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There was more, he found, that he wanted to say to Elizabeth. Much more.

He set down his teacup and waited for a natural pause in Mrs Bennet’s discourse, which took some time, and when it came he said to Elizabeth, simply: “Will you come to the garden?”

She looked at him. “It is rather cold,” she said.

“Yes.”

She paused and looked at Miss Bennet, but her attention had turned wholly to Bingley, as if she could not keep her eyes off him, still less stop marvelling at how happy she was.

Elizabeth smiled, then turned back to Darcy. “I will need my coat.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

The garden offered nothing by way of comfort except the open sky and the privacy of a space that nobody else wanted to be in. Elizabeth’s breath made small clouds in the air. The gravel was iron-hard underfoot, and the rose beds contained only skeletons of their former glorious beauty. The hedgerows stood bare against the pale light, stripped to the essentials.

Elizabeth and Mr Darcy walked together without an immediate destination. The house was visible behind them through the kitchen garden gate, the drawing room window warm and lit. Mrs Bennet’s silhouette was intermittently visible as she moved through what was presumably a continuing account of the afternoon’s events to anyone within range.

“She will be at that window for the remainder of the day,” Elizabeth said.

“At a minimum,” Mr Darcy agreed.

“She may sleep there, hoping to shout the news out to any passerby,” Elizabeth went on with a chuckle.

Mr Darcy nodded, mock-solemn. “I would not rule it out.”

They walked a little further, to where the path turned along the near hedge. The house fell out of sight, and the garden became cold and quiet. The sky above them was dull with high clouds, while the frost-stiff grass on either side of the gravel was colourless and shining.

Mr Darcy halted on the path.

Elizabeth stopped beside him. She looked at him, and he looked at her, and she could see that whatever he had come out here to say, he was assembling with care. That was his way, and she had learned to wait for it.

“When I proposed to you,” he said, “I told you I was acting from duty. I told you it was not inclination. Or rather, not inclination alone.” He paused. “I should like to revisit that.”

“It was November,” Elizabeth said gently. “You had known me for little more than a week. I believe some revision is reasonable.”

“It is not only revision,” he replied. “I said what was true at the time, but it is very different to what is true now. There have been far too many misunderstandings between us. I must apologise for that.”

“I have contributed my share of inaccuracies,” Elizabeth protested.

“We have been remarkably well-matched in that respect.” The ghost of a smile flitted across his mouth, but he quickly schooled his features into seriousness.

“What I want to say is this. The engagement was made in November under circumstances neither of us chose, for reasons that were entirely practical and not especially pleasant, and I conducted it, for a long time, as though those circumstances and those reasons were the whole account. They were not. They stopped being the whole account — well, I am not certain exactly when.” Mr Darcy paused for a long moment. To judge by the abstraction of his expression, he must have been conducting a review of past thoughts and desires of considerable extent — and to judge by the astonishment that gradually came over his features, one with results surprising even to himself.

“Perhaps the study,” Elizabeth said, half breathless. There had been something there, even then, in the way he had handed her his jacket, the manner in which he had taken such care of her.

“Yes,” he said. “Possibly the study.”

She thought about this. The hairpin, the cold floor, the jacket around her shoulders. The situation had been dreadful, and Mr Darcy had been steadier in it than anyone could have expected. That steadiness had been the first thing she had filed away in the inventory she had been keeping, before she had even been aware she was keeping it.

An inventory, Elizabeth now understood, of the reasons she loved Mr Darcy.

“For me, also,” she said. “Possibly.”

Mr Darcy nodded, as though this confirmed what he already suspected. “The engagement as it stands is the engagement of two people who agreed to investigate its origins and dissolve it honourably, if we could. That was what we agreed in the parlour in November. Those are, technically, still the terms.”

“Technically.”

“It seems to me that we could now dissolve that understanding and replace it with a better one,” Mr Darcy said softly. “Will you marry me, Elizabeth? Not because the neighbourhood requires it. Not because honour requires it, or reputation, or any of the practical machinery that produced this engagement in the first place. I have come to know that I love you with all my heart, and I never wish to be parted from you for all the days of my life. Can I hope that you might feel something of the kind for me? Will you choose me freely, and be my wife not out of necessity, but out of choice?”