Page 66 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

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He heard the door slam from the study, two floors below. The whole house heard it. The crystal drops on the hall chandelier rang like bells.

Darcy stood behind his desk and looked down at his father's pistols, and for the first time since the hall, the cold clear anger in him wavered.

I would rather have you alive and ashamed than dead and magnificent.

He sat down. He put his elbows on the desk and his face in his hands.

She was right. That was the unbearable thing. She was right about all of it, and Richard was right, and he had known they were right from the moment he sent for the case. He had known it and done it anyway, because the alternative was to do nothing. To sit in this house and be laughed at, and watch Wickham walk through the Park in a new coat, and bear it. He had not known how to bear it. He had been taught, all his life, that there were things a gentleman did not bear.

He thought of his father, teaching him to shoot at a playing card nailed to an oak in Pemberley park. A Darcy never starts a quarrel, Fitzwilliam. But he always finishes one. He had been nine years old and very proud.

His father had not finished anything with Wickham. His father had paid Wickham's debts, and forgiven him, and paid them again, and died still believing the boy would come right. Darcy had spent ten years despising that weakness.

And tonight, he had been about to go out at dawn without telling his wife, the way his father had gone to London without telling his mother, the way his father had shut every door in this house between himself and the people who loved him, and kept a footman with a candle in the passage in case anybody needed him. He had been about to become exactly what he had built a door in the wall to stop himself becoming.

He stood up. He closed the pistol case, very quietly, and snapped the brass catches shut, and rang for Grey.

"Take these back up," he said, when his valet came in. "Unload them. Put them in the bottom of the press in my dressing room, under the winter coats. I do not want to see them again."

Grey's long grave face did something it had not done in all the years Darcy had known him. It smiled.

"Very good, sir."

Darcy went upstairs.

He did not go into the green room, or the passage, or knock at her door from the outside. He went into his own bedroom, and crossed it, and stood in front of the door in the far wall that had no lock. It was shut. He could hear her on the other side of it: a small, ragged, muffled sound, low down, near the floor.

He put his hand flat on the panel.

"Elizabeth," he said.

The sound stopped.

"I have sent the pistols away," he said to the door. "Grey has them. He is putting them under my winter coats, and I do not think I shall ever find them again. He looked very pleased about it."

Silence on the other side.

"You were right," said Darcy. "You and Richard both. I knew it before you said it. I was going to go at dawn and not tell you, and I knew it was wrong, and I was going to do it anyway, because I did not know what else to do. Because I was so angry that I could not see anything but his face. And because I was afraid."

He leant his forehead against the wood.

"Not of him," he said. "Of this. Of standing still and letting it happen to you and not being able to stop it. I have always been able to stop things. I stopped Ramsgate. I have stopped every bill and every scandal and every creditor since I was two-and-twenty. And I cannot stop this. Every day there is something new in the papers and every day you read it at breakfast with your chin up and I can do nothing. Nothing. I thought, at least I can do this. At least I can make him pay for one thing." His voice cracked. "It was the only thing I could think of that would feel like doing something. That was all it was. It was not courage. It was the opposite."

On the other side of the door, there was a small movement. The sound of skirts on a floor.

Then the door opened.

She was sitting on the carpet, where she had slid down against it, in her crumpled gown, with her hair coming down and her face blotched with crying. She looked up at him. Her eyes were swollen and furious and full of love.

"You great fool," she said. "You enormous, proud, magnificent fool."

He went down on his knees on the threshold, and she came into his arms, and they held each other in the doorway between their two rooms, halfway in and halfway out, with the door with no lock standing open against his shoulder.

"I do not need you to die for me," she said into his neck. "Do you understand? I have never needed that. I need you to live with me. Every day. For fifty years. And be laughed at, if that is what it takes, and come home to dinner, and let me hold your hand while they laugh. That is harder. I know it is harder. That is why I want it."

"I know," he said into her hair. "I know. I am sorry. I am so sorry."