Page 12 of Shadows Of Rosings Park: Part 2

He could not. Not here. Not yet. He lacked the words.

He removed his handkerchief and dabbed the moisture beneath her eyes. She stayed. Her warm cheek beneath the cool linen stirred a tenderness he refused to admit.

"We must return to the parlour," she said.

"This conversation is not concluded."

"Few conversations between us ever truly conclude, sir. They merely adjourn to more private settings."

They went inside. He handed her in to the parlour as though she were made of glass, which she was not, which was the entire problem. Elizabeth Bennet was not fragile. She was the strongest person he had ever met, and he had broken her situation without breaking her. The discrepancy between those two facts was what kept him awake at three in the morning, staring at the ceiling of a borrowed house, thinking about a woman who had left her letter unsigned.

In the carriage home, while Bingley talked and Caroline sulked, Darcy sat in the dark with Elizabeth's question. The distinction between keeping and loving. Whether, in his case, such a distinction existed.

The answer eluded him. In the dark of the carriage his hands lay open on his knees, palms up, and he noticed the posture and closed them. The fists felt better. The fists he understood.

Tomorrow he would await her letter. Tomorrow he would read between the lines for evidence of her true thoughts. Tomorrow the bargaining would resume.

But tonight, on a moonlit terrace, Elizabeth Bennet had looked him in the face and told him what he was, and he had not been able to disagree. Darcy, who planned everything, could not tell whether the admission began something or ended it.

Then Caroline spoke.

She had been silent for the duration of the ride, unusual for a woman who typically filled every carriage journey with commentary. Now her voice came from the dark of the opposite seat, addressed to Mrs. Hurst but pitched, Darcy suspected, for his ears.

"I received the most interesting letter from Mrs. Jenkinson today. You remember her, Miss de Bourgh's companion at Rosings? We met during Anne de Bourgh's last winter in London and have corresponded occasionally since. She writes that there has been considerable speculation in the neighbourhood regarding Mr. Collins's death. A tenant claims a lantern was seen near the embankment that night, and several others have remarked that Mr. Collins was not known to take that path after dark, drunk or sober."

Silence.

Darcy held still. His breathing stayed even. He sat in the dark of the carriage and felt the temperature of the evening drop by several degrees.

"How curious," Mrs. Hurst murmured.

"Is it not?" Caroline's voice was light, conversational, entirely innocent. "Certainly, one ought not to credit servants' gossip. But I thought it worth mentioning."

She said nothing more. The carriage rolled on. Bingley, beside Darcy, appeared to have noticed nothing, he was watching the moonlit fields with the expression of a man composing tomorrow's compliments for Jane.

Darcy sat unmoving. Mrs. Jenkinson. Tenants who noticed things. A lantern where none should have been. Habits remembered at the worst possible moment. He had dismissed Caroline Bingley as a nuisance. She had just proved herself more dangerous.

She was asking questions, and she had just told him so.

At the week's end he would take Elizabeth to Ashbourne Hall. The private house was no longer merely a retreat. They needed thicker walls and fewer witnesses. The cover story, the convenient accident, the grieving widow, the sudden engagement, had just developed its first crack from the outside.

Caroline Bingley was asking questions about Kent. And the answers, if she found them, would destroy everything.

CHAPTER 5

ELIZABETH

Aweek had passed since the engagement was announced at Lucas Lodge, and Elizabeth's walking dress had a button at the left cuff that would not stay closed.

She noticed it in the mirror as she dressed for the afternoon: a loose thread she would once have mended with a needle and five minutes of idle attention. Now it occupied her mind because it was the only nearby problem she could solve.

Darcy had postponed their drive without explanation. His note that morning had at last named two o'clock, and contained, beneath the usual commands, a line that chilled her: A mutual acquaintance has taken an interest in matters best left undisturbed. We shall discuss the particulars this afternoon. Until then, I trust you will exercise the discretion I have come to rely upon. The note named no one and committed nothing compromising to paper. Its caution revealed more than directness could. A threat had surfaced. Elizabeth had learned to read his letters as a sailor reads weather, attending not to the sky but to the pressure that preceded storms.

She pinned the button as best she could, checked the powder on her cheek. The sapphire brooch sat on the dressing table where she had left it after the Lucas Lodge dinner, his mother's jewel, placed at her collar to draw attention from another man's marks. She had not worn it since. She could not say whether this constituted defiance or merely the recognition that some gifts are too heavy to carry daily.

She paused at the mirror. On the terrace at Longbourn, the evening after the announcement, she had told Darcy that he did not love her but merely desired to keep her. She had watched his face absorb the blow and had seen, for one unguarded moment, not anger but recognition, as though she had named something he had been carrying without examining it. The memory disturbed her. A man who could be wounded by the truth was a man who yet felt something. Feeling was the most dangerous quality a captor could possess.

She went downstairs.