Page 27

She looks up at me.

Her eyes are very dark this morning, and there is something in them I cannot name. It is not the look I am used to from her. I am used to her eyes laughing at me across a drawing room, sharp and bright and a little dangerous, like sunlight on a blade. This is something else. Something careful. Something almost frightened.

"The rest," she says softly, "was not a hash at all."

The room is very quiet. Even Pettigrew has stopped polishing.

"You put down the wool," she says. "You came and sat beside me. Not in front of me. Beside me. And you said—" She stops. Her fingers tighten in mine. "You said you had no fine speech."

"I am sure I had one. I had been composing one for a fortnight."

"You said you had one, and that it was a very bad one, and all about yourself. And that you had thrown it away on the walk down the lane."

I am silent.

It does not sound like me. I know the speech I carried down that lane. I remember the shape of it, if not the words: the scruples, the struggle, the long honest account of every reason I had fought against it. I was rather proud of that speech. It was thorough.

And I threw it away?

"What did I say instead?" I ask. "Exactly. I want the words."

She draws a breath.

"You said—" She is looking at our hands again, and her voice drops so low I have to lean toward her to catch it. "You said, Miss Bennet, I have been happier in an hour of your company than in a year of anyone else's."

Something turns over in my chest.

"You said, I would rather be laughed at by you than admired by the whole world."

Fitzwilliam, by the door, turns very slowly and looks at the back of Miss Bennet's head.

"You said, I do not ask you to think me good. I know you do not. I only ask you to let me try to become so."

I cannot speak.

"And then you said—" Her voice catches, very slightly. "You said, If you can bear to have me—"

She stops.

"If you can bear to have me," I repeat. "And?"

"And nothing. You did not finish." She lifts her chin and looks straight at me, and her eyes are bright and wet. "I said yes before you could."

I have been told a great many things in my life. I have been told that I am the master of Pemberley, and that I have ten thousand a year, and that I am handsome, and proud, and disagreeable, and a great catch, and a great disappointment to my aunt. I have been praised by bishops and flattered by duchesses and fawned upon by half the mamas in London.

No one has ever given me anything like this.

"I said that," I say at last. "I said all of that."

She hesitates. Then: "Every word."

"It does not sound like me."

A strange, small laugh escapes her. "No. It surprised me very much."

"I am surprised myself." I look at her hand in mine. Her fingers are trembling a little; so, I find, are mine. "I had no idea I could say anything so well. I have never said anything well to you in my life. I have stood about in drawing rooms like a lamp post for six months, and said that Hertfordshire was very well for a country neighborhood."

"You did say that," she agrees. "Several times."