She closed her eyes. She did not open them quickly. When she did, her face had arranged itself into something that had not been on it a minute before.
“What else did he ask?”
“Whether the house was once Wetherthwaite which it was. Whether there were ladies in it. How many. And whether there was a woman here by the name of Miss Elizabeth Bennet from Hertfordshire.”
Her breath stalled, and the colour, which had been high, bled from her cheeks. “And what was answered?”
“The Pemberton girl said Miss Darcy and a lady staying. Nameless for now. He will have a name by tomorrow.”
“Mr Darcy… there is something I—”
“I have not finished.”
She stopped. Her hand, which had begun to move away from the writing-table, returned to it.
“I have known for nearly a fortnight now.”
Her throat bobbed, and she gripped the table. “Known what?”
“That an attorney of Gray’s Inn is acting on a Chancery filing for the recovery of property and papers. That the named parties are yourself and your elder sister. That the estate is Longbourn. That the claimant is the Reverend Mr Collins—a name rather well known to me. That a circular naming Merebank has been in my desk drawer for better than a week, unanswered, because I have been waiting for you to tell me yourself. Which you have not done.”
He stopped. He had not meant the last clause to arrive with the shape it arrived with. It was too late to take it back.
She had gone white to the lips.
“Better than a week?”
“Yes.”
“You have sat with me at supper. You have brought me books. You have walked me out to the water. You have permitted me —” her voice did not rise—it went, if anything, lower—”you have permitted me to be a woman called Bennet in your parlour, carrying in your desk a paper that named me.”
“Yes.”
“Why! In heaven’s name, Mr Darcy—why!You could have warned me. Could have acted, could have spoken…”
He had no answer that would stand up to the form the question had taken.
“I do not know.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is the one I have. I believed at first the circular might be a false accusation. I continued to believe it after I knew it was not. I believed, then, that you would tell me when you were ready, and that until then my knowing of it was something you had earned the privacy of by never having been asked. I believed my silence was a courtesy. It was not. It was collusion. I see that now. I have seen it, if I am honest with you, for several days.”
She had not moved in the chair for some minutes. He had been seeing it for some time before he understood that he was seeing it—her hands set on the table, holding themselves still, the knuckles beginning to whiten at the second joint. The angle of her shoulders was wrong. The line of her good leg under the table was wrong. The breath at her collarbone came shallow and deliberate, measured against the requirement of not making a sound.
He knew which line of her face went where when the leg went bad. He knew the difference between the ache she had carried since teatime and the heat that had risen in her a quarter of an hour ago. He knew, watching her, that it had sharpened in the last three minutes—and that she was holding her spine against the chair-back so he would not see, and her hands on the table so he would not have to ask.
He stood at the grate with the poker in his hand and the iron going cold, and he did not turn. The not-asking was the only thing left between them she had not yet been forced to refuse.
“You have been letting me lie to you. For eleven weeks. Why?”
He swallowed. “Because I wanted to believe you. Because of all the people I have ever known, you were the one person I hoped… Ineededto believe that what you withheld was in good faith.”
Her lashes fluttered, and her chest rose in a trembling sigh. “Mr Darcy. Please sit down.”
“I would rather not.”
“You are shaking.”
