Something softer, more tender…more personal.
Her heart gave a violent, stuttering lurch, as if it had just stumbled over a truth it was not ready to face.
No, she thought, a wave of dawning, horrified panic washing over her. This could not be happening. She couldnotbe so monumentally foolish, so utterly contrary, as to feel her own heart open to him only after she had wounded him so unforgivably.
She scrambled for her old justifications, for the anger she felt on behalf of others. She summoned the memory of Jane, of Georgiana. And yet, somehow, the images that had once been so sharp and damning now felt strangely muted, their power to wound dulled by the insistent intrusion of his true character into her heart.
Her gaze jerked up, her eyes wide, and locked on him across the formal divide of the dinner table. Darcy was nodding absently to something the colonel was saying.
It was as if his presence now drew her in completely, and she found she simply could not look away. She began to catalogue the details she had once refused to see, her attention lingering on the dark waves of his hair, the quiet strength in his posture, and the unexpected grace in the precise movements of his hands. Every detail felt like a new and fascinating discovery.
“ — would you not say so, Darcy?” the colonel’s voice boomed, startling her from her reverie. It sounded a bit forced. Even the colonel, it seemed, was beginning to crack under the strain of carrying every conversation.
Darcy murmured a perfunctory answer.
Feeling a ridiculous need to interject herself into the discussion, Elizabeth said lightly, “A debate on stubborn soils, and Mr Darcy of Pemberley offers no opinion? How singular. Perhaps the northern soils require a different manner of cultivation.”
He stilled upon hearing her voice, his focus seemingly roused from some distant contemplation. The blankness in his expression left her with the distinct and rather embarrassingimpression that he had not truly absorbed a word of the colonel’s story.
Her teasing sally, she realised belatedly, had been aimed at a man who was not even present in the conversation. Had he been engaged, it might have been taken as the playful challenge she intended; instead, it could only have sounded like a sharp and unprovoked cruelty. In her attempt to reach him, she had only managed to sound exactly like the woman who had so loved making sport of his reticence.A truly masterful manoeuvre, Lizzy, she laughed at herself pitifully.
The colonel turned to Darcy with a look of good-natured exasperation. “Come now, cousin. As a man whose entire life is devoted to coaxing a harvest from the stubborn soils of Derbyshire, what is your expert counsel?”
Darcy looked as if he was only just registering the end of a story he hadn’t heard. Her heart was pulsing in her ears as she watched him, desperately searching his impassive features for some echo of the upheaval that had just occurred within her own heart.
“There is little sense in labouring over a field that will yield no harvest,” he said eventually.
Unable to shake the suspicion he was not speaking solely of Eckleman and his soils, Elizabeth’s hands suddenly felt cold in her lap. The hopeful pulse she had felt in her own ears just moments before went completely silent.
It was, she thought with sardonic amusement, a perfectly constructed farce, one she would have laughed at were she not a central character. Lord knows her father would have been vastly entertained by the exquisitely terrible irony of it.
Her own heart was finally, hopelessly, softening to him. But she knew any regard on his part was now impossible; she herself had made it so.
Sensing the immediate collapse of the conversation, Colonel Fitzwilliam charged to the rescue. “That reminds me of that time I happened upon Lieutenant Kennedy in Brighton!” he said, with valiant cheer, and then launched determinedly into a story. The colonel’s voice became a meaningless drone in Elizabeth’s ears, entirely drowned out by the deafening silence emanating from the man whose expression now held the very distance she had so vehemently demanded of him.
With Darcy’s principles of visualisation in mind, Elizabeth focused on the leaf. With a concentration that was almost a prayer, she coaxed it from the ground. It rose, trembling, then held steady. Slowly she guided the leaf in a looping dance through the air before allowing it to drift into the stream. With another pulse of will, she created a miniature whirlpool in the water below, swirling the leaf around and around in a mesmerising spiral.
A snap of a twig from the edge of the glade broke her focus.
The leaf sank into the water, the whirlpool vanished, and the magic dissipated as if it had never been. Elizabeth whirled around, her heart leaping into her throat.
Colonel Fitzwilliam was there, astride his horse. He dismounted with a slow deliberation, his gaze never leaving her. The appraising look in his eyes told her everything: he had seen it all.
He said nothing at first, simply walking his mount closer, the silence stretching uncomfortably. Finally, he said, in a tone missing its usual cheer, “Does Darcy know you have been doing this?”
“I have not yet shared it with him.”
“Why not? Elizabeth, after everything…you must know that he would want to help. Surely you cannot think otherwise.”
“He has enough to occupy him,” she said, prevaricating.
And there was another, more private reason she could not voice: the simple, disorienting fact of his nearness. Her heart now seemed to thunder in her chest whenever he was close, a powerful, distracting rhythm that made focus impossible. It was a complication her questionable grasp on her magic could not afford.
“Nothing would be so important to him as this.” The colonel gestured broadly. “This is progress. This ishope.”
“I do not doubt that he would wish to help,” she allowed.
“Then why not inform him?” the colonel demanded. “To practise in secret and conceal a strength is a division. What possible advantage is there in keeping this from him?”
