“I have survived that accusation before.”
“You treat the matter with a levity entirely unsuited to it, Miss Bennet. Let me be rightly understood. This match must take place. You are engaged to me by the express wishes of by the express wishes of your guardians.”
“Why should I accept you?”
“Because honour, decorum, prudence, and interest require it. Do not imagine you may reject me and yet continue to expect favour and acknowledgment from those whose name and consequence you are so ready to disregard.”
“My family has shown me very little favour that I should tremble at the loss of it.”
“Your immediate family, perhaps. But you possess another guardian entirely, whose support I have fully and honourably obtained. I do not imagine he will receive this display of ingratitude and impertinence with much admiration.”
“I cannot imagine his opinion alters mine.”
“No. At present you cannot imagine it at all. That is precisely the difficulty.”
He stepped nearer. “You and I were formed for one another, Miss Bennet. We are descended from the same noble line. Our fortunes on both sides are considerable. Every person possessing authority in this matter has desired the match. And what is to divide us? The pretensions of a young man without a title?”
“Mr. Darcy requires no title to secure my esteem.”
“Esteem,” said Ambrose. “Young women are forever talking of esteem when they mean infatuation.”
“And noblemen are forever talking of consequence when they mean vanity.”
His expression hardened.
“Tell me plainly, Miss Bennet. Will you marry me?”
“I will not.”
“You refuse, then, to oblige me. You refuse the claims of duty, honour, gratitude, and family expectation.”
“Neither duty, nor honour, nor gratitude have any claim upon me in the present instance. Contracts made without my knowledge by guardians I have never met shall not determine the rest of my life.”
“Then,” said Ambrose, “I take no leave of you, Miss Bennet. You deserve no such civility.”
He turned toward the house. Lord and Lady Matlock stood at the garden gate. Behind them, Mr. Darcy.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Lady Matlock had wanted to leave at first light. Henry had a meeting he could not reschedule, and she had spent the morning in a state of compressed impatience that she managed with considerably less grace than usual. They had barely cleared the town before she spoke. “We should have known,” she said. “It was all there.”
Henry did not argue. Since reading the will the previous afternoon and seeing Elizabeth Bennet’s name in Stephen’s careful hand at last, he had spent nearly every waking hour revisiting the missed signs of the last twenty years.
“The letters,” Lady Matlock said. “He wrote every year. I wish I could have seen her first steps. I wish I could have watched her learn to read. I thought it was grief. I thought he was imagining what the baby might have done if she had lived. It never occurred to me he was writing about Elizabeth herself. That someone was sending him news of her progress, and he was sharing it with us because she was all he had left of Margaret.”
“No, it did not occur to me either. When Stephen later wrote asking for help overturning the guardianship, I could have sworn he spoke only of a ward. Never granddaughter. Never Elizabeth herself. I thought he meant some distant relation he had taken responsibility for in his old age.”
“You were distracted at the time. Anne had just written that Edmund was ill. You asked Alfred to help because you could not leave Matlock. Then everything happened at once.”
“That is not an excuse.”
“No, but it is the truth. First Edmund, then Georgiana, then Anne, and before we had even understood your sister was gone, Catherine arrived with Anne de Bourgh half-dead beside her and grief enough for ten people. We were surviving, Henry. Nothing more.”
The carriage rolled on in silence.
“And while we were surviving,” he said at last, “Alfred was lying to us.”
“I loved my brother,” she said at last. “But before Sophia, he was often proud, selfish, and impossible to admire for very long. She softened him. Improved him. Through her I came to love him properly. And when Sophia and the baby died, the better part of Alfred died with them. We should have seen it sooner than we did.”
