Page 8 of Shadows Of Rosings Park: Part 2

"Indeed." Her father's voice had cooled by several degrees. "We have much to discuss. Far more than settlements, I suspect."

In the carriage home, Elizabeth stared at the dark countryside and said nothing. Mrs. Bennet dozed. Jane watched her with unconcealed concern. Mr. Bennet sat in his corner and thought his private thoughts. Darcy rode beside them, a dark figure appearing and vanishing at the window as the road curved.

At Longbourn, Darcy handed the ladies from the carriage. When Elizabeth's turn came, he held her hand a beat too long, drew her aside.

"Your father grows suspicious. This complicates matters."

"He has always seen more than others."

His expression hardened, then smoothed. He lifted her hand to his lips. His mouth on her gloved knuckles, his breath warm through the fabric, lingered one beat beyond propriety. She felt the warmth travel up her arm and lodge somewhere behind her ribs. Heat and cold, attraction and revulsion, left her standing on uncertain ground.

"Until tomorrow," he murmured.

She withdrew her hand and went inside without looking back.

In her chamber, she sat at her writing desk and composed her nightly letter to him. She wrote of the announcement, the congratulations, the evening's events. She described her family's reactions. She confirmed her compliance. She sealed the letter with wax.

She did not sign it.

A small defiance. A gesture he would recognise, remember, and perhaps admire. His admiration confused her. For all his insistence on obedience, Darcy wanted the resistance. He wanted to feel it bend.

She placed the letter on the dressing table, undressed in the dark, and climbed into bed. She lay there listening to the old house breathe around her and the garden bench returned to her, his thumb tracing her wrist, his mask slipping, something human showing through. Not tenderness exactly. Its shadow. A shape moving behind glass.

She turned her face into the pillow. The linen smelled of lavender and starch and nothing else, nothing of sandalwood or leather or the particular warmth of a hand too careful for the man it belonged to.

She closed her eyes. Outside, an owl called from the elm at the end of the garden, a sound so familiar it hurt.

Tomorrow her father would demand answers she couldn't give. Tomorrow Darcy would arrive with his plans and his strategies and his dangerous, complicated hands. Tomorrow the pretence would continue.

Tonight she lay in the dark and said her own name, Elizabeth Bennet, Elizabeth Bennet, like a prayer against erasure, a small bright stone held tight in a closed fist, refusing to be dropped.

CHAPTER 4

MR. DARCY

Darcy stood in Netherfield's entrance hall and waited for Bingley as a man waits for a tool he needs but does not particularly enjoy using.

The hall smelled of fresh paint and beeswax, the hasty preparations of a house reopened at short notice. Through the tall windows he could see the drive, empty for now. He checked his watch. Half past three. Bingley was late. He was always late. It was among his lesser failings.

Elizabeth's letter sat folded in his breast pocket. He had read it twice, once for content, once for tells. Her penmanship was controlled except in the fourth line, where the pressure of her nib had thickened on the word "compliance." Agitation. She was angry when she wrote that word. Good. Anger he could manage. It was indifference he feared.

She had not signed it. He should have been irritated. Instead, the omission stirred reluctant admiration, or its more dangerous cousin.

Mr. Bennet had received him that morning. The interview had not gone as Darcy expected. The pointed questions and shrewd pauses were predictable; the refusal to be hurried was not.

"You may have secured my paternal consent, sir," Mr. Bennet had said, "but I suspect there remains much you haven't revealed regarding this sudden attachment."

"Every marriage contains its private understandings, does it not, sir?"

Mr. Bennet's mouth thinned. "Mine has taught me the danger of entering one while determined not to see what's before you. I shall not let my failures serve as your defence."

Darcy had no answer ready for that.

Mr. Bennet had given that consent only after confirming, twice, that Elizabeth still insisted upon the match. Even then her father leaned across the desk and said, "If she asks me for aid, today or ten years hence, neither your name nor your fortune will keep me from giving it."

"I'd expect no less," Darcy replied. It was the truth, and the truth unsettled him more than victory would have done.

Carriage wheels on gravel. He straightened his coat.