“So, with those rumors, do you wish to take it back?” she said. “Everyone in the surrounding area will know of what I have done soon enough, I rather imagine, and you will not wish to be saddled with that.”
“Perhaps not, but I wish to have you more,” I said.
“Why?” she said. “Because I am pretty?”
“More than that,” I said. “Because you are brave and because you have this spirit within you, this spirit that reaches for the things you want. You are fearless and you are willing to pursue pleasure, and I think I have sensed that in you from the beginning. You make me wish to be fearless, too.”
She regarded me. “We don’t really know each other, Mr. Darcy.”
“Are you not this way, then?”
She shrugged, smiling a little. “Well, I don’t know, perhaps. But I do not mean that you are wrong about me, only what I say. We have spent very little time together. We have conversed very little. We do not know each other.”
“If we get married, we shall know each other,” I said. “We shall know each other rather well, I think.”
She raised her eyebrows at me and then smirked. “Well, all right.” She swallowed. “But you see what Bingley is offering me, do you not?”
“I suppose,” I said. “But I am offering you the same thing and more.”
“More?” she said. “How do you suppose that is true?”
I coughed. “Rather obviously, I should think, there is something I bring to the table that he doesn’t, and it’s that I want you.”
She stopped walking, and her lips parted. “Oh,” she said.
“Apologies,” I said. “After what happened with Mr. Wickham, you might be reticent, and if so, I should assure you—”
“No, that was not unpleasant, Mr. Darcy,” she breathed, and she began to walk again. “Not even remotely unpleasant, I must say.” She was smiling.
Encouraged, I fell into step with her. “Then accept me. And if so, there is no concern with breaking your engagement with him. It has barely been hours, you are allowed to change your mind, and he won’t even mind.”
“He is offering me a life,” she said. “A life similar to what my brother and I had always planned. I can travel with James, and we can go to the continent, and we can even go to America, and no one will think anything of it. It will be proper as anything, and James and Bingley will be happy, and I shall have my adventures—moreadventures, Mr. Darcy—and you will have… responsibilities, likely, and some large and stuffy country house that I shall be expected to be mistress of, and ever so many balls with ever so many women who will not even like me. Who will all be jealous because it ismeon your arm and not them and they will feel as iftheywere the right sort to have been your wife, and I never was, and the life, Mr. Darcy, the offer you make me…”
I stopped walking.
She kept on for several paces. And then she stopped and turned to look at me.
“You are going to say no?” I said. “I can take you to America, if that’s what you want.”
She bit down on her lower lip. “I suppose.”
“I think, Miss Bennet,” I said in a voice that had taken on a rather scratchy quality, “I might like nothing better than finding things that please you and doing them. I might like to spend my whole life trying to please you.”
She laughed helplessly. “My mother says my father said something like that to her. But you see how they are now.”
“What happened between your parents?”
“I know not, but she always goes on about how she swore she would never have another of his children, you know. They were once quite in love. My mother says men desire you, as a woman, and it feels lovely, but that it is dangerous, for it is so easy to disappoint them.”
“I can’t imagine you disappointing me.”
“Oh, I definitely shall,” she said. “I might do it right now if I refuse your proposal.”
“Miss Bennet, you cannot do this. You cannot agree to a marriage with a man who desires yourbrother. You cannot marry a man who will never want you, who will never be a husband to you in that way.”
“Well, he says there are things… like insemination with bulls, and that we can have children, and—”
“That’s appalling,” I said. “You eloped with a man because you wanted him for your own pleasure, and you will then resign yourself to a life with no pleasure at all?”
