PROLOGUE
On a warm and otherwise innocuous Friday evening in June, Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy entered the British Institution in Pall Mall, London. Therein was displayed a collection of works by several celebrated artists, and splendid were the many exhibits. That, however, was not why Darcy had come. Up the grand staircase and through a series of candlelit rooms he moved, navigating his way with ill-disguised impatience around groups of milling connoisseurs, dilettantes, and proponents of fashionable society. He searched the faces around him, anxious to catch a glimpse of his quarry but increasingly certain he had missed his chance—until he reached the entrance of the upper east exhibition room.
There, beyond a sea of tables, easels, floor candelabras, and what seemed like half theton, seated on one very particular couch, between two architecturally extraneous but nevertheless imposing marble columns, sat Miss Elizabeth Bennet.
He breathed a sigh of relief to see her there, and to see that she was alone. She looked extraordinarily lovely, the glow of so many candles adding yet another layer of loveliness to her complexion. He knew he must speak to her, yet his feet remained obstinately rooted to the spot. This might be the lasttime he ever saw her, the last moment before the spark of hope that flickered wildly in his breast was forever doused. He would look his fill before he chanced to hear her say that all hope was in vain.
It had been more than half a year since he last spoke to her—at an excruciating dinner at Longbourn the previous autumn—and they had scarcely exchanged a dozen words on that occasion. He had gone there to judge whether he might ever succeed in making Elizabeth love him.
To his profound regret, it had transpired that no, he could not.
In the eight months since, his admiration and regard for her had not lessened by even the smallest iota, and misery and loneliness had become his constant bedfellows. What Elizabeth had done in those eight months, and with whom she had done it, Darcy knew not. What he did know was that now she was in danger, and he could not—nay,wouldnot—stand by and allow her to be ill-used.
She might not thank him for it, he knew. The cost of his previous interference had been the loss of her regard—or at least the entrenching of her antipathy. Yet the cost of his silence where Wickham was concerned had been greater still, and to more people than him alone. Thus, although he did not relish drawing Elizabeth’s ire upon himself again, he would warn her that she was about to ally herself with a different cad.
He would have done so, even if her displeasure were guaranteed. There was, however, one tiny sliver of hope that she might not be displeased to see him. As a consequence of the most unlikely sequence of events ever to have occurred in—or out of, for that matter—an art gallery, an astonishing report had reached him: that against all evidence to the contrary, Elizabeth might be amenable to a renewal of his attentions.
So incredible was this string of coincidences that Darcy could scarcely believe it had happened at all, let alone what it purportedly signified. And yet, had none of it come to pass in the manner it had, he would never have learnt to hope at all. He would have turned away from this exact spot—where, four days ago, he had set eyes on Elizabeth for the first time in months—and left without ever seeing her again. Fortunately, that was not quite how events transpired.
CHAPTER ONE
Earlier that week
Darcy had never stared at a painting with such intensity in his life as the one in front of him, depicting three rotten apples and a dead fish. Other visitors had come and gone, and he had murmured assent to every expression of admiration they had made about it, hoping none of them would notice how often his gaze was not on the canvas at all but beyond it. For, with a furtiveness that was both uncharacteristic and unpardonable, he was watching Elizabeth stroll about the room, arm in arm with a woman he did not know, whilst he attempted to summon the courage to talk to her.
He had not expected to see her here. He had not expected to see heranywhere, ever again, and the shock of doing so had apparently knocked all rational thought out of his head. Nothing and no one else could reduce him to cowering out of sight behind an easel in a public viewing gallery, but he knew not how he ought to go about greeting her.
His initial thought had been that he ought not to attempt it at all; she could have no desire to see him, and he certainly hadno wish to be mortified by her indifference. As was her wont, however, she had exerted an insuperable gravitational pull on him, and he had found himself approaching—only to divert at the last moment to contemplate the lifeless carp, a less perilous encounter by far.
He willed her to look his way; then he willed her with equal forcenotto, for the possibility that she might see him but choose not to acknowledge him was too painful to countenance.He instantly dismissed the notion; Elizabeth might not return his regard, but that did not alter the fact that she was the most compassionate and amiable woman of his acquaintance. Publicly slighting people was not something she would ever do. That assurance, in addition to the overwhelming desire to speak to her, drew Darcy out from behind the easel.
She and her companion had stopped to peer up at a large seascape hung high on the wall. In profile, with her chin tilted up and a pensive frown on her face, Elizabeth looked so lovely that Darcy smiled despite his unease. He had not forgotten a single feature of her countenance, but memories were no substitute for the real thing, and the real Elizabeth was sublime. His feet moved towards her, his heart began to pound as though he were approaching a lion’s den, and then the woman on Elizabeth’s arm struck up a conversation with another couple. It was enough to scatter Darcy’s tenuous resolve, and he turned away, bumped into someone, apologised, sidestepped them, knocked into someone else, apologised again, and hastened to the opposite wall, cringing lest Elizabeth had heard the commotion and seen him scurrying away.
