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She had been withdrawing from the investigation for some time. He had observed it and told himself it was fatigue, or caution, or the natural pace of inquiry stalling as inquiries sometimes stalled. But there was a quality to her deflections that had been consistent and deliberate, and sitting at a supper table with her empty chair and the remnants of their shared look still warm in his chest, he found himself questioning whether what he had been reading as caution was something else entirely.

Elizabeth had not chosen this engagement. Neither had he.

But if he had the choice to make now, freely and openly, he might well do so. Darcy’s perception of her, and his feelings about their engagement had gradually shifted, becoming almost unrecognisable.

Did Elizabeth know he no longer wished to prevent their marriage, but welcomed it? And if she learned how his feelings had changed, would she receive the knowledge with happiness, or cold dread?

At that thought, Darcy winced. He picked up his glass, but did not drink.

He turned over this new consideration with unflinching honesty. Though he did not like the conclusion at which he arrived, it was unavoidable. Continuing to pursue an engagement she found repugnant, out of his own growing attachment, was not honour. It was the opposite of honour. He had proposed to protect her, not to bind her to something that made her excuse herself from supper tables before her composure could break.

He set his glass down.

Yet if Elizabeth wished entirely to be freed, why had she seemed to lose interest in their investigations? He had thought it discouragement at the lack of results, but what if there were another answer?

Perhaps she had found something, but if so, why had she kept it a secret? She had not wished to take him and his ten thousand a year regardless of mutual affection when he first proposed, and Darcy did not imagine that her motivations would have become more venial now. None of Elizabeth’s actions were consistent with a woman who was glad to marry a man of fortune and consequence without the more substantial benefit of love. Then, too, she was a woman of principle. If Elizabeth had a simple answer to resolve their compromise, she would share it with him. What could she have found that would place such a burden on her?

Looking at the wall above the empty chair, Darcy at last arrived at a conclusion. If she had found a way out and was not taking it for reasons of her own, the most honourable thing he could do was not add himself to the weight she was carrying.

That was a way forward, if a difficult one. He would not press the investigation, nor yet his personal feelings. Instead, he would give Elizabeth the room that she was asking for, in the only way she felt she could ask for it, and he would conduct the remainder of this engagement with careful integrity. That, at least, he could do. The question of what he had begun to feel, and what it might mean, would remain unasked.

The fish course was removed and replaced. Bingley said something cheerful beside him, and he answered it. The supper continued, and Darcy looked at neither the empty chair nor his wine glass. He attended carefully to the conversation, all the while feeling that his interior and exterior had come entirely uncoupled.

∞∞∞

Caroline had excused herself for five minutes on the pretense of retrieving her shawl. As she walked to the parlour, she heard two voices drifting down from the top of the landing.

She had not missed the manner in which Mr Darcy gazed at Elizabeth Bennet. She did not like the attentiveness in his gaze, the way he tracked her every movement with care.

Miss Eliza had excused herself from supper rather abruptly, in a manner most unlike herself. That was most suggestive. How happy Caroline would have been in her place, with Mr Darcy securely hers, and half the conversation around the table about the lavish arrangements of the wedding to come!

It was only too obvious that Elizabeth Bennet did not feel the same. She did not glory in the chance to become Mrs Darcy — did not even appreciate what she had. She had doubts, and in those regrets was surely an opportunity. A woman doubting the wisdom of her engagement was not a woman moving toward marriage. She was a woman who could be helped toward a door she already wished to find.

Caroline turned to her right and made a bright, complimentary comment about the soup to Mrs Bennet. She did not trouble herself to listen to the answer before turning to Georgiana and enquiring about her latest piece on the pianoforte. Those exchanges led to others, each offering Caroline the chance she sought to exhibit her grace and charm to that gentleman who ought to have noticed it by now.

All the while, she thought very carefully about Elizabeth Bennet, who needed help to reach the obviously correct decision, and about the shape of the help she intended to provide.

Chapter Fifteen

Though Elizabeth would have said that matters could hardly grow worse, she soon found that she had been mistaken. As suddenly and inexorably as a shift in the wind may bring a chilling rain, the narrative had shifted.

A conversation at the circulating library that paused when she entered, resumed at a lower register, and resolved into smiles of the wrong kind when she asked for her book. A visit from Mrs Long, whose enquiries after her health had acquired a new quality, solicitous in a way that implied she had heard something requiring solicitude. More alarming still was Charlotte’s expression at church on Sunday. She was composed, but there was no ease and a great deal of concern in her manner. In combination with all the other oddities of the past week, that expression could best be accounted for by the supposition that she knew something highly unpleasant, and was choosing the most suitable, least painful time at which to share it.

Charlotte told her on Tuesday, walking in the garden at Lucas Lodge and speaking with the brisk pragmatism she brought to unpleasant things. “There is a version of events being circulated,” Charlotte said carefully. “I should not like to speak of it. Only…only I believe you should know.”

Elizabeth knew, or suspected, before she had finished. The version being circulated had a familiar shape: a Bennet girl, forward by nature; a gentleman of fortune, known to be a most desirable prize on the marriage mart; a young woman who had gone alone, and early, to a room she knew Mr Darcy used; a mother who had been openly delighted with the match despite how it was made. Even the locked door had been hinted at, made into another hideous piece of evidence.

“I cannot tell you the source,” Charlotte added, “because it has no single source. The rumour has seemed to move without a name attached to it.”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “I am becoming all too familiar with it.”

She thought about the kind of rumour that travels without attribution, that rearranges facts rather than inventing them, that cannot be disproven because it does not make a claim susceptible to proof. Elizabeth thought likewise about who had access to the particular combination of facts required, and found herself drawing a conclusion that she could not share with her friend.

Elizabeth thanked her for her honesty and care, and walked home, weighed down by things she could not say, replaying the details over and over again.

What the neighbourhood was now circulating was two stories that had been braided together into one.

The first was that Elizabeth Bennet had calculated the compromise. This version did not say so directly, but said instead that she had always been clever, that her mother’s ambitions had been openly displayed, that it was perhaps not so surprising that cleverness and ambition, combined with opportunity, had produced an outcome that any young woman with a small dowry and few expectations must regard as a triumph.