Page 65 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

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She had meant to be calm.

She had sat on the top stair for three-quarters of an hour with her arms round her knees, while her tea went cold on a tray beside her and Hannah hovered in the passage wringing her hands, and she had planned exactly what she would say. She would be reasonable. She would be gentle. She would take his hand, and remind him of everything Richard must already have said to him, and he would see sense, because he was the most sensible man she had ever known.

Then she came into the study and saw the pistols.

They lay in their green baize bed on the desk between his hands, long and dark and gleaming in the lamplight, and he was sitting behind them with his face like a stone. He looked up at her as she came in, and she saw that he was not surprised to see her. He had been waiting for her. He had decided what he would say, too.

Every reasonable word went out of her head.

"Put them away," she said.

"Elizabeth—"

"Put them away. Now. Close the case and give it to Grey and tell him to lock it in the cellar and lose the key."

He stood up. He did not touch the case.

"I cannot do that," he said quietly.

"You can. You simply will not."

"He put that letter in your hands." The words came out of him low and hard, as if each one cost him something. "He stood in front of you and watched you read it. He wanted you to believe I had married you for a jest. He wanted to see you break."

"And I did not break! I tore it up! I threw it in the Serpentine!" She heard her own voice rising and could not stop it. "He did not win, Fitzwilliam. He did not win. I stood there and I knew you, and I told him so, and I walked away. And now you want to go and give him the one thing he could never have got from me."

"What thing?"

"You." It came out almost as a sob. "Your life. On a heath at dawn, with his pistol pointed at your heart. He is a better shot than you. Richard said so. I heard him. I heard everything."

"Then you will have heard that I have let him live ten years for my father's sake. That he has ruined half the tradesmen in Lambton and a dozen farmers' daughters and very nearly my sister, and walked away from every one of them laughing." His hands were clenched on the edge of the desk. "I will not let him walk away from you. I cannot. A man who lets this pass—"

"Is a man who comes home to dinner!"

They stared at each other across the desk.

"You promised me," said Elizabeth. She was shaking now, from head to foot. "At Christmas. In the linen cupboard. I wrote it and you answered it. We would face this together. Side by side. Not you in front of me with a pistol, and me at home waiting to hear whether I am a widow. Together. And now the first time it is truly dreadful, the very first time, you shut the door on me and send for your father's pistols without a word, and I have to hear about it sitting on the stairs, like a servant listening at a keyhole."

He flinched. She saw it.

"I was going to come up," he said.

"When? After you had loaded them? After you had found Richard a second and chosen the ground?" Her voice broke. "You were going to come up and kiss me good night and let me sleep, and go out at dawn, and let me find out afterwards. Were you not? Tell me the truth. We said no secrets."

He did not answer. He did not need to. She saw it in his face.

Something inside her gave way, like a floor.

"Then go," she said. "Go and find him. Go and get yourself killed on some heath for my honour, and leave me a widow at twenty, and Georgiana with nobody, and Pemberley with nobody, and see if my honour keeps me warm." The tears were running down her face now and she did not wipe them. "I would rather have a husband who has been laughed at in the Post than a husband in the churchyard at Pemberley with a very fine monument. Do you understand me? I would rather have you alive. I would rather have you alive and ashamed than dead and magnificent. I did not marry you for your pride, Fitzwilliam Darcy. I married you in spite of it."

She turned and went out of the study before he could answer. She went up the stairs, past Hannah, past the cold tea, past Georgiana's door. She went into her green room, and through it to her bedroom, and she stood in front of the door in the far wall, the door with no lock, that he had made for her in December.

She had told him, on her first evening in this house, that she reserved the right to slam it.

She slammed it. It was a very satisfying slam. It shook the pictures on the wall.

Then she sat down on the floor with her back against it, in her gown and her stockings, and put her face in her hands, and cried until she could not breathe.