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"And now?"

I turn my head and look at him.

And the thing I have been holding at arm's length for a week, for a month, since the first morning he laughed, comes up in me so strong I cannot breathe.

***

I ought to say no.

I know it the way I know my own name. It has been sitting at the bottom of my stomach for days like a stone. He does not know what he is asking. He does not know who he is asking. He thinks he is asking a woman who wept buckets and said yes before he could finish, who has loved him since the parsonage, who has nothing whatever to hide. And she does not exist. I made her up, in a sickroom, out of guilt and green worsted.

If I kiss him now, I am kissing him with a lie in my mouth.

And when he remembers, as Charlotte says he will, as Pettigrew says he may any day, he will remember this too. He will remember standing on this hill in the wind, and asking, and being given what he asked for. And he will wonder what it was worth. Whether it was pity. Whether it was guilt. Whether the woman who kissed him on Oakham Mount was laughing at him the whole time, the way she laughed at him in Charlotte's parlor.

I ought to say no.

"Mr. Pettigrew wrote to me this morning," I say.

It comes out sideways. I do not know why I say it. Perhaps because I want to say anything but what I am thinking.

He raises his brows. "Did he? To you, and not to me?"

"He worries about you. He thinks I will be more sensible."

"He does not know you very well." He smiles. "What did he say?"

I am gratified to hear Mr. Darcy bore the journey so well. Nonetheless I would beg you, miss, to say nothing of an agitating nature until I have seen him myself. I shall come into Hertfordshire within the fortnight, and examine him, and give you my opinion then. I trust you will forgive an anxious old man for his caution.

"He said you are doing very well," I say. "And that he will come to see you himself, within the fortnight."

"Splendid. He can come to the wedding."

"And that you are to have no excitements until then."

"Ah." He looks down at me. The wind lifts a curl from under my bonnet and lays it across my cheek. He does not brush it back. He only looks at it, and then at my mouth, and then at my eyes. "So you will say no."

I open my mouth to say it.

"I shall understand," he says quietly, before I can. "I want you to know that. You need not explain. If you say not yet again, I shall wait. I shall wait as long as you like. I have waited since October. I can wait until June, or until Christmas, or until we are both old and gray and Pettigrew has gone to his reward. I only wanted you to know that I keep thinking of it." A pause. "Very often. More often than is quite respectable."

The larks are going up all round us. The whole of Hertfordshire lies below in the sun.

And I think: he would wait.

He would. That is what undoes me. Not the asking. The waiting. He would stand on this hill with his hat in his hand and wait for me until we were old, and never once ask me why, because he trusts me. He trusts the woman I invented. He trusts me so completely that he laughed in George Wickham's face for my sake.

And I want him.

Not the house. Not the ten thousand a year. Not the safety of being married, and settled, and done with Mama's schemes and Lady Catherine's insults. Him. His terrible jokes about dairymaids. His mother's long nose. The way he says my name. The way he looked, asleep on my shoulder in the carriage, with his hair under my bare hand.

I want it so much I am shaking.

And that is what frightens me. Not that I would be lying to him. That I would not be lying at all.

"Fitzwilliam," I say.

He goes still.