“Truthfully, Fitzwilliam, it has been only a few months since that first proposal of yours,” she said.
“Yes, but it feels as if it has been twenty years,” he said. “And we have both been through so very much in the meantime.”
“Well, but we must wait,” she said. “It is our penance, you see, for doing this to Richard.”
He thought that over. Nodded. “I suppose I can see that.”
It was quiet.
They both sipped at their tea.
“Perhaps he would wish us to be happy, however?” said Mr. Darcy. “He would not wish us to spend all our time mourning over him?”
She snorted. “He most certainly would, I think. He would have wanted us to shed quite a number of tears, each and every day for months on end, and to profess often and loudly that we could barely comprehend the thought of living without him.”
Mr. Darcy’s smile was tender. “Ah, yes, I suppose that is our Richard.”
“I did love him, you know,” she told her tea.
“I know you did, Lizzy.” A long pause. “I wouldn’t have engineered your marriage if I hadn’t seen that you loved him.”
She looked up at him. “I suppose you did engineer it, didn’t you? You went to him and told him to do it. He did it because you pressed him to do it, not because he wanted to.”
“He wanted to marry you, Lizzy.”
“He wanted to bed me,” she countered, and now she was up on her feet, feeling the same twisted notions of her attachment to Richard Fitzwilliam run all through her. “Youwanted to marry me, Fitz.”
He got to his feet. “No, I promise you, Lizzy, I know my cousin, and I know he was in love with you.”
She shrugged. “I think he loved me the way he had loved a number of other women. He told me of all the widows he had bedded, bragged that he was quite good at knowing how to pleasure a woman, and I was no more than one more of his conquests, and he had to be talked into taking me on, and then he married me in haste, in secret, and I was a source of some shame to his family at his death!”
He came for her. He caught her by the shoulders and made her look at him. “Did I do this, then?”
She tried to look away. “No, Fitz, I should have resisted him in the first—”
He took her chin between his thumb and forefinger. “Lizzy, you know that isn’t fair to you. This is all my fault.”
“Oh, you blame yourself for everything,” she moaned.
“Yes, but of course, this is why it all went the way it did, isn’t it?” he breathed. “Because I blame myself and think of myself as so poorly and feebly made that you could never have wanted me, that it must have been him, that of course you were in love with him, that I must procure him for you, and…”
“And?”
“Well, this is going to sound frightfully arrogant, I think, but you needed me. I was the right man for you. I’ve always been the right man for you, and I should have fought harder for you.”
She shook her head.
“No?” He smiled at her.
“I don’t know. Does it matter? What’s done is done. And we are here now, and I am in mourning, and we shall wait, because that is the way it isdone.”
“Maybe I should fight harder now, Lizzy,” he breathed, searching her gaze. “Let’s go to Scotland. Right now. Tonight.”
She shoved him off. “No.”
He raised his eyebrows. “All right, then.”
“I’ve been a shameful secret too long, Fitz. I want it right this time. I want it properly done. I want to be respectable. I want the banns read and the announcement in the papers, and I want…”
