He began with the obvious. Her family. The mother whose nerves were a weapon and whose ambitions were a mortification. The younger sisters, two of them shrieking over officers as if the militia were a lending library and they could not decide which volume to check out first. And Miss Elizabeth’s father who was clever enough to know better and too indolent to act on it.
Then Bingley. Poor, trusting Bingley, who would follow Darcy's lead in most things but who would be bewildered and then quietly hurt if Darcy, having counseled him against the Bennets, turned around and attached himself to one. The hypocrisy of it would be breathtaking.
And his Aunt Catherine would receive the news like a declaration of war. She had spoken of Anne, of the understanding between their families, as though it were settled law rather than wishful thinking, and she would make Elizabeth's life a misery if given the opportunity.
And Georgiana. Sweet, fragile Georgiana, who needed a sister-in-law she could trust, who deserved better than to be thrust into a family whose youngest members might undo every inch of progress she had made since Ramsgate.
He built his walls back up, brick by methodical brick. Station. Propriety. Duty. The expectations of his name, the weight of Pemberley, the careful architecture of a life designed to honor his family's legacy and protect its future. Each reason was sound. Each reason was true. Each reason should have been enough.
He laid them out with the precision of a man setting stones in mortar, one atop the next, until the wall stood solid and high and unassailable between himself and the woman sleeping in the corner of this ridiculous cottage.
There.
It was done.
He would sit here through the night and keep the fire. He would guard her rest, because he was a gentleman and that was what gentlemen did. And in the morning, when the storm passed, he would escort her back to Longbourn and deliver her to her family with whatever story best preserved her reputation. And then he would return to Netherfield and persuade Bingley to close the lease early, and he would go back to London, and in time, a month, a year, however long it took, the memory of this night would lose its edges. Just a strange evening. A storm and a cottage with a glass roof. Nothing more.
He returned to his chair. Sat down. Rested his head against the back of it and closed his eyes.
He had perhaps ten seconds of peace.
Elizabeth shifted in her sleep.
It was a small movement, a readjustment of her body beneath the blankets. Her hair slid across the pillow with a sound like a whisper.
Every wall he had just rebuilt trembled.
Darcy opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling, his hands gripping the arms of the chair. He could feel his pulse in his throat, heavy and insistent, and beneath it a deeper current: the wanting, the terrible wanting that had settled into his bones like a fever.
The evening had cracked him open. The conversation about his mother. The way she had understood without pity. Standing behind a thin door while she undressed, his forehead pressed against the wood, his hands clenched at his sides. And now she was asleep. Beautiful and completely unaware of what she was doing to him. The wall was already cracking, and the mortar was still wet.
Darcy did not know if he wanted to stop it, and that was the most terrifying thought of all.
He rose again, quietly, and fed another log to the fire. The wood caught quickly, and he watched the flames climb with the blank attention of a man who had run out of arguments against himself.
He would not sleep tonight. He would sit here and guard her rest and keep his hands to himself and his confessions behind his teeth. He would not think about the curve of her neck or the way her face had changed when he said those three words or the brush of his finger against her hand over the wine cup, that accidental, devastating point of contact that had sent ajolt through his body he could still feel, hours later, like the aftershock of a lightning strike.
In the morning, he would see her home. Then he would rebuild his walls with better mortar and never speak of this night again.
He sat back down and watched the fire, listened to her breathe, and told himself all of this with the conviction of a man reciting a prayer he had long since stopped believing.
5
WALLS AND WINDOWS
Elizabeth woketo cold and the sound of wind.
Not the steady moan that had accompanied her into sleep, but something sharper, a high, keening shriek that found every gap in the cottage's stone walls and drove through them like needles. The fire had burned lower, its light reduced to a sullen orange glow, and the temperature in the room had dropped so steeply that Elizabeth could see her breath in thin white plumes above the blanket.
She lay still for a moment, clenching her jaw against the chatter of her teeth, and took stock.
The cot. The blankets. The scratchy wool against her bare skin. These things she remembered. But the cold had changed character while she slept, deepening from discomfort into something with teeth, and the blankets that had felt sufficient an hour ago — two hours? she had no way of knowing — now seemed thin as muslin.
She heard him before she saw him.
The scrape of the chair against the floor. The creak of his weight shifting. Then his voice, rough with something that might have been fatigue: “The wind has changed direction. It is driving snow through the gaps in the window frames.”
Elizabeth pushed herself upright, pulling the blankets to her chin, and found Mr. Darcy exactly where she had left him in the chair by the hearth, his legs stretched toward the diminished fire, his greatcoat draped across his lap. He looked as though he had not moved for hours. He also looked as though he had not slept at all.
