Page 81 of Fitzwilliam Darcy, Exile

He had stayed to help her. Elizabeth felt her anger slip. “So you presented yourself to my uncle as Robinson.”

“As Darcy, I had wealth and a name and a measure of influence. As Robinson, I had skills that could help you resolve the problem from its origin. That felt—” He stopped. “It felt like the only honest thing I had to give.”

She looked at him for a long moment. The man in front of her—clean-shaven, black-coated, commanding, every inch the master of Pemberley—looked back at her with the same eyes that had listened to her in her father's cramped study, and handed her the Italian letters, and made her tea exactly as she liked it without being told. The same hands that had split wood in the kitchen yard while her sisters watched from the window. The same voice that had described the Mediterranean to her, that had told her, very seriously, that once you stopped fighting the water it would hold you.

“Tell me something,” she said. “All of it—everything that passed between us at Longbourn. Was any of it real?” Her eyes prickled and burned.

“Every bit of it.”

The urge to reach out and touch him was so strong, she clasped her hands together in resistance. She believed him. But believing him and knowing what to do about it were two very different matters. Standing six feet away from him was too close, and Pemberley was too full of him.

She needed to go home. She needed to be somewhere she had known herself before he arrived and rearranged everything she had thought she understood about her own heart.

“I loved Robinson,” she said. The words came slowly, drawn from the depths of her soul. “I could have married him happily. Freely. With my whole heart.” She met his eyes. “I do not know yet if I can love Fitzwilliam Darcy the same way. I do not know if I can reconcile the two of you, or whether I need to do so. I only know that I need time to understand who you truly are.” A pause, softer. “And who I am when I am with you.”

He did not try to persuade her. He did not reach for her hand or offer reassurance or construct an argument. She waited for it, but it did not come. Finally, after some time, he said quietly. “I have waited ten years to come home. For you, I would wait longer.”

She understood what he was not saying. That waiting was a choice. The will gave him two years, and he was offering however many years more, without condition or pressure, regardless of what that cost him. He was willing to lose his inheritance for her.

She turned before she could say anything she was not yet ready to say and walked to the door.

Mr. Wrayburn waited in the corridor, precisely where she had half-expected him to be. He met her eyes with a slight incline of his head and held out a letter. It was sealed, her name written in a bold, formal hand. She took it without opening it.

Charlotte was waiting outside their chambers, their cloaks already over her arm, Papa ready beside her. An hour later, they walked out of Pemberley into the cold November afternoon and alighted their carriage bound for Longbourn.

CHAPTER 44

Elizabeth watched the blurred landscape through the carriage window. Beside her, Charlotte sat silently with her hands folded and her eyes forward. Across from them, Father sat with his hat on his knee and his gaze fixed on the floor.

He had not said a word since Pemberley’s gate. After an hour, when the last of the park had given way to the open road, he cleared his throat. Elizabeth waited. “I owe you an apology,” he said, raising his eyes to hers. “Several, if I am being thorough.” She did not answer. She had learned, from long experience, that her father rarely said the difficult thing first. “I have leaned on you since you wore your hair in braids, convincing myself that it was a compliment.” He turned his hat slowly in his hands. “I told myself that you were capable—which you are—and that you preferred useful work to idle accomplishment—which you do. I told myself these things, not because I was a forward-thinking father allowing my daughter greater independence for her benefit, but because they allowed me to do less.” He sighed. “I was wrong to do it. Selfish. I have known it for some time and found it more comfortable not to say so. Or to change.”

Elizabeth looked at him—truly looked, the way she had not permitted herself to do since the customs officer arrived at Longbourn and her father had sat in his chair and let the world fall in. What she saw was not the man she had been angry at for weeks. He looked smaller than she remembered. Older.

“I handled Robinson badly,” he continued. “I treated him with contempt and then threw him out of the house for doing what any decent man would do. And I did not know who he was, which I suppose makes it worse rather than better, because it means my judgment of him was entirely my own.” He laughed—a dry, scornful sound. “I have been a very poor judge of men this year. Of Wickham in particular.”

“Papa—”

“I am not finished.” He said it firmly. “I have no counsel to offer you about what you ought to decide. I forfeited that right some time ago. I only want you to know that whatever you decide, I will not use your family against you as I have in the past. Not your mother, not your sisters, not our debts or our difficulties or the fact that I have managed nothing and left everything to you. You will decide your own future, Lizzy. I believe you are the only person here who has earned the right to do so.”

Elizabeth pressed her lips together. She was not going to cry in the carriage. She had decided this firmly.

She was very nearly about to cry in the carriage.

“I am proud of you,” he said.

Her tears came then, fast and freely flowing.

His voice cracked. “I have always been proud of you. I do not deserve to have you as a daughter.”

She reached across and covered his hand with hers. He looked down at it and then out the window, and they did not speak again for some time, which was, Elizabeth thought, for the best. The moment was too perfect to ruin with words. His conscience thus unburdened, he fell soundly asleep before they reached the next village.

Charlotte waited until his breathing deepened and steadied, then shifted slightly toward Elizabeth. “What do you mean to do about Mr. Robinson?” she asked.

“I do not know.” Elizabeth knew the topic would not have been raised unless her friend had come to some logical conclusions. If Charlotte could help Elizabeth sort her tangled thoughts, she welcomed the insight. “Say what you need to say.”

Charlotte considered for a moment, carefully examining her perceptions once more before expressing them. “He put himself in an impossible position the moment he chose to help you. Had he told you who he was when Wickham arrived, your family would have seized on the revelation and pushed for an immediate marriage. Your father would have had you both in front of a parson within the week.”

“I know it.”