seemed impossible that Mr Darcy meant to offer everything while wanting nothing, not even her thanks, and yet it appeared it was so. “So, we are engaged,” Elizabeth said at last, letting out a held breath. “That is the public fact, and we cannot alter it at present. The damage is done. The engagement is the plaster over it, and removing it before the wound has closed would make things considerably worse.”

“Quite so,” Mr Darcy said quietly.

“But neither of us chose this. And I have no interest in entering into marriage solely to contain the damage of a scandalous accident if the accident can be accounted for and its consequences addressed by some other means.” She met his eyes. “Do you agree, Mr Darcy?”

“I understand you precisely,” he said, and something in his voice shifted very slightly. A quality of relief so brief and so well-contained that she almost missed it. “If the engagement can be honourably dissolved, if we can determine what occurred and satisfy the demands of reputation in another way, we should not allow convention to bind us to a permanent arrangement neither of us sought.”

“Yes,” she said, relieved that he had the same sentiments about their engagement. “Exactly that.”

He was quiet for a moment. Outside, a cart went along the lane, the rattle of its wheels suggesting that it had seen better days. The fire crackled in the hearth.

“Then we are in agreement,” he said. “The engagement stands for now. We shall conduct ourselves accordingly and give no one further cause for talk. But privately, we will investigate. The door was locked — how, and why? It seems to me it may have been no accident.”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “I have wondered the same myself.”

The circumstances of their compromise had weighed considerably on Elizabeth’s mind, for something there did not add up. She had gone over the sequence more times than she could count: the handle turning freely when she entered, the same handle immovable five minutes later, and the crowd of witnesses present to see them. Was it all truly nothing more than a coincidence? Elizabeth did not think so.

But it would not do to say as much to Mr Darcy, not yet. She had no proof, only an arrangement of facts that looked suspicious when examined in a certain light. Yet Elizabeth knew well that such conclusions might come to mean very little. The suspicion that had gradually begun to play on her mind might be nothing more than the merest illusion.

What she said instead was, “I should like to look at the lock. It would be most instructive to return to the study and see if our accident can be replicated, and is therefore more likely to have been mere coincidence.”

“An excellent notion,” Mr Darcy said. “When shall you come? It would be better not to delay too long.”

Elizabeth nodded. “Tomorrow, then,” she said. “My mother will want to call at Netherfield under the guise of wedding planning, and I think we should let her. If you could arrange for the planning to require some time in the house’s interior, I might find occasion to visit the study.”

The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite into a smile, but the possibility of one. “You have considered this already.”

Elizabeth nodded. “It had become apparent that this would be…a problem, shall we say. And had you not offered me your hand, a solution would have been a matter of even greater urgency.”

Mr Darcy’s expression darkened briefly. Elizabeth had the sense he was reassessing something, though she could not have said what.

“Until tomorrow, then,” he said.

“Good.” She smoothed her skirt and took a breath. “And Mr Darcy, whatever we find, or do not find, I intend to conduct this engagement with all the propriety the situation requires. I will not embarrass you.”