But the farmers did seem so dispirited at our behavior that I lost interest in it quickly. It was not very much fun to visit suffering on someone, even if I knew it would all reset and they would not suffer.
Then I wondered at myself, not feeling anything for the shopkeepers when we stole from them except delight when they shrieked and shook their fists and ran after us.
“I wonder if this phase is ending now,” I said one evening.
We were sitting outside together, and we had some food we’d stolen earlier from town, meatpies we’d taken to eat for later.
“Ending?” he said. “Whatever do you mean?”
“It’s as you said,” I said, chewing on the delicious mixture of pastry, meat, and spices. “I don’t know if I like being the sort of person who delights in taking advantage of others.”
“Yes, but you said we weren’t really taking advantage, since nothing we do sticks,” he said.
“I know that, but it… I don’t like the way it feels.”
“Ah, yes, this is about the way I felt when I realized I was only going about asking women to marry me because I wished to take liberties.”
I sat up straight, blinking at him.
“Did I… not make that plain to you?” He cringed, stuffing his mouth full of pie.
“That’s appalling, Will.”
“Mmph.” He nodded. He was chewing.
“I don’t think that’s true anyway,” I said. Because it had been a number of Thursdays, many, many Thursdays. I couldn’t say how many, but probably two months worth at this point, and he had never attempted anything untoward with me, never at all.
He’d even stopped saying those strange and confusing things to me, about how he found me pretty and all of that.
He swallowed. “Yes, but as I have said, I’m not that sort of man. So, I stopped. I think, before, in the first phase, the veryhopeless phase, it seemed permissible, because all things were permissible, you know?”
“Well, they are not,” I said.
“No, I see that,” he said. “I wouldn’t like myself if I had done that to a woman, even if she wouldn’t remember it the next day. It would be a stain on me somewhere. Anyway, I’ve always wanted to wait.”
“Wait?” I said. “Wait for what?”
“Well, to be married, obviously. I know there are a number of men who have this odd way of interpreting scripture, as if men are the exceptions to all of God’s rules about such things, but it’s really quite clear. Men are to cleave to their wives, not to dally with mistresses and actresses and all manner of those sorts of women before settling down and having children. I believe that’s the right way to do it, to wait, and that’s what I intend to do.”
“You mean for… forthat,” I said softly. “Oh.” I tilted my head and looked him over, and… oh, dear.
When had Mr. Darcy becomehandsome?
Of course, I suppose I had thought him pleasing enough upon first being introduced, but then he’d been so reliably horrid, his countenance had soured somehow. And then, well, we’d been trapped together for all this time, and I had grown used to him, but it hadn’t been that way, not in weeks and weeks of Thursdays, because we never even said the M-word. I had thought of him as a friend or a brother or a…
“Apologies,” he said, wiping juices from the pie from his hands. “I should not discuss such things with you, I don’t suppose. Not a proper sort of conversation to have with a woman like you.”
“But we aren’tbeingproper,” I said. “And anyway, I think it does you credit. I approve.”
He gave me an easy grin. “Do you, then?”
I grinned back, taking another bite of my pie. I was eating mine much more slowly than he.
“I think I’ve somehow succeeded, against all odds. I’ve made you like me.”
“That happened a long time ago,” I said, shrugging.
“Well, considering you’ve no one else, I don’t know that it means anything.”
