Darcy said nothing. The silence stretched between them, filled with the distant sounds of the drawing room — Lady Catherine's voice, the rustle of skirts.
He finished his port. The drawing room fell quiet eventually — Lady Catherine retired early when she was displeased, and displeasure had been her dominant mode since dinner. At the door of the dining room he paused with his hand on the handle and allowed himself, briefly, the question he had been refusing to ask since the night of the parlour floor.
Had he seized an opportunity?
The honest answer — the one he would never give Fitzwilliam, or Elizabeth, or anyone — was that he did not know. He had walked into that room and seen blood and a dead man and a woman in a chair with bruises on her face and another standing in the doorway with her arms wrapped around herself, and his first thought had not beenhow terribleorwhat has happenedbutshe needs me now.The relief of it — the shameful, galvanicrelief of finally possessing a reason she could not refuse — had arrived before the horror, and the fact that he could not determine which had come first was the thing that kept him awake at night. He had not manufactured the crisis. But he had used it. And the distinction between causing a fire and refusing to waste one was a distinction only a man of considerable self-deception could find comforting.
He opened the door and went to join the ladies.
CHAPTER 10
ELIZABETH
He came to her room at midnight.
She was not asleep. She had not been asleep for hours, lying in the large bed in her Rosings chamber with the counterpane pulled up to her chin and the curtains open to the moonlight and her mind turning in the slow, grinding circles that had become its nightly habit. The day's performance replayed behind her eyes — Lady Catherine's interrogation at dinner, Darcy's intervention, the careful choreography of compliance that had become her daily art.
She heard the door before she saw it move. Not the connecting door to Charlotte's room — the other one, the door to the corridor, which she had locked. But locks required keys, and keys in a house like Rosings were not private things. A nephew who had spent every summer here since boyhood would know where the housekeeper kept her ring.
The door opened. He stood on the threshold in shirtsleeves, the white linen ghostly in the dark corridor behind him. No coat. No cravat. His hair was disordered, as though he had been running his hands through it — a gesture she had never seen him makein daylight but could imagine him making in the privacy of his own rooms, where the composure that armoured him in public could be set aside. In one hand he held something small and dark — a jar, she thought, though the light was too poor to be certain. He set it on her nightstand without explanation, the way one might lay down a card one did not yet intend to play.
"Mr. Darcy." She sat up. Her voice was steady; her heart was not. "This is highly improper."
"Yes." He stepped inside and closed the door. The click of the latch was the loudest sound in the room. "It is."
He did not advance further. He stood with his back to the closed door, his hands at his sides, and looked at her across the moonlit space of the bedchamber with an expression that she could not, in the insufficient light, fully read. But she could feel it — the intensity of his attention, the charged quality of his presence — the way she had felt it in the drawing room, on the woodland path, across every dinner table they had shared. Only now there was nothing between them. No table. No convention. No pretence.
"Someone might see you," she said.
"No one will see me. The servants have retired. My aunt sleeps like the dead." A pause. "Forgive the expression."
A sound escaped her — not quite a laugh, too sharp for that, but something that acknowledged the horror and the absurdity at once. He passed a hand over his face, and when his hand dropped, his expression had altered. Less controlled. More human.
"I could not sleep. I find, increasingly, that I cannot sleep in this house. Or any house. Or anywhere, frankly, since the evening I walked into the parsonage and found?—"
He stopped.
"Found me," Elizabeth finished.
"Yes." The single word carried more weight than his entire proposal had done. He pushed away from the door and took two steps into the room — measured, deliberate, the walk of a man who is very conscious of every boundary he is crossing.
"You should not be here," she said again. Steadier this time. "We are not married."
"No." He did not step back. "We are not."
"Then you understand why this is —" She searched for the right word.Improperwas too small.Dangerouswas too honest. "— inadvisable."
"I understand perfectly." His voice was quiet, measured, the voice of a man who has considered all the angles and proceeded anyway. "I did not come here for that, Elizabeth. I came because I could not sleep, and I could not stop thinking, and I owe you something before we leave this house."
"You owe me a great many things. Privacy among them."
A pause. Something flickered behind his eyes — not quite hurt, not quite amusement. "You are right. I will leave if you wish it. But hear me first."
She should sayleave nowand mean it. But the man standing before her in shirtsleeves and bare feet was not the Mr. Darcy of the drawing room — not the composed, armoured creature whospoke in careful sentences and watched her with calculating precision. This was someone else. Someone undone. And the curiosity that had always been her weakness would not let her send him away without knowing what had brought him to her door at midnight looking like a man who had lost an argument with himself.
"Say it, then."
"I was already going to propose to you," he said. "Before Collins. Before any of it. I had been composing the words for a week. I intended to do it badly — in my aunt's drawing room, probably, with too much pride and too little feeling, because that is the only way I know how to say anything that matters."
