We were trapped up here.
We were not getting down.
“They’ll come looking for us.” Elizabeth was looking out of the window in the bedchamber with the bed in it. It was starting to get dark outside. “It must be dinner by now. They would know we are not there.”
“Yes,” I said. “But I warrant no one has noticed we are gone until now.” I was seated in the doorway of the room, not quite inside it, but not outside of it either. I had not entered the bedchamber with her yet. Something about that conversation about violation kept me from it.
She turned around from the window. “But the Bingley sisters saw us—”
“Yes, and Caroline would have turned back round in a snit and gone to hide somewhere and Louisa would have stayed outside her door, calling to her, begging to be let in, and it could have gone on hours. I have seen it before.”
She sighed, going back to the window. “Yes, all right. I do have sisters.” She sighed. “You said I was beautiful to her to hurther feelings. You were pointedly saying you didn’t think she was pretty.”
“It was perhaps not my finest hour,” I said with a sigh.
“So, she was very hurt,” said Elizabeth quietly. “All right, but now, they will question her, and she will remember that we were walking together on the path, and they will come out here looking for us.”
“Yes,” I said. “They must.”
“And if they do not find us quickly, they will send word to my parents, and my father will bring every able-bodied man on the grounds of Longbourn, and they will comb the woods with lanterns and dogs, and we shall hear them and we shall call to them from the windows, and they will come in and go and fetch a ladder, and then… then it is all over.”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, we must hang on but a few more hours at the most, I should think.”
She looked out the window again. “All right.” She put her fingertips to one of the panes of glass and then she turned away from it. “What do you think this house was? Perhaps a housekeeper’s cottage or something of that nature?”
“Could be,” I said. “Yes, for a servant who lived on the grounds. How long has Netherfield been unoccupied?”
“Quite some time,” said Elizabeth. “When the owner was here, he was solitary. Never came to town, never hosted dinners, never attended anyone else’s dinners.”
“But this hasn’t been used in quite some time,” I said, looking around at the house. “It’s quite in disrepair.”
“Yes,” she said. She left the window and came over to sit down next to me, arranging her skirts around her knees.
I stayed where I was, waiting to see what she might say or do.
“I have to say, sir, what you said to me today, it has unsettled me a bit, but in a good way, I think. I hope. I wish to question you a bit further on it, if I may.”
“What did I say and what do you wish to question me about?” I said.
“Well, it’s heartening, being found, er, breathtaking.” She blushed again.
“Yes, well, when I said that, I perhaps shouldn’t have,” I said. “I do not want you to get an impression that I—”
“No, you are betrothed, as you have said,” she said, smiling at me.
“Indeed,” I said, giving her a relieved smile.
“But it makes me think that it would not be out of the realm of possibility that some man who was not betrothed might also find me pleasing.”
“Oh, indeed,” I said, though I found myself thinking about the idea of Elizabeth catching the eye of some other man and not really liking it very much.
That is not fair, Fitzwilliam. You cannot have her. You cannot seek to bar anyone else from having her.
“Yes, but you also said I was not behaving the way a woman would behave if she were seeking a husband, and what did you mean by that?”
My lips parted. “Well, just the walking, I suppose.”
“Walking?” she said.
