He looked at her. He did not look away.
"Miss Elizabeth," he said. "I wonder if I might walk with you."
She came downstairs. She did not speak. She put on her pelisse and her boots and her bonnet, and she did these things with the deliberate care of a woman who did not trust herself to talk while she was fastening buttons. They walked out into the garden together, Darcy carrying the pig because Truffles would not be put down.
The morning was quiet. The frost glittered on the hedgerows and on the grass and on the bare branches of the elm at the corner of the garden. Their breath made clouds in the cold air.The only sounds were their footsteps on the frozen path and the contented grunting of the pig.
They walked along the path toward the stile at the end of the lane. They walked in silence for thirty yards. It was not a comfortable silence. It was the silence of two people who both had things to say and were both afraid to begin.
Elizabeth spoke first. She stopped walking. She turned to face him on the path, her chin lifted, her eyes bright with something that was not anger and not sadness but a determination so fierce it was almost physical.
"Mr. Darcy. I owe you an apology."
"You owe me nothing."
"I owe you a great deal, and I would appreciate it if you would not contradict me while I am trying to be honest, because honesty is difficult enough without being interrupted."
His mouth twitched. The pig in his arms shifted.
"I believed Mr. Wickham's story without question," Elizabeth said. "I judged you without evidence. I saw your reserve and decided it was cruelty. I saw Wickham's charm and decided it was virtue. I was angry and proud and blind, and the only creature in this entire neighbourhood who saw you clearly from the beginning was a pig."
Darcy looked at the pig in his arms. Truffles looked up at him with her enormous dark eyes.
"The pig has excellent judgment," he said.
"The pig has better judgment than I do. She tried to warn me about Wickham. She tried to tell me from the very first meeting that something was wrong with him, and I ignored her because I preferred my own conclusions to the evidence that was trembling against my ankle."
"You are not alone in that. I have preferred my own conclusions many times. I preferred them at the assembly, when I said something unforgivable about a woman I had barelylooked at. I preferred them at the dinner, when Caroline asked about the pig and I gave an answer that was cowardly and wrong because I was afraid of a roomful of people."
He stopped walking. He turned to face her. The pig was between them, warm and solid, her presence the bridge it had always been. The buffer. The excuse for proximity. The small, warm creature who had brought them together in spite of everything they had done to stay apart.
"I was kind to Truffles in private," he said. His voice was lower now. Not the formal, controlled tone he used in company. The other voice. The one he had used in the library at Netherfield, talking to a pig. "I talked to her in the library. I let her into my room. I fed her bread crusts and discussed Latin translations with her and let her sleep beside my chair. I carried her home from a farm where she had been taken by a woman who could not bear the thought that I might care about something she considered beneath me."
He paused. He took a breath. The morning air was cold in his lungs.
"But I was not brave enough to be kind in public. I was not brave enough to stand in a room full of people and say what I felt. I have spent my whole life being careful, and the care has made me a coward, and the cowardice has cost me the regard of the only woman whose regard matters."
Elizabeth was very still. Her eyes were bright. The frost glittered on her bonnet. The pig between them was quiet, listening, as though she understood that something was happening that required silence.
"There is something else," he said. "About Wickham. About why I could not speak." He paused. The words came slowly, each one carrying a weight she could see. "Last summer, at Ramsgate, Wickham attempted the same thing with my sister. Georgiana is fifteen. She is shy and trusting and she has thirty thousandpounds, and Wickham saw all three and moved on her the way he moved on Lydia. I arrived in time. But only just."
Elizabeth's hand went to her mouth. The pieces fell together: Darcy's silence at the card party, his rigid face when Wickham spoke, his inability to expose the man without exposing his own sister. He had been holding a secret that would have destroyed Georgiana to share, and he had held it while Elizabeth praised the man who had nearly ruined her.
"I am sorry," she said. "I did not know."
"You could not have known. I made certain of that." His voice was quiet. "I chose Georgiana's safety over the truth, and the cost was your good opinion, and I would make the same choice again."
He paused. The pig shifted in his arms.
"But that is not the only thing I have been hiding behind. Georgiana was a reason. The rest was pride. The rest was standing in rooms full of people and choosing the safe sentence over the true one, every time, because the true one frightened me."
He looked at her. His jaw was tight.
"I am done with that. I am going to be the man your pig thinks I am. In public. In front of everyone. Regardless of what it costs."
He looked at her. She looked at him. The lane was quiet. The morning held its breath.
"I love you," he said. The words came out rough and plain, without elegance, without the polish he would have given them if he had been rehearsing, and they were better for it. "I love you and I love your pig and I would very much like to take both of you to Pemberley, if you will have me."
