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“Silence is appropriate when it protects someone from something they do not want,” Bingley said. “It is less appropriate when what it actually does is leave them to draw their own conclusions from insufficient evidence. What conclusions would you draw, in her position, from your behaviour these past weeks?”

Darcy thought about it, and arrived at the image of a man who had conducted every interaction with the careful evenness of someone managing an obligation. Who had moved to her at an assembly and defended her, yes, but who had also maintained, in every private moment, an equally careful distance. In every particular, Darcy had behaved exactly like a man of honour who wanted to be elsewhere, and who restrained himself from saying so only with difficulty.

Dread and remorse coiled in his stomach, cold and nausea-inducing. “She thinks I am enduring it,” he said.

“I believe so,” Bingley agreed.

“And in trying not to burden her with my own feelings, I have instead produced something that looks, from her side, like a man counting the days until his execution.”

“That is a fairly accurate summary of it.”

Darcy moved to the window. The frost on the gravel caught what little light came from the house. He stood there for a moment with the full weight of the past weeks and months arranged plainly before him, stripped of the justifications he had applied to each individual decision, and saw the shape of it whole.

He had been so intent on not placing himself in her way; he had meant it for the best, and produced the worst. Darcy had been so careful not to use his feelings as a claim on her that he had inadvertently hidden the only thing that might have changed the nature of what she was enduring.

And she had been enduring it. He knew this. He had watched her endure it with a grace and a wit and an integrity that had cost her something every day, and he had admired it and said nothing, and the admiration had been invisible and the saying nothing had been all she had to work with.

“She does not know,” he said. She does not know my heart; I have made it impossible that she could.

Bingley said nothing. He did not need to speak.

Darcy turned from the window, knowing that something must be done. He had told himself that he would not speak unless she asked. He had thought it for the best, and he had been wrong.

Elizabeth deserved to know. Not as a claim, or as pressure, and not as something she was required to receive or respond to in any particular way. But she was carrying a weight that was partly his to carry, and she had been carrying it alone under a misapprehension that was largely his fault.

“I need to speak to her,” he said.

Bingley looked at him with a crooked smile, like a schoolmaster pleased with a slightly slow student who has finally grasped the lesson. “Yes,” he said. “You do.”

Not through a letter, even though it would be more comfortable, as it would spare him of having to reveal in excruciating detail all the ways he had been wrong. A letter could be drafted and revised and reduced to the version of honesty that required the least exposure. Elizabeth deserved more than that. “I must speak to her in person.”

“That would be my recommendation,” Bingley agreed.

Darcy looked at the fire. He thought about what he would say, and found himself equally terrified and elated by the thought of finally, finally laying bare his heart.

Elizabeth might not return his feelings; that was an eventuality that he must accept. It was entirely possible that Bingley was right about what she did not know, but wrong about what she felt. That he would speak and she would receive it with nothing more than kindness, and that the kindness would be worse than the silence had ever been.

So be it; Darcy would still speak. Tomorrow he would call at Longbourn and say what he should have said weeks ago.

“Thank you,” he said to Bingley.

“Don’t thank me,” Bingley said. “Go to bed. You look terrible.”

Darcy smiled ruefully. “You are not much improved yourself.”

“I have my own difficulties,” Bingley said, finally laying his cue stick on the table.

This was true, Darcy noted, and suggested a conversation they did not need to have tonight but must have soon. Bingley’s situation with Miss Bennet also needed attention.

One thing at a time. Darcy bade his friend goodnight and went upstairs, though he knew sleep would be long in coming. Tomorrow would require all his courage; tomorrow would define all his hopes.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Mr Darcy arrived early at Longbourn the following morning. Elizabeth knew the identity of their visitor at once, simply from the sound of Mr Darcy’s horse on the gravel. Without meaning to, she had become familiar with so many small details of the man, from the difference between a social smile and one felt truly, to the quality of his step and the sound of his horse. There was no reason to believe this visit different from any other, yet her heart was pounding and her mouth was dry. Even without reason, she believed it was.

When Mrs Hill showed him in, Elizabeth was carefully arranged in the drawing room with her embroidery in her lap, though she could not remember the last time she had taken a stitch. Her mother was there, and Kitty by the window, and Mary at the pianoforte, working through a passage that had been resisting her for a week; the picture of a morning at Longbourn.

Mr Darcy came in and greeted them with his usual composure, but he looked at Elizabeth first. Elizabeth felt her breath catch upon seeing the difference in that look. There was something in it she could not immediately classify. The urgency with which he spoke, however, was not difficult to identify at all.