Page 17

"Yes."

"Darcy."

"Yes."

"Fitzwilliam Darcy. Of Pemberley. Ten thousand a year and half of Derbyshire."

"I was aware of the particulars, Colonel."

"I do not think anyone has ever refused Darcy anything," he says, in a voice of wonder. "Not since he was in leading strings. Nurse tried once, over a pony. She did not try again."

In spite of everything, my mouth twitches.

Then his face changes. I watch it happen. He is putting it together piece by piece, the way I have just put together Mr. Wickham.

"He came in last night just as the Collinses were leaving," he says slowly. "White as a sheet. He went straight up. He sat writing till dawn. Nine sheets on the floor, and he would not tell me why." He looks at me. "I made a joke about highwaymen."

"You could not have known."

"And the morning before that—" He stops. All the color goes out of him. "Good God. The grove. Bingley. Strong objections against the lady. I told you that. I told you that, smiling, and that very night he walked down and—"

"It was not only that," I say quickly. "I had other grievances. I had Mr. Wickham's."

"Wickham," the Colonel says, in an altogether different voice.

"I believed him. Everything he told me." I touch the letter in my lap. "Mr. Darcy rode out this morning to give me this. To tell me the truth. Because I had thrown Mr. Wickham's lies in his face."

The Colonel looks at the letter. "Did he tell you about—"

"About Miss Darcy. Yes."

He lets out a long breath. "Then he trusted you with the one thing he guards above everything. After you refused him." He shakes his head slowly. "That is Darcy all over. Proud as Lucifer about the wrong things, and humble as a curate about the right ones, and never once able to tell which is which."

"I told him he was the last man in the world I could ever be prevailed upon to marry."

The Colonel winces. "Did you."

"I said it very well, too."

"I do not doubt it." He rubs his forehead. "Poor devil. He has been in love with you this age, you know, and I never saw it. I thought it was only that he did not like you. He kept walking in the grove at odd hours and coming back in a temper. I thought it was the weather." A short, unhappy laugh. "And now he has lost the one day he would most like to forget, and he cannot even have the satisfaction of forgetting it on purpose."

"He thinks I said yes," I say.

"He is perfectly certain of it."

"Then I must tell him." I stand. My knees are steadier than I expected. "Now, before it goes any further. Before he says it to anyone else. Before he says it to Lady Catherine."

The Colonel rises too. "Miss Bennet, I am not sure—"

"I cannot let him lie up there believing it. It would be the cruelest thing I have done yet, and I have done some very cruel things lately." I turn toward the door. "I shall go up and tell him that I never accepted him."

"No."

It is not the Colonel who says it.

Mr. Pettigrew is standing in the doorway. I did not hear the door open. He is a small, gray, anxious man, with his spectacles pushed up on his forehead and his neckcloth in a state of great alarm, and he is looking at me as though I have just proposed to set fire to the curtains.

"Forgive me," he says. "I did not mean to listen. I came down for my bag." He swallows. "But I am afraid you must not do that, miss."