“Miss Elizabeth Bennet.”
Miss Bennet? Cousin to Lady Catherine’s parson?“And you love her, you say?”
Darcy levelled a glare at him. “Since you found your way in, I assume you can find your way out just as easily.”
Fitzwilliam held up his hands. “I beg your pardon. It is only, after so patchy an acquaintance, I must admit to some surprise at hearing you speak of love. Are you sure it is not merely a fascination that will pass in time?”
“How long do you propose I wait to find out? A month? Six? Eight months, Fitzwilliam—eight—and still I am in as deep as the first day. I have never felt aught akin to this before. It consumes me.”
Fitzwilliam knew not what to make of such talk. It was not that either of them had ever explicitly disdained the notion of love, but it had never occurred to him—and he was damned sure it had never occurred to Darcy—that they would ever be troubled by it. Of course, he knew people who claimed to be in love. Some of them were even married, though none of them to each other. But that Darcy, who never caught a cold but that he planned it in advance, should be thus afflicted was… incredible.
He could not be satisfied until he had an account of how it came about. As he listened to Darcy’s rather halting depiction of his association with Miss Bennet, it became clear there was even more toadmire in the lady than he had observed for himself in Kent—aside, that was, from those most fundamental of virtues: connections and fortune. No wonder the old chap was languishing in despair. “Are you distressed, then, because you cannot have her?”
Darcy gave a bark of bitter laughter. “In a nutshell, yes.”
“Well, admittedly, there is little to be done about her relations, but you could surely afford the want of fortune.”
Darcy exhaled heavily. “I am marginally comforted to know your assumptions mirror what my own have been.”
“Pardon?”
“It is not her circumstances that hamper me.”
“What then stands in your way? Marry the girl!”
“She will not have me.”
“Pardon?”
“You heard. I offered for her. She refused. Emphatically.”
“But—why?” No answer was forthcoming. “Does she favour another?”
Darcy grimaced and lifted a hand to run over his face, only to catch the slash on his cheek, ripping a harsh curse from his lips.
“Pardon me. That was impolitic.”
Darcy dismissed his apology with a grunt. Past the hand with which he dabbed blood from his cheek, he mumbled, “She does not love me.”
“She does notwhat? She turned you down—Pemberley for God’s sake—for a want of love?”
“That was the gist of her reasoning.”
“Singular. I have not been used to consider love as high on most women’s list of criteria for a husband.”
Darcy sighed. “Elizabeth is not most women.”
That much was becoming clear. “But you are friends. Was that not enough for her?”
“We were never friends,” he said stiffly. “In that, as in so much else, I was mistaken. She despises me.”
“Surely not!”
Yet apparently, it was true. Darcy’s expression said it all.
“I gave her no reason to like me. I slighted her. I ignored her. I quarrelled with her.”
Fitzwilliam raised his eyebrows. “An interesting approach to courtship.”
