“The morning after the Netherfield ball,” he said, and his tone changed then, losing its lightness. “When the house was in an uproar, and your mother complained later that she could not find me, I had taken a horse to call at Netherfield before breakfast.”
Elizabeth stared. “You never asked me!”
“I had not intended to. It was a private errand, and I was not certain of my footing. I thought to speak to him plainly. To ask what he intended. No more than that.”
Her hand tightened on the letter she still held. “And?”
“And he was already gone,” Papa said. “Risen early. Left word with Mr Bingley while he was still in his dressing room. Did not even stay to break his fast but was gone with the first light.”
“You would have obligated him,” she said slowly. “Challenged his honour. Papa, do you not see? You would have nearly forced an offer from a man who would never intend to make one!”
“I would have asked him whether he understood what he had stirred,” her father replied. “And whether he meant to stand by it.”
Elizabeth’s throat worked. “You had no right.”
“Perhaps not,” he said. “But I am your father, and I have rights that do not require permission.”
She placed the letter carefully on top of the others. “Well. What a mercy for him that his rights do not oblige him to answer for yours.”
Darcy did not ringfor a light. He carried one down himself, the flame sputtering in his hand, his breath still ragged from the dream he could not yet dismiss as such.
The house lay silent around him, wrapped in that peculiar stillness that followed alarm rather than peace. Brutus padded at his heel, close enough that Darcy felt the brush of furagainst his calf each time he slowed, each time his steps faltered as though the floor might yet be hot beneath them.
He set the candle down on his desk hard enough to make the flame gutter and immediately reached for another, then another, until the room took on the layered glow of necessity rather than comfort. Books lay open where he had left them. TheLiber de Terris et Finibusrested among them.
He did not sit.
He moved from shelf to shelf, from desk to cabinet, pulling volumes down without ceremony: old chronicles his father had insisted upon keeping; a battered collection of ballads that were contemporaries or protégés of Harrowe; a Latin tract copied and recopied by monastic hands, its margins crowded with cramped corrections and faint glosses. He opened them all at once, spreading them across the table, the chair, the floor, the window-seat. Brutus settled beside the hearth and watched him with grave attention, head lifted, ears pricked, as though this, too, were a vigil.
Darcy read standing, leaning, crouching—whatever position allowed him to keep moving. The language resisted him at every turn. Words shifted their meanings under his eye; spellings changed from page to page; references assumed knowledge no longer held by anyone living. He translated, then checked himself. He cross-referenced, then doubted. More than once, he snapped a book shut with annoyance, only to open it again a moment later, compelled by something he could not quite articulate.
It was in theLiberthat he found it—not buried, not emphasised, but placed with the unthinking confidence of a scribe who assumed the phrase would speak for itself.
…as it was holden and keped in þe tyme of Bedeverus.
Darcy gave a short, incredulous laugh.
The sound rang oddly in the room, too loud, too piercing, and Brutus rose, crossing to him and pressing his shoulder against Darcy’s knee.
“Preposterous!” Darcy said aloud, though whether to the book, the dog, or himself, he could not have said. “A marginal fancy. A monk’s flourish. I expect this entire book, then, must be suspect.”
He tossed theLiberaside and reached for the Harrowe volume with one hand and flipped pages with the other, still scoffing faintly, as though at a jest that had overreached itself. How could he take any of this hogwash seriously? Bedevere! It was a name fornursery rhymes and French novels. A name poets reached for when they wished to lend gravity to a tale already grown thin with repetition. No serious scholar would ever—
Then he saw it again. And again.
Not the name… not exactly. But enough references to identify the myth. “The faithful knight.” “The last witness.” “The one entrusted with the king’s sword.”
Not mythic. Not reverent. Administrative, almost. As though it were not a story being invoked, but a point of reference. A dating. A fact assumed.
And the more pages he read, the more he suddenly saw.
The disbelieving smile did not fade. It simply stopped belonging to his face.
His heart missed a beat—no, more than that. It halted, suspended in a space where breath did not seem required. The room narrowed. The candle flames drew long and thin, stretching toward the ceiling like something straining to escape. He became abruptly aware of his own pulse, loud in his ears, uneven, as though it had forgotten its proper rhythm.
Brutus gave a low sound, not quite a growl, not quite a whine, and Darcy reached down without looking, his fingers burying themselves in the dog’s ruff as though to anchor himself to something solid, something present.
The dream seemed to choke his lungs again—not its images, but its certainty. Fire. Her voice. The knowledge of what “binding” himself must have meant.
