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"You wrote it. In your letter. The crack in the ceiling, like the Thames." Something extraordinary is happening to his face. "I lay under that ceiling a week before you did, Elizabeth. The second room on the left at the top of the stairs. I lay awake all night looking at that crack and thinking of you."

I stare at him.

"The second room on the left," I whisper.

"Yes."

"With the washstand that rocks."

"Yes."

And I begin to laugh. I cannot help it. It comes up out of me half a sob, standing on the path under the willows with the dead forget-me-nots in my palm and the tears running down my face, at the idea of the two of us lying in the same narrow bed a week apart, staring at the same crack, both of us too proud to say a single word to anyone. And he laughs too. That laugh. The one I first heard in Lady Catherine's best bedchamber, that comes up out of him from somewhere low and warm, the one I thought I would never hear again.

***

When we have stopped, we are standing much closer than we were.

I do not know how it happened. I did not see either of us move. But the willow branches are moving gently around us now, and the light is coming down green and gold through the leaves, and he is so near that I could put out my hand and touch his waistcoat, just over his heart, the way I did at the foot of the stairs at Longbourn.

I do.

His heart is going very hard.

He looks down at my hand. Then at my face. His own face has gone very still, very grave, and his eyes are dark, and he lifts one hand and lays it, very lightly, against my cheek. His thumb moves once, slowly, along the line of my cheekbone, through the wet.

"You have been crying," he says.

"A little."

"On my account?"

"Entirely on your account."

The corner of his mouth moves. He remembers. He said those very words to me, the first morning at Rosings, and I answered them with the only true thing I said to him that day.

I cannot bear it any longer. I have not been able to bear it since the garden. I rise up onto my toes, and my hand slides up from his waistcoat to his collar, and I lean in toward his mouth, and his breath catches, and his eyes drop to my lips, and his hand on my cheek tightens—

And he stops me.

Very gently. His hand moves from my cheek to my shoulder, and holds me there, a breath away. Not pushing me back. Only holding still.

"Not yet," he says.

I stare up at him.

He is not smiling. But his eyes are, I think. Somewhere at the back of them. Very dark, and very warm, and full of something I have never seen in them before, something that looks almost like mischief.

"Not yet?" I say.

"Not yet." His voice is not quite steady. "I owe you something first."

"You owe me nothing."

"I owe you a proposal." He looks down at me. "Mine was the worst ever made, I think. In the whole history of the Church of England. You told me so yourself, at some length. And then you gave me a better one, at my bedside, out of nothing. And I have never once said it to you."

I cannot breathe.

"In your letter," he says, "you wrote something about the proposal you gave me. At my bedside. I have read it a dozen times since. I want to hear you say it."