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“I would rather,” she said, and the tears she had been holding back through sheer force of will were close enough now that she could hear them in her voice, and she hated that even more than she hated him in this moment. “I would rather return to my plans of disappearing entirely, I would rather fake my own death or go into service as a governess, than marry a man who has just informed me in such a thorough manner of how unsuitable and repugnant I am, and how much he is lowering himself in order to save me.”

“No! Elizabeth — wait —”

But she didn’t wait to hear him; she had already turned away as she did not trust herself to remain a moment longer without the tears finally overtaking her, and she was determined not to allow them to do so where he could see them. So she did all she could and hurried along the path to the house, all but running up the stone steps, leaving him standing there amid the roses with the ruins of his proposal scattered at his feet.

Chapter 19

Darcy was never able to entirely remember the walk back to the house after that rejected proposal. He remembered the roses vividly from the start, and suspected that he would remember them for the rest of his life, however much he would like to forget the vivid splashes of colour, and how the petals curved and blew gently in the breeze as the words that dashed his hopes rained down on him. He remembered them, and he remembered reaching his study and closing the door, and he remembered standing there, rather foolishly, at the door, his hand still on the handle, as though bracing for an intrusion that he knew would not happen.

He had ruined everything.

Darcy sat down behind his desk, finally, his unfocused stare shifting from the back of the door to the polished wood surface, his face blank as his mind frantically tried to understand what had happened. He approached the dilemma with the same methodical consideration he had always brought to his problems, and found, much to his frustration, that when he needed it most, his orderly system failed him utterly.

Darcy could remember what he had said — exactly what he had said — and that was the worst part of all. He could recall with perfect, merciless clarity what he had told her, and the longer he examined the words, the less he could understand how he had ever thought they could belong in a marriage proposal.

Foolish! Lord, he had never felt so foolish. He had only meant to be honest — he had told himself that she deserved honesty, and that a woman of her intelligence would, in fact, demand it. She would, he had assured himself, value that type of plain realism over the empty flattery other men offered. He had been convinced she would see how deep his regard for her truly went when she saw he had considered and utterly disregarded whatever barriers might have stood in the way of their union.

Only with the bitter gift of hindsight did he see that what he had thought of as realism was in fact cruelty, and that he hadn’t got to the part where he rejected those beliefs that others might have had. Instead, he had handed her a list of deficiencies, had made no attempt to explain that he did not see them as such, and only now, when he was almost paralyzed by the devastation of her refusal, he could understand why she had failed to see his words in the light he had intended them.

He could not even regret that Elizabeth had refused him, though his chest still ached with it. She had been right to refuse him; he might even go so far as to say she had to refuse him. If she had not, if she had accepted a proposal offered as simply a transaction to overcome some inconvenient problems, much less a solution offered despite what were framed as her own deficiencies, she would not have been the woman he had come to love so thoroughly.

After his late-night conversation with Bingley and Fitzwilliam, Darcy had awoken with the burning desire to ask her, as if by giving voice to his regard for her he had to move at once to actualise it. He hadn’t prepared, and had wanted, with some confused and desperate part of himself, for Elizabeth to simply see the deep regard he felt for her. That had been unreasonable, Darcy knew now. Fool that he was, he had given her nothing with which to see or even suspect the existence of that love.

He was still sitting there, staring at the bare surface of the desk, when a knock came at the door. He looked up slowly to find his uncle standing in the doorway, watching him with an expression that communicated nothing beyond a certain attentiveness, as though he suspected Darcy had done something interesting and was intrigued to see if he would do it again.

“May I come in?” his uncle asked. Darcy gestured wordlessly at the chair opposite, and the earl came in, closing the door carefully behind himself with a click that sounded very loud in the still space. He settled into the chair and tilted his head, regarding his nephew with mild curiosity.

“You look,” he said finally, “like you have had a rather bad morning.”

“I am quite well,” Darcy said automatically, knowing even as he spoke the words that it was one of the more transparently false things he had ever said.

“Of course you are,” Matlock agreed, with no sarcasm that Darcy could hear, which somehow made it even more cutting than outright scorn would have been. The earl said nothing else — he simply waited, with the patience of a man who long ago learned that a well-held silence could get more answers than questions or demands ever could.

Darcy remained silent as long as his pride would allow him, which, considering how thorough a beating that quality had taken that day, was not long at all.

“I proposed to Miss Elizabeth,” he admitted. He didn’t look to see if his uncle’s never-changing expression changed. Somehow the confession opened some closed reservoir that he had not been aware was under such pressure, and the words came out of him in a rush, as though by admitting them quickly enough he might outrun the shame of them. “I must apologise, sir, for contemplating bringing such a connection into the family. Her mother is indiscreet at best, and her relations are…an embarrassment. Her younger sisters have neither sense nor restraint, and the youngest of them is the entire reason we are all in this situation in the first place. The scandal of what occurred in the library, however unjustly it came to be, will follow Miss Elizabeth regardless of the eventual resolution, whatever it may be, and I had no right to expect you and my aunt to receive a woman who —”

“Did you say all of that to her?” the earl asked. The question was asked with his usual unhurried curiosity, but it was unlike him to interrupt, and somehow it stopped the rushing stream of Darcy’s justifications as effectively as a dam barred a raging river.

“I…I beg your pardon?” Darcy asked, blinking.

“What you have just said to me,” the earl clarified, “about her mother, and her relations, and her sisters, and the scandal. I am curious whether you mentioned any of those topics to Miss Elizabeth herself when you proposed to her.”

Darcy opened his mouth to reply and closed it again. There was no judgement in the earl’s voice, but somehow Darcy felt he had already been found lacking. “I did, sir. It seemed to me that if I outlined the difficulties fully, if I were honest about them, she would appreciate that I was speaking to her intelligence and not attempting to gloss over unpleasant truths.”

“I see,” the earl said. “And she refused you.”

It was not phrased as a question, but Darcy felt compelled to answer as though it had been. “She did.”

His uncle was quiet for a moment, and when he spoke again, his tone was dry rather than disapproving, which was harder to bear than outright condemnation would have been. “Darcy,” he said reasonably, “any woman of character would be compelled to refuse a proposal that was delivered in the form of a catalogue of her own faults. Did you tell her you did not see them as faults?”

Darcy closed his eyes briefly. “I told her…that people would believe I had degraded myself by marrying her.”

The earl actually winced. “I believe that I would have to be seriously concerned for Miss Elizabeth’s good sense and self-respect had she not refused you.”

There was nothing that Darcy could say in reply to that, and so he was silent.

The earl sighed. “You believed that we, your family, would object to the match? Is that why you felt obliged to list all the disadvantages to it in your proposal?” This time it was a question.