Page 17 of The Servants’ Matchmaking

"After Sarah announced the terrace was dry."

"It was dry."

Darcy turned from the window at last. "The result was a flooded pavilion and a proposal she believed came from duty alone."

McKeever's expression lost its careful neutrality for the first time all evening. "You proposed today?"

"I did."

"And Miss Elizabeth declined."

It was not a question. Darcy disliked how plainly the answer must have shown on him already. In his jaw. In the stillness he was working rather too hard to maintain.

"She considered my motive insufficient."

"Was it?"

Rank drew a line across the room, invisible but real as a wall. McKeever rarely approached it. In ten years, he had never once stepped over. Darcy might have dismissed the question outright. Instead he sat down heavily in the chair by the fire, and the breath he released had been held rather longer than he had realised.

"I told her I admired her. I spoke of honour. I never once asked whether she could be happy with me."

"I see."

"Do you?"

"I see why she declined, sir."

The respectful answer cut clean through every excuse Darcy had been assembling since the morning room. He had expected gratitude, he realised now, for doing the proper thing, for behaving exactly as a gentleman ought to behave under the circumstances. Elizabeth had demanded truth instead about why he wished to do it at all. He had possessed that truth the whole time. He had simply hidden it behind duty until it came out sounding like reluctance. Which was, he was beginning to understand, very nearly the worst thing it could have sounded like.

"Sarah believes Miss Elizabeth's opinion of you has improved, sir."

"You have discussed that as well, apparently."

"She observed it."

"And supplied it to you."

"I asked whether Miss Elizabeth had been distressed by the discovery at the pavilion. Sarah reported that she was angry only after the proposal. She gave no reason for it."

Darcy looked over at him properly. "You asked after her distress?"

"Yes, sir."

There was real concern in that single syllable, plain as anything. McKeever had served Darcy since Cambridge. He had managed fevers, mourning clothes, and the grim weeks after Ramsgate without ever once losing his composure. His wages kept a widowed sister and her children fed in Derbyshire. Darcy knew the man's discretion the way he knew his own hands. He had never quite considered that the same discretion might extend to actual affection for the people who crossed his path.

"No more arrangements."

"Very good, sir."

"No messages invented, no meetings contrived, no rumours answered by anyone but me."

McKeever's brows drew together, wounded. "We invented nothing, sir."

"I know. Keep it that way."

"Yes, sir."

"If Sarah hears Miss Bingley speak of the pavilion, she is to tell Mrs. Nicholls. You are to tell me. Neither of you is to confront her directly."