The conservatory was quiet with filtered light.
She noticed it as she reached for her shift, which lay draped across the chair where it had been drying by the fire. The glassroof was still buried under snow, but the storm had stopped, and the morning sun above it turned the white covering into a pale, even glow. Not the clear northern light the room had been built for, but enough to see by.
Peeking out the door, she saw the world outside was white and still. It looked, from where she stood pulling her shift over her head, like a simple walk to Longbourn. She had walked that distance a hundred times. The ground would be covered, but the sun was out, and without the driving snow, she knew these paths. She could follow the hedgerows. She could be home before the household had finished breakfast, could slip in through the kitchen and claim she had sheltered in a barn, and no one would ever need to know about this cottage or this fire or the man sleeping on the floor with the ghost of her body still warm against his.
She dressed quickly, fingers fumbling with laces she knew by heart. Her dress was wrinkled and stiff from its night by the fire, but it was dry. Her pelisse was dry. Her boots, set near the hearth, were stiff but wearable. She pulled them on and tied them with hands that would not stop shaking.
She did not look at Mr. Darcy again. One more look at his sleeping face and her resolve would crumble, and she would crawl back under the blankets and press herself against his chest and stay, and staying was the one thing she could not do, because staying meant choosing, and choosing meant trusting, and trusting meant opening herself to the possibility of devastation, and she was not brave enough for that.
She told herself she was not brave enough.
It was easier than admitting she was terrified of being brave and having it not be enough.
She crossed to the door and eased it open. The cold hit her face like a slap, but the wind was gone. The world was still. Snow lay in smooth, unbroken drifts across the clearing, glittering in the morning sun with a beauty that felt almost mocking in its serenity.
It looked manageable. It looked survivable. It looked like a walk, not a death sentence.
She stepped outside and pulled the door shut behind her.
The snow was deeper than she expected, halfway to her knees in the clearing, deeper where it had drifted against walls and fences. But the sun was warm on her face, and she could see the line of the hedgerow that marked the boundary of Netherfield's grounds, and beyond it the gentle rise of the hill she had climbed a thousand times on her way to Oakham Mount.
She knew where she was. She knew the way home.
She walked.
Behind her, the cottage sat in its clearing. Behind its walls, Fitzwilliam Darcy slept on the floor before a dying fire with his arm outstretched across empty blankets, reaching for a woman who was no longer there.
Elizabeth did not look back.
If she had, she might not have kept walking. And she needed to keep walking, because the alternative was turning around and choosing him, and she did not yet know. could not yet know whether choosing him would save her or destroy her.
The snow crunched beneath her boots. The sun climbed higher. The sky was blue and clear and full of lies.
8
LOST
For the first quarter-mile,she believed she had made the right decision.
The sun was climbing. The snow glittered. The hedgerow she followed ran straight and true along the boundary of Netherfield's grounds, its dark tangle of bare branches rising above the drifts like a fence line, and she knew that if she followed it south, it would bring her to the lane that led past Lucas Lodge to Meryton, and from there to Longbourn.
She had walked this route a hundred times. She could do it with her eyes closed.
The snow was deeper than it had looked from the cottage. It came past her ankles in the open ground and near her knees where it had drifted against the hedgerow. Each step required a deliberate, effortful lift-and-plunge that used muscles she had not known she possessed. Her boots were adequate, but not made for this. Eventually, the snow had found its way over the tops, soaking her stockings, and the cold crept upward from her feet.
But the sun was out. The air was still. She could see where she was going.
She kept walking.
The fog arrived without announcement.
One moment the sky was clear, the sun bright enough to make her squint against the glare of the snow. The next, a pale haze had settled across the world like gauze drawn over a lamp. It thickened with astonishing speed, swallowing the hedgerow behind her and the field ahead, and the distant line of trees she had been using as a bearing. Within minutes, she could see perhaps twenty yards in any direction. Within a quarter hour, even that had narrowed to ten.
She stopped.
She turned slowly, a full circle, looking for anything — a wall, a tree, a building, the dark line of a hedge. Nothing. Fog had reduced the world to a sphere of white, flat and directionless, the ground merging with the sky until she could not tell where one ended and the other began. The sun had become a pale disc, diffused and useless, offering light but no warmth and no shadow to navigate by.
The cold, which had been manageable while she was moving with purpose, began to tighten its grip. Her dress and pelisse, dried by the cottage fire, were damp again from the waist down where she had been wading through snow. Her fingers ached inside her gloves. Her toes had passed through pain into a numbness she knew was dangerous.
