She swallowed, looking me over. “Perhaps not… physically. You wouldn’t do that.”
“No danger at all,” I said. “Not even to your reputation. We shall keep it quiet. I am going to go and look for him now and take care of him. You will need to stay here until that is settled, but then I think we shall both go to the country together. Hopefully, your bleeding comes and that will make everything much easier, but if it doesn’t—”
“Oh, Lord!” she cried. “You think he… you think…” She turned and pressed her face into the wall and she started sobbing loudly, broken sounds.
“Stop that,” I said, dragging a hand over my face.
She did not stop.
I went to her and she shied from me when I tried to touch her, so I didn’t.
She hunched into the corner and her face was wet with tears. “Fitzwilliam, he never touched me. You are the only man I’ve ever evenkissed.”
“Well, you would say that regardless,” I whispered. “It doesn’t matter anyway, Elizabeth. Whatever happened, it is not your fault, and I have determined to forgive you.”
“Forgive me?” she said, and there was iron in her voice. “How dare you?”
I took a step backwards.
She looked into my eyes and flinched and then curled into herself. “Apologies, please. I did not mean—”
“I am not going to hurt you!”
“Oh, yes,” she said in a tight and teary voice, “you wish me to trust you, trust in your character, trust that you are the man you present yourself to be. And yet, you will not afford me the same courtesy.”
This cut me. I regarded her there for some time, and I did not know what to say or do. Finally, I found my voice, and I said,“What have I done, what have I ever done, that would make you think I would harm a woman, any woman, let alone one that I love?”
“You love me?”
“I do,” I said. “God help me, I do, and I do not think there is anything you could do, anything I could find out about you, that would make me stop. Believe me, IwishI could stop, but I cannot, and if you are some snare designed to lure me in and trap me, you are my perfect ruin.”
She let out a wild and harsh laugh. “If you loved me, Fitzwilliam—”
“What have I done to make you fear me?”
“It is only the way of everything with us, I suppose. None of it has been easy or quiet or safe. It has all been so very fiery, so quick, so intense. I do not know if I love you or if I simply get drunk on you. I thought myself a very practical sort of person, you know, and you come into my sitting room and sit down and tell me you want me and I go to pieces. And this would be a fitting end, would it not? Is this not what love is, in the end? Madness?”
“No,” I said. “No, I won’t believe that.” I reached out for her.
She let me touch her, let me caress her face.
“You deny it, then?” I said. “He is lying. He said it to dothisto us? This is his triumph?”
She nodded. “I absolutely deny it. I categorically deny it. Do I seem to you like the sort of woman who would go to bed with someone who was not my husband?”
“My sister did not seem as if she would have done such a thing either.”
She sucked in a sharp and noisy breath through her nose. “Well, there it is, I suppose.” Her voice was full of tears again.
“I wish to believe you,” I said, taking my hand back, tucking it into my pocket, the feel of her warmth against my fingertips amemory of a sweet and simple past that I wanted to escape back into. I wanted this never to have happened.
“But you do not,” she said, devastated.
“I wish to,” I said, and my voice wasn’t strong.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Richard and I pursued him back to Meryton, for that seemed the first place to look for him, given it was where he was meant to have returned to.
