Page 109 of Honor Requires

The carriage moved.

Elizabeth sat back, stunned, her tears falling unchecked, her mind unable to grasp what had just passed between them.

Dead. He had said it so plainly, so deliberately, treating it as incontrovertible truth.

They did not speak again. When the carriage stopped, the door was opened, and she descended without looking back, her steps unsteady as she watched his carriage pull away. Filled with pain, she whirled and ran toward Hyde Park. Elizabeth did not care if she ruined her slippers or if being out alone at night was folly; she wanted only for some peace.

After walking the path for some time, she made her way slowly back to Matlock House, entering through the front door and making her way to her bedchamber.

Only when she was alone—when the door was closed and the silence surrounded her—did the full significance of it return.

She pressed a hand to her mouth. His voice. His words. Fitzwilliam Darcy is dead. Elizabeth’s breath caught. Her eyes widened. And only then did she realize…

He had said Darcy.

Darcy watched as Elizabeth ran away from the safety of Matlock House. He knocked on the roof of his carriage and gave his driver instructions to circle the block. He dared not enter the park; it would not do to reinforce Elizabeth’s assertions. Only when she wearily returned to Matlock House did he give the word for his carriage to return home. Exhausted and overwrought, he bid Lucien goodnight before retreating to his bed.

Chapter Twenty-One

Time, which had once seemed both stagnant and cruelly unyielding, now passed with a different quality altogether—swift in its outward progression, but heavy with all that lay beneath it.

For Darcy, the weeks that followed were marked not by rest, but by deliberate movement. He did not seek Wickham at once after that first encounter. Instead, he allowed the acquaintance to grow as such things must—gradually, without design apparent to any but himself. He returned to the gaming hell on several evenings, sometimes to observe, sometimes to play with sufficient restraint to maintain credibility, and always with the purpose of drawing nearer to the man who had altered the course of his life.

Wickham received him readily.

That, in itself, did not surprise Darcy. He soon perceived that Wickham now welcomed any society that did not demand too much of him. The careless charm remained, but it had worn thin at the edges through excess and something deeper and less easily named.

Darcy watched, listening and waiting.

The first of their more substantial conversations took place on an evening thick with smoke and restless energy, when the gaming tables were crowded and the air seemed to hum with the fever of risk.

Darcy arrived later than usual and found Wickham drinking regularly, though he was not so far gone as to be insensible. He sat at the far end of the room, one arm draped loosely over the back of his chair, his attention divided between the cards before him and the glass at his side.

“Ah,” Wickham said as Darcy approached, his expression brightening with easy familiarity. “My Sardinian friend. Come to observe again, or will you at last risk something of consequence?”

“I have learned that observation is often the safer course,” Darcy replied, taking the chair beside him.

“Safer, yes,” Wickham said with a crooked smile. “But far less entertaining.”

“That depends upon one’s purpose.”

Wickham studied him with suspicion on his face, then laughed.

“You are not a man who plays for amusement alone, I think.”

Darcy inclined his head. “Few men are, when they are honest with themselves.”

Wickham’s gaze lingered, seeming to weigh the remark, before he turned back to the table.The game progressed. Coins changed hands. Wickham lost more than he won, though he seemed less concerned with the outcome than with the act itself. He drank between rounds, not heavily, but steadily, maintaining a deliberate distance from the world through constant effort.

When at last he pushed back from the table, his purse lighter than before, he gestured toward a secluded corner.

“Come,” he said. “Let us leave these vultures to their feast.”

Darcy followed.

They took seats somewhat removed from the press of the room, where conversation might be carried on without immediate interruption. A servant appeared with fresh glasses, and Wickham accepted his with a nod before raising it in a loose approximation of a toast.

“To fortune,” he said. “Though she is a fickle mistress.”