Page 85 of Fitzwilliam Darcy, Exile

Papa considered his wife for a long moment, a mixture of bewilderment and admiration crossing his features. “As you wish, Mrs. Bennet.” As quickly as their spat had arisen, it had settled with a truce.

Papa went to London with the contract, accompanied by Mama, who had decided that her presence would ensure the business was concluded with appropriate swiftness and was entirely correct. She had the official letter from Sir Bradley as proof. Uncle Philips had been alerted. Uncle Gardiner had been applied to, and his offer to lend the seed money arrived by express before the week was out, accompanied by a letter from Aunt Gardiner that was warm and practical in equal measure and made Elizabeth cry twice.

The days that followed were full of work and noise and the productive chaos of a household learning new habits. A good deal of work was getting done at Longbourn. Elizabeth threw herself into the activity, filling every hour from early morning until the light failed.

She was glad for it. Work was honest and immediate, and it did not require her to sit with the questions she was not yet ready to answer. But the work could only fill the daylight hours. In the evenings, when the house quieted and her sisters were occupied and her mother was writing letters and her father was sitting with the family rather than behind his study door, Elizabeth found herself listening. For wheels on the drive. For a particular knock.

A week passed. She had asked for time, and he had offered her more of it than she had asked for, and she understood that. She did. She turned it over in her mind with the patient, rational part of herself that had been balancing ledgers since she had first learned sums. She also found, on the eve of that seventh night, that she had perhaps underestimated how much she had hoped he would not take her entirely at her word.

She thought of his father's letter, still carried in her pocket, though she had read it so many times she could have reproduced it from memory. She thought of the way he had stood in the library with his hands at his sides and said, without preparation or performance: You. She pressed her forehead against the cool glass. For you, I would wait longer.

The road outside was empty and dark and showed no signs of changing. Elizabeth straightened, told herself to be sensible, and went to bed.

CHAPTER 46

Darcy had spent ten years living in apartments, counting houses, and merchant offices across half a continent, and he had never once found silence oppressive. After a week of it at Pemberley, he could bear it no longer.

Richard’s repeated disruptions were not helping. “The globe,” he said, for what Darcy estimated was the eleventh time, as he blithely slathered butter on a roll in the breakfast room.

“No.”

“It is just sitting there.”

“Where it will still be when I decide to set foot in Father’s study.”

“Darcy.” Richard set his bread on his plate. “You have been home for a week. You have been in every room of this house except that one.” Darcy looked at his breakfast and pushed his plate away. He did not have much of an appetite after all. “I could get the globe for you,” Richard offered. “Bring it out. You would not have to go inside.”

He knew Richard meant well. He ought to have looked at the globe before it was returned to its place in his father’s study. But the more Richard pressed him on the matter, the more Darcy resisted. “If you are so profoundly interested in that globe, you are welcome to go and look at it yourself.”

Richard opened his mouth, considered something, and closed it again. He drank his coffee. After a moment he said, “You are waiting until you know about Elizabeth.” Darcy said nothing. He could not have defined his reason so clearly until he heard Richard say it aloud. He was right, though blast it all if he knew why. “You think that if you open that room before she is decided, you will have to face whatever is in there alone.”

Darcy put down his fork. That was exactly right. “Has anyone ever told you how unsettling your perceptiveness is?”

“Frequently.” Richard set down his cup. “Go to Longbourn, Darcy.”

“She asked for time.”

“It has been a week.”

“She may need longer than a week.”

“She may.” Richard leaned forward. “You are sitting in a house that is too large for one person, not eating your breakfast, refusing to go into your father's study, and counting the hours. That is not giving her time. That is suffering in place.”

Darcy looked at the window. The park was pale and frost-touched in the early morning light, the stream just visible through the bare trees. He had ridden every path on the property twice in the past seven days. He had reviewed the estate accounts with the steward, answered correspondence that had accumulated during his absence, met with the gamekeeper and the head gardener and three tenant farmers. He had been, by any external measure, entirely occupied.

He had not slept well in a week.

“I told her I would wait, and I must honor my word for her sake,” he said.

“You told her you would wait as long as she needed. A horrible, vague space of time you failed to define. You did yourself—and her—no favor there.” Richard took a bite of his roll, chewing with the efficiency of a man who has not yet finished his part of the conversation. “Pack a bag. Take the carriage. If she does not want to see you, she will say so, and you will come back, and we will get the globe out of the study together and drink brandy, and you will feel sorry for yourself in an appropriate and contained fashion. But I do not think she will send you away.”

Darcy looked at him for a long moment. Richard had just proven himself surprisingly accurate about him. Could he be as perceptive about Elizabeth? The possibility gave him courage.

He pushed back his chair, the orders he gave carried out with the greatest efficiency by a household who had only been waiting for his command to act. Three days later, he rolled into Meryton, where he took a room at the inn and rented a horse to take him to Longbourn.

He saw Elizabeth before he reached the lane. She walked along the field path she favored in her heaviest coat, her hands behind her back and her face tipped up slightly—the way she walked when she was contemplating. He pulled his horse to a stop, not wishing to startle her and hoping that his nerves might settle. His stomach tied in knots.

She turned at the sound of his horse and saw him, and the immediate smile blossoming over her face undid every practiced sentiment he had planned to say. He dismounted. They stood on either side of the fence for a moment with the frigid wind stirring his coat and her curls. “You came,” she said. He held her gaze. She bit her lips, her smile softening. “I had hoped you would not wait too long.”