"I am going."
"Already? The evening is young."
"The evening is unbearable. I will take Caesar. Have your carriage follow when you are ready."
Bingley looked at him. Some flicker of understanding crossed his open, uncomplicated face. "Are you well, Darcy?"
"Perfectly well."
He was not perfectly well. He rode back to Netherfield in the dark, the cold November air sharp against his face, and the ride was not long enough to quiet his mind. The lanes were black except where the moon caught the frost on the hedgerows. Caesar's hooves rang on the frozen road.
At Netherfield, the library was dark and empty. He lit a single candle. The rug beside his chair was bare. No small pink body curled on it. No sound of steady breathing. No warmth.
He sat in his chair and stared at the empty rug and thought about Elizabeth's face when she looked at Wickham. The openness. The laughter. The trust she gave so freely to a liar while the man who cared for her sat across the room and could not find the words.
He thought about Georgiana. Last summer. The letter she had written from Ramsgate, the one that arrived at Pemberley three days before Darcy rode south and found Wickham installed in his sister's good graces. Fifteen years old. Trusting. Lonely after their father's death. Wickham had seen a girl with thirty thousand pounds and no protection and had moved on her with the precise, predatory charm he was now directing at Elizabeth.
Georgiana's voice when Darcy confronted her. The way she had crumbled. The way she had apologised, as if she were the one who had done something wrong. She had not been the same since. She played the pianoforte with the curtains drawn and flinched when strangers spoke to her, and Darcy had sworn he would never let Wickham near anyone he cared about again.
He was breaking that promise. He was standing in rooms with the man who had nearly ruined his sister, and he was doing nothing, because the truth was a weapon that would wound Georgiana as surely as it wounded Wickham, and Darcy could not fire it.
He could not tell Elizabeth. He could not expose his sister's near-ruin to save his own reputation. The truth sat locked in his chest beside all the other things he could not say, and it pressed against his ribs like a stone.
The candle guttered. The rug stayed empty.
He thought about the pig. Small and warm and uncomplicated in her affections. Truffles had loved him without reservation and without conditions, and she was at Longbourn now, probably asleep on Elizabeth's bed, and he missed her with an intensity that was absurd for a grown man to feel about a piglet.
He sat in the dark library and listened to the silence where the pig used to be, and he was afraid. Not of losing Elizabeth's good opinion, though he feared that too. He was afraid that Wickham would hurt her, that the charming smile would lead somewhere dangerous, and that his own silence would be the reason.
CHAPTER 14
Mr. Darcy
Darcy could no longer pretend. Three weeks had passed since the ball at Netherfield, and every one of them had made things worse.
He could not pretend that his rides past Longbourn were for exercise. He could not pretend that his eagerness to accompany Bingley on every call was friendship. He could not pretend that the book of Cowper's poems, with Elizabeth's margin notes, sat on his bedside table for literary appreciation. He had read her annotations fourteen times. He could recite three of them from memory. This was not literary appreciation. This was a fever of the mind.
He was in love with Elizabeth Bennet. He had been in love with her since the library at Netherfield, or perhaps since the Meryton high street, or perhaps since the moment he looked down and saw a pig on his boot and felt, for the first time in years, something other than duty.
He was also, he acknowledged, making a thorough mess of it.
The dinner at Mrs. Phillips's house haunted him. He replayed the evening in a loop: his silence, his rigidity, Caroline's poisoned compliment, Elizabeth's face turning away. He had stood in a room with the woman he loved and given her every reason to believe he was the villain Wickham painted him as.
And Wickham. Wickham was still here, still charming, still moving through Meryton's society with the practised ease of a man who had been deceiving people since he could talk. Darcy heard reports from Bingley. Wickham had dined with the Phillipses. Wickham had been seen walking with Elizabeth in Meryton. Wickham had told his story of the denied living to at least four families, each telling adding detail, each detail a lie wrapped in just enough truth to be believed.
Darcy could do nothing. The truth about Georgiana sat behind his teeth like a coin he could not spend.
He rode past Longbourn again on a Thursday morning. November had stripped the landscape to its bones: brown fields, black hedgerows, the occasional red flash of a robin. He had developed, over the past two weeks, a route that took him past Longbourn and through the lanes connecting Longbourn to Meryton without ever requiring him to stop. He had mapped it carefully. The route was exactly forty-five minutes at a walk, thirty at a trot, and seventeen at a canter, and he had timed all three because he was a man who measured things, and measuring was a way of maintaining the illusion of control over a situation that had escaped his control entirely.
He knew the section of wall where the mortar was crumbling, because on his third ride past he had seen Elizabeth sitting there with her knees drawn up and a book in her hand and the pig asleep at her feet. She had not seen him. He had been grateful. He had also been disappointed.
He slowed his horse near the garden wall. From inside: laughter, and the faint, distant squeal of a pig.
He missed that pig. He would not admit it. He would not admit that he still carried a crust of bread in his coat pocket from habit, or that he had caught himself looking down at his boot in the Netherfield dining room, half expecting to see a small pink snout gazing up at him. He rode on. He did not look back.
His valet had noticed the state of his boots. "Sir," Jenkins had said that morning, holding up a boot caked with Hertfordshire mud, "you appear to be riding a great deal."
"I am."
