Elizabeth let him take her weight. The movement of the room eased at once—not because it had stopped spinning, but because she no longer had to manage it alone.
They reached the hall. The door closed behind them, muffling the laughter into something distant and survivable.
“Well?” her father asked softly, bending his head toward hers as though inspecting a confidence. “Are you quite recovered? Or merely too stubborn to stay in bed where you belong?”
The answer wavered. “I am…” The sentence failed to complete itself. The floor lurched, nearer now.
His hand tightened on her arm, and he leaned closer, his mouth near her ear. “Say the word,” he murmured, “and I will have you married before the candles burn down. I believe there is a gentleman in that room who would leap at the chance.”
She shook her head. “No. Please. Papa, just… take me upstairs.”
“Of course, my dear,” he said, as though she had asked for nothing more taxing than a book. He turned her gently toward the stairs, and Elizabeth let the world narrow to the steady fact of his arm beneath her hand.
And that was the last thing she knew before the world spun once, then went dark.
The clock on themantel marked the quarter hour with maddening precision.
Darcy crossed the length of the room, turned, crossed it again. The papers he had taken up lay abandoned where he had set them down, the fire burning lower than he would typically countenance, but he had not permitted any disturbance to his ruminations. He adjusted the grate once, then again, though the heat in the room was already mostly gone.
Foolishness. Idle nerves. The natural consequence of too much talk and too little certainty.
The thought held for several steps—no more.
The Lady.
The image—the very framing of the words and the answering call on himself—rose before his eyes without invitation, and his body shuddered recognition before his mind could intercede. Heat gathered beneath his collar, then broke. For an instant, the room wavered, overlaid with the memory of flame where no flame burned: light too bright, air too thin, a sense of loss so complete it left no room for sound. He halted, one hand braced against the back of a chair until the vision loosened its grip.
Enough!
He moved again, deliberately this time, counting his steps as he went. The dream was nothing. A trick of exhaustion.
Elizabeth’s face intruded without warning, clear as if she stood before him—eyes intent, mouth set with that particular resolve she wore when she refused to yield ground. The memory dragged after it another, more recent and far less abstract: Bingley’s hand, unsteady on the page; the careful phrasing that had failed to disguise urgency.
She collapsed again.
Darcy stopped short.
The house felt suddenly slanted. The walls pressed closer than they had a moment before, the familiar order of the room offering no purchase at all. Hertfordshire lay at a remove he could not cross. Whatever was happening there—whatever strain had brought her down once more—was unfolding beyond his reach, and he was left pacing a well-appointed prison with nothing but conjecture for company.
He turned sharply, seized his coat from the stand, and shrugged into it with unnecessary force. The air beyond his door, cold and unaccommodating, promised at least movement.
That would do.
Darcy took up his hat and went out.
Darcy entered the clubwith the expectation of order.
The hall was warm, the lamps already lit against the early dark. A servant relieved him of his coat without remark, and another stepped forward to take his hat. The familiar exchange comforted him for a moment—the small, expected acknowledgments of place and belonging.
“Good evening, sir.”
“Good evening.” He paused, glancing past the steward toward the reading room. “Has Mr Harcourt arrived?”
The man consulted his memory rather than any ledger. “Not yet, sir. We had word he was delayed in Norfolk.”
Norfolk, then. Darcy nodded once. Harcourt would have had opinions on the weather there—on the flooding reported along the lower fields, the late frosts. A sensible conversation, the like of which he sorely needed.
“And Mr Denham?”
