Elizabeth tried to answer. What came out was watered-down and wrong.
Jane stiffened, one hand rising to Elizabeth’s wrist. “Mr Bingley?”
Bingley leaned forward, all his cheer falling away. “Miss Elizabeth?”
Elizabeth shook her head, though she could not have said why. The heat surged higher, blotting out the edges of the carriage, the faces before her. She meant to sit upright, to insist she was well enough—but her strength slipped from her grasp like water through cupped hands, and she sank back against the cushions instead.
Jane caught her. Miss Bingley drew back, her mouth tightening, her eyes sharp with something that was not fear. “A rather surprising turn, to be sure.”
“She cannot go on,” Jane murmured, and her hands trembled. “What can be done?”
Bingley nodded, already turning toward the door. “We are scarcely beyond London. It is as far to return as to press forward to where we meant to stay for the night.”
“And London has physicians,” Miss Bingley added promptly. “Proper ones. Lodgings, too—why, surely, we do have friends in London at this time of year. It would be foolish to continue on to Ramsgate.”
Elizabeth heard this as though through water. The words reached her without urgency, without meaning. She did not protest. She could not have summoned the strength to do so if she wished.
The carriage slowed.
Then, with a long, careful turn, it changed its course.
Elizabeth felt the alteration—not as motion, but as relief breaking too soon, too sharply, like a breath taken after being held too long. She let it carry her, her thoughts loosening, slipping again into shadow, as the road bent back toward the city she had not known she was already longing for.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The clock had nomercy in it.
Darcy sat at the escritoire with a letter half-folded beneath his hand and watched the minute hand advance with infuriating composure. It was not late—by London standards, it was hardly evening at all—but the light beyond the windows had dwindled, and the fire had settled into that low, consuming burn which signalled the approach of quiet. He had already dismissed one footman. The house had begun, subtly, to draw inward.
The steward’s letter lay unanswered. Figures blurred where he had tried to review them. Invitations—a bare fraction of the number he would have expected for December—had been stacked and restacked without decision. He had read the same paragraph twice and retained none of it.
He glanced again at the clock.
Harrowe had said a day or two. It had been one day and a half already. Darcy had told himany hour. Day or night. As if knowledge might obey urgency simply because it was demanded.
He rose and crossed the room, only to stop without knowing why. The house was too still. Even Brutus had settled on his pallet somewhere beyond the kitchens, where he liked to wait on scraps from Cook. Darcy turned back, drew up the poker, and adjusted the fire by a fraction that made no discernible difference.
The clock marked another quarter hour.
He had just opened his mouth to tell the servant to bank the fire when the sound came—not the sedate announcement of a proper caller, but a sharp, insistent knock that cut through the hall with improper force.
Darcy stilled, then glanced at the footman. “Admit them,” he said at once. “It is likely the man I am expecting.”
The door had scarcely opened before Darcy sawher.
Elizabeth Bennet—borne across the threshold in Bingley’s arms, her head lifted, her colour high, her eyes alight with unmistakable awareness. For a fraction of a second, nothing else in the hall seemed properly placed.
Then the rest of it resolved: Bingley’s coat askew, his breath still uneven from haste; Jane Bennet close behind, her bonnet undone, her face drawn pale with strain; and Miss Bingley entering last, composed enough to notice everything and approve of none of it.
“Darcy—” Bingley began, then broke off, adjusting his hold as Elizabeth stirred. “Forgive us. We had no intention of intruding upon you without notice, but—”
Elizabeth was pressing away from Bingley’s chest with a look of faint chagrin. “Mr Bingley, you may set me down,” she said, her voice clear, touched only by impatience. “I assure you, I am not an invalid. I am perfectly capable.”
Darcy had not moved. He was aware of his own stillness only because it felt so unlike him. She looked…well. Colour warmed her cheeks; her eyes were bright, keen, unmistakably herself. For a moment, the memory of finding her outside Netherfield—the pallor, the pain, the collapse—failed him entirely.
Bingley hesitated, then obeyed, easing her to her feet with evident reluctance even as Darcy’s instincts propelled him forward. He reached out to catch her hand as her feet touched the floor, but she shook her head and pulled at her cloak.
“I can walk,” Elizabeth said at once, and smiled—faintly, determinedly—as though daring anyone present to contradict her.
