Page 67 of Mr. Darcy’s Fiery Passion

She got to her feet on the crutch, and her hand tightened on the head of it. For a moment she could not think at all. Then she put on her Meryton face, very carefully, and waited.

He stopped a few yards off. He was breathing hard, and there was mud to the tops of his boots. "Miss Elizabeth."

"Mr. Darcy." Her voice came out perfectly steady. She was proud of it. "You have come a strange way round to Netherfield, sir. This lane will get you there, but not quickly."

"I have not come from Netherfield. I have come from Longbourn."

"From Longbourn?"

"I called on your father. He told me which way you walk."

Elizabeth stared at him. Papa knows? In a fortnight her father had never once asked where she went. She had thought him quite incurious.

"Then he has told you more than he tells me," she said. "I hope Mr. Bingley is well. And Miss Darcy. And the settlements. I hope everything in London is very well."

"Elizabeth."

She stopped.

He had not called her that since the night of the ball. In the hall at Netherfield, with the trunks all round them, he had only bowed.

He came a step closer. He did not try to take her hand. "On the morning I left," he said, "you said a thing on the hall bench. I heard it from the stairs."

Heat climbed into her face. "I did not know anyone was listening."

"You said I needed you, and that now I do not." His voice was very low. "You were right about the first. You were wrong about the second."

She could not answer him.

"I heard you hand my own words back to me," he went on. "And I was too sick with Bingley's brandy to say anything worth saying. So my face did what it always does. It went still." He looked at her. "You know that face. I wore it at the assembly. I taught it to you myself."

"You looked relieved," said Elizabeth. Her voice was not steady now. "You looked glad to be rid of the whole business."

"I know how I looked."

"And you did not look back." She had not meant to say it. It came out anyway. "I watched you go down the steps to the carriage. You did not look back once."

"No." He was quiet a moment. "If I had looked back, I would have got out of the carriage. And I would have said it wrong a second time, in front of your mother and the trunks and Bingley's coachman. I had said it wrong once already."

Elizabeth dropped her eyes to the frozen ruts.

Do not hope, she told herself. He is a gentleman. He spoke badly, and he has come to set it right. That is all this is.

"You need not apologize, sir," she said. "You offered me everything a man could offer. It was very handsome. I was not ungrateful. I only..."

"I did not come to apologize."

She looked up.

He had taken off his gloves. She had not seen him do it. He held them in his left hand, and his right hand hung open at his side. The palm was still pink. The new skin shone a little in the cold. "At the ball I told you what I could give you," he said. "Pemberley. Security. An end to every care. I had three pages of it in my head. In London I wrote them all out again. Then I burned them."

"Why?"

"Because every word was a thing I could give you. And not one of them was the true thing."

Elizabeth said nothing. She was not sure she could.

"When my father was ill," he said, "he needed me to hold his cup. His hands would not do it. I held it for a year. And I watched him hate every day of it." He stopped. "So I decided that to need anyone was to begin to fade. That a man was worth what he could provide. I believed it for six years."