Damn this insanity!He would leave. He would return to his sister, waiting in the carriage outside, and forget he had ever seen Elizabeth. Except, he was now as far from the main double doors as it was possible to be, on the wrong side of the room to reach the only other exit—a small, single door in the far corner—and so depleted of courage that he could not bring himself to turn around. The painting he had come to be staring at this time was a particularly well-rendered pastiche ofJudith and Holofernes, only in this one, rather than the woman slitting the man’s throat, she was stabbing him in the heart.Apropos,he thought wryly.
In truth, though, Elizabeth had not intentionally inflicted any wound on him—his heartbreak was all his own doing. From his careless censure of her beauty, early in their acquaintance, to his profoundly offensive offer of marriage—somewhere in the middle, he had done about as much as any man could to ensure a woman’s antipathy. It was little surprise that even his sincerest efforts to redeem himself in the succeeding months had failed.
Had it been up to him, he might never have stopped believing he would one day succeed in making her love him. He had, after all, fooled himself before into thinking that she did, and the force of the passion he felt for her could easily have led to him being fooled again. Regrettably, there had been a stream of evidence in proof of the fact that all hope was lost, which even his desperate heart had not been able to overlook.
The first blow had come during the few days the previous autumn when he had returned to London to attend to some insignificant business that he wished now he had ignored. He had left Hertfordshire with the expectation that Bingley would propose to Miss Jane Bennet while he was gone and with every intention of returning to try and secure the same happiness for himself with Elizabeth. Before his business was concluded, Lady Catherine had arrived at his London house with the news that she had visited Longbourn and been told that Elizabeth was absolutely, irrevocably decided against him.
Notwithstanding the insolence of his aunt’s interference, her report was so accurate, the words and phrasing so like Elizabeth’s own, Darcy had found it difficult to discredit. Hecould perfectly envisage Elizabeth unabashedly asserting that Lady Catherine was not entitled to know her business. He could almost hear her exclaiming at the implication that she and he were not equals. He knew precisely what expression she would have worn as she declared that she was resolved to act in that manner that would constitute her happiness without reference to anyone unconnected to her. He could not easily, therefore, dismiss Lady Catherine’s claim that Elizabeth had also frankly and openly given the promise that she would never enter into an engagement with him.
This alone might not have been enough to rob him of all hope, but the very next day, Bingley had slunk back to London with his tail between his legs, despondent and still single. Jane Bennet, it transpired,hadgot engaged, only not to him. In the months of his absence, she had met and fallen in love with a Mr Malcolm. The happiness that Darcy had thought he perceived in her upon Bingley’s return had been real, but his friend had not been its object.
“The whole family has forsaken me,” Bingley had lamented at the time. “Miss Catherine told me Jane is happier with Malcolm than she ever was with me, and according to her, Miss Elizabeth is delighted that the man has no friends in high places to persuade him against her family.”
Until that moment, Darcy had dared to dream that Elizabeth had forgiven him for separating Bingley and Jane. When they met in Derbyshire the previous summer, she had no longer seemed angry. Of course, that was before Wickham eloped with Lydia Bennet. When that news reached them, Elizabeth had hastened home to support her family, and he had raced to London with the purpose of saving her sister. Alas, Miss Lydia had not wanted to be saved, and the best Darcy had managed was to force Wickham to make an honest woman of her. Withwhich act, he had hammered the final nail in the coffin of his own romantic aspirations.
He tried to have as little to do with the Wickhams as possible, but since they moved to Newcastle, he had been required to settle several more debts of honour as well as to vouch—in person—for Wickham’s character, to prevent him losing his commission and returning to Longbourn to live off Mr Bennet’s meagre income. Whilst Darcy was in Newcastle, Mrs Wickham, far further into her first pregnancy than her few months of marriage made feasible, had railed at him for her pitiful circumstances.
“This is all your fault! You made me marry him! You, who knew he could never be a good husband, made me take him into my bed!”
When Darcy pointed out that she had obviously taken him there long before anyone insisted that they marry, she had replied, “Only because I thought he could be trusted! If you had told us what he really was, I would never have thrown myself into his power! You know it is true. Wickham knows it, my aunt and uncle Gardiner know it. Lizzy knows it.”
“Your sister knows of my involvement in this?” he had demanded.
“Of course she does! You think yourself so cunning—well, Lizzy is twice as clever as you. She knows precisely who condemned me to this hell, and it is hell, Mr Darcy. I have not one reason to be happy. I shall never forgive you for it. None of us will.”
