She walked home alone, the November wind cold against her face, Wickham's story sitting in her chest like a stone. The man she was engaged to was not merely proud and difficult and maddeningly attractive. He was cruel. He had ruined a man's life out of spite. He was capable of vindictiveness, of injustice, of thekind of cold-blooded cruelty that no kiss, however devastating, could excuse.
She should have felt relieved. The confusion was over. Darcy was exactly the man she had always believed him to be, and the fact that her body responded to him was simply a biological betrayal, a failure of flesh over principle, signifying nothing.
She should have felt relieved. She did not.
Because lying in bed that night, staring at the ceiling while the house settled into darkness around her, she could not reconcile the man Wickham had described with the man who had stood in her garden and said I would rather have your genuine contempt than a manufactured warmth. She could not reconcile a cold-blooded villain with a man whose voice had cracked on the word dispassionately, whose eyes had been raw with vulnerability when he thought she was not looking, whose hands had trembled -- she had felt them tremble -- when they held her face in the library.
Wickham's Darcy was a monster. The man who had kissed her was many things, but he was not that.
She turned onto her side and pressed her face into the pillow and tried not to think about the kiss. She failed spectacularly. Her mind replayed it in merciless detail: the heat of his mouth, the sound he had made against her lips, the pressure of his body against hers, his hands sliding into her hair with a desperation that was the opposite of cruelty.
She touched her own throat, where his lips had been, and felt the ghost of warmth.
Either Wickham was lying, or Darcy was two men: the one who denied a clergyman his living and the one who kissed her as though she were the last breath of air in a drowning world.
Both possibilities frightened her. One because it meant she had been fooled. The other because it meant the man she was going to marry was exactly as terrible as she feared, and the ache she felt for him was a sickness she could not cure.
Sleep, when it finally came, was shallow and restless, and she dreamed of libraries and firelight and a voice saying Elizabeth as though it were a prayer, and she woke with her hand against her lips and the dawn grey through the curtains and no closer to understanding anything at all.
Chapter 4: Dangerous Proximity
Darcy learned of Wickham's presence in Meryton through the worst possible channel: Caroline Bingley, who delivered the information with the relish of a cat presenting a dead bird.
"Your old friend Mr. Wickham has been seen about town," she said over breakfast, her smile razor-thin. "He seems to have struck up quite a friendship with your fiancee. They were observed walking together in Meryton yesterday. Alone."
She let the word alone sit on the table between them like a grenade.
Darcy set down his coffee cup with a precision that required all of his considerable discipline. "Thank you, Miss Bingley."
"I thought you should know. Given Miss Eliza's tendency toward -- how shall I put it? -- impulsive encounters with gentlemen in private settings."
"Caroline." Bingley's voice carried an unusual edge. "That is enough."
Caroline's smile did not waver, but she returned her attention to her toast with the air of a woman who had achieved her objective. Darcy stared at his plate and felt something dark and unfamiliar uncoil in his chest.
Jealousy. He recognized it intellectually, the way one recognizes a disease from a textbook description. He had never experienced it before. There had never been occasion. Women had pursued him, not the reverse, and he had never wanted any of them enough to care whether they looked at another man.
Elizabeth was different. Elizabeth was everything different.
He spent the morning in Bingley's study, ostensibly reviewing correspondence, actually constructing and demolishing scenarios in which Wickham told Elizabeth every lie he had ever polished to a shine. The living denied out of spite. The friendship betrayed. The carefully curated narrative of victimhood that Wickham had been performing since they were boys, each iteration more refined, more convincing, more devastating.
Elizabeth would believe him. Of course she would. Wickham was charming and she was predisposed to distrust Darcy, and the combination was a poison for which he had no antidote except the truth, and the truth involved Georgiana, and the truth was not his to tell.
He wrote three letters to Elizabeth and burned all of them.
The dinner at Netherfield that evening was Caroline's design, though she presented it as Bingley's idea with the seamless mendacity of long practice. The Bennets arrived in their best evening wear: Mrs. Bennet in a gown of alarming purple, Mr. Bennet in quiet resignation, Jane luminous, and Elizabeth --
Elizabeth in dark green silk that caught the candlelight and turned it into something alive. Her hair was pinned up,exposing the line of her neck, and Darcy stared at the place where his mouth had been and felt the memory of her pulse beneath his lips like a brand.
She caught him looking. Her chin lifted. Her eyes held a challenge and something else, something that might have been awareness, the involuntary recognition of a shared history written on the body. She looked away first, a small victory that gave him no satisfaction.
Dinner was an exercise in endurance. Caroline had seated Elizabeth between Mr. Hurst, who spoke only of hunting, and Colonel Forster, who spoke only of militia matters, while placing herself at Darcy's side, where she could monitor his attention with the vigilance of a hawk. Mrs. Bennet dominated the conversation from her end of the table, expounding on wedding details that Darcy had not agreed to and describing Pemberley to the assembled company as though she had personally overseen its construction.
Elizabeth ate in near silence, responding to questions with a politeness that Darcy recognized as her most dangerous mood: the preternatural calm that preceded either a devastatingly witty remark or a devastatingly honest one. She did not look at him. She did not need to. He could feel her presence across the table like a change in temperature, and the effort of not looking at her was consuming resources he needed for basic social function.
After dinner, the ladies withdrew. When the gentlemen rejoined them, Elizabeth was at the pianoforte.
She played badly. She knew she played badly, and it was one of the things Darcy found most charming about her: the complete absence of pretense, the cheerful acknowledgment that her talents lay elsewhere. She stumbled through a countryair with more enthusiasm than skill, her fingers occasionally finding the right notes by accident rather than design, and her enjoyment was so genuine that the errors became endearing rather than painful.
