“He has consulted Mr Wickham, the only man whose counsel has proved in the least helpful or accurate.”
The name had scarcely left her mouth before Darcy turned away, a sharp sound breaking from him—low, involuntary, edged with disbelief. “Wickham?” he muttered, the word bitten off like an oath.
Elizabeth’s hand faltered. She drew the letter back a fraction, her gaze lifting to his face. “You must forgive me, but that reaction requires explanation. What history have you with Mr Wickham? And what possible knowledge could he have of any of this?”
Darcy did not answer at once. When he did, his voice had lost its earlier heat and taken on something more guarded.
“He and I were raised on the same stories,” he said. “The sort one hears at nurse’s knee and thinks nothing of until one is too old to ask after them properly. Tales meant to frighten children into obedience. Warnings dressed as rhyme.” He shook his head once. “An oath unkept. A charge deferred. A future claim laid upon my family. Wickham listened where I did not. He remembered what I dismissed. Valued it for the supposed ‘honour’ I would have gladly foregone.”
Elizabeth glanced down at the folded paper again. “Then you will understand why his counsel troubles me.”
Darcy’s eyes returned to the express. “Tell me.”
She hesitated only a moment longer. “He believes I ought not to be near you. That whatever passes between us is… poisonous. He calls my improvement here a false calm. A borrowed strength. He fears it will cost me dearer in the end.”
Slowly, Darcy reached out. His fingers closed on the letter at last, easing it from her grasp. He unfolded it and read in silence, his expression flickering between feelings as his eyes moved down the page. When he finished, he refolded it once and held it loosely in his hand.
“And you?” he asked. “What doyouthink, Miss Elizabeth?”
She frowned, considering him with a seriousness he had rarely seen in her. Then she lifted her eyes and met his without flinching.
“I think,” she said, “that whatever it is you have set in motion in me, the only relief I have known from it has been either in your presence—or in the thought of you, or of things bound to you.”
The nearness of herwas already undoing him—his balance gone subtly wrong, breath miscounted, the room narrowed to the precise distance between them. Want gathered where discipline had always held. He had lived his life by governing impulse. This—whatever this was—answered to no such governance.
“Define it,” he said. The words came quietly, but they carried more than he meant to permit. He heard it himself: the edge beneath them, the demand sharpened by fear. “Is it fate you speak of? Affection? Or only the mind’s last defence against something it cannot outrun?”
Her smile struck him before the words did. Not bright. Not teasing. Something inward, as though she had reached the end of an argument she had long been conducting with herself and had at last conceded the point.
“Perhaps all of them,” she said. “Or none. It has a shape, but not yet a name. I only know that if my nearness did not wound you so plainly, I should be tempted to test it—tosee whether what strengthens me might do so more completely, more… permanently. And whether there might come a point at which your strength returns, or if I am only capable of wounding you.”
The sentence left him unmoored.
Test it… He drew in a breath and held it, bracing as though the floor might give way beneath him. His heart beat too fast, then stumbled, then recovered with a painful insistence that made his vision swim.
“Your touch does… wound,” he said at last. “But not as you suppose.”
Her brow creased. “Mr Darcy—”
“Itisa weakness,” he went on, forcing the truth past his throat. “It leaves me altered. Diminished, perhaps—but only because something of me has passed into your keeping.” His voice broke despite his attempt at composure. “And what returns to me is not loss. It is… attachment.”
She did not interrupt him. Egad, he wished she would. Perhaps then, the words would stop tumbling from him. Perhaps she would force him to make some sense of them.
“It was so at Netherfield,” he went on. “I lacked the sense to recognise it. I knew when you entered a room without seeing you. The house altered in your absence, as though it had mislaid some necessary proportion.” His mouth tightened. “When you returned to Longbourn, I told myself it was relief to be free of disturbance. It was not relief. It was deprivation.”
Her breathing shallowed… trembled, as her lips parted softly. He saw it. Felt it.
“Even when I resisted seeking you,” he continued, “even when I was resolved to be sensible, I could not escape the knowledge of where you were. Reason availed nothing. Habit less. Duty not at all.” A breath escaped him, short and without humour. “Even my dog defeated me.”
Her lips curved in a reluctant chuckle. “Brutus?”
“He knew before I did. He would not settle. Would not be diverted. He dragged me from my books, from my explanations, from my resolve. Therewasa tether.” He paused, then spoke the word he had avoided. “Not desire… not alone.” His voice dropped. “Something far less governable.”
She abandoned her chair then, slowly, as though any abrupt movement might fracture what lay between them. The motion pulled at him, hard enough that he had to brace his hand against the mantel to remain upright.
“What do you make of it?” she asked. “What is to be done?”
He met her gaze without evasion now. There was no strength left for it. “All I know,” he said, “is that proximity has bred not only obligation, but…want—and I no longer know where one ends and the other begins.”
