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“Do not joke with me.” Darcy crossed the floor in two strides. He did not touch him. He stood with his fists at his sides, and the lamplight showed the pulse in his neck, and the old, bright, narrow light was in his face that his cousin remembered from long ago. “You made a scene of her, Richard. You put her in a position where she must choose between sitting by me and walking out, and you did it in my name.”

“I did.” The Colonel did not flinch.

Darcy swore under his breath. “Then what did you think you were about?”

The Colonel put down the bridle. “I was about what I have always been about. Winning. She was right to be angry, Fitz. Do you hear me? She was right. I told her so, and I gave her my word. And if you are fool enough to suppose that the next thing you do should be any form of trick, however well meant, you will undo in one evening every inch we have gained.”

“How many inches have we gained?” Darcy’s tone made it sound like it was a complaint, rather than an inquiry.

The Colonel considered. “Two,” he said at last. “Possibly three. She has not yet told you to go to the devil; at least not in so many words.”

Darcy gave a short, hard, ugly laugh. It was the first the Colonel had heard from him in a week that sounded in the least like a man; and it died in his throat, and he put his hand over his eyes.

“I will not seek her out,” he said. His voice was rough. “Not by any chance, nor by any means whatsoever. If she wishes to see me, she may say so. I will go to her door if she sends. I will not go otherwise.”

The message came through Charlotte, two days later, delivered in the vestry garden between the bean-rows in the voice Mrs. Collins used when she wished to appear to be speaking of something else.

“Mr. Darcy bade me say,” said Charlotte, “that he is sorry for Thursday. He did not know of it, and would not have permitted it, and desires you to understand it was not his doing. And he asks me to tell you that he will not seek another meeting, of any kind, unless you yourself should desire it. He wished you to know that it rests with you.” She stooped, as if to pick a bean.”

Elizabeth did not answer at once. She stood among the green bean-rows with the sun on her neck and the smell of wet earth about her, and a feeling had come upon her that she could not place. She supposed it was not relief; it was nearer to unease; she felt it was the sensation of a person who has leaned all her weight upon a door and found it open. She had told the Colonel she would not be managed. She had been so certain, in the gallery, of what she wanted, which was that she should be let alone. And here it was, given to her entire, on a plate, by a man who had been told by half of Hertfordshire that he would sooner die than ask a favour. It was a good gift. It was exactly what she had asked for.

“Do you believe him?” she said at last.

“I believe he means it,” said Charlotte directly. “I do not know that I should say it comes easily.”

“No.” Elizabeth looked down the row, where a pale line of seedlings was just breaking through. “No, I don’t suppose it does.”

She turned it over all afternoon. And, she slowly realized that it was either the cleverest piece of strategy she had ever met, or the first truly unstrategic thing he had ever done. She could not tell which. That, she thought, is the disturbing part. For the first time since she had known him, she could not tell which it was, and was a good deal more eager than she liked to find out.

CHAPTER 7

A little past midnight, on the ninth night of the campaign, the two of them sat in Darcy’s sitting-room at Rosings with the fire half dead and a decanter between them that neither had touched. Darcy had taken off his coat and thrown it across the back of a chair. He was in his shirt-sleeves, with one boot off and one boot on, like a man who had begun to undress and been interrupted by a more pressing grief. The knuckles of his right hand had healed to a hard pink seam. He kept rubbing the place with his thumb.

“You will not like this,” said the Colonel.

Darcy looked at his cousin, and scoffed. “Then do not say it.”

Richard looked back at Darcy and said it anyway. “I have been thinking about Wickham.”

Darcy let out a small, bitter laugh. “I have been thinking of very little else for eleven years.”

“No, you have been thinking of how to avoid thinking about him, Ftiz” The Colonel put his elbows on his knees. “That evening at the parsonage, she told you what she believed. Eloquently, at the top of her voice. She said you had ruined him. And she was perfectly sincere. She had it from his own lips, a charming candid fellow in a red coat, telling the story as he told it. And you stood on the hearth-rug and said, you take an eager interest in that gentleman’s concerns, and gave her nothing.”

“I was not about to defend myself to her,” said Darcy gravely.

Fitzwilliam did not understand. “Why not?”

“Because she had no right to think I’d have to,” Darcy insisted.

The Colonel looked at him for a very long moment. “That is the most dumbbrained and revealing sentence I have ever heard you speak.”

Darcy did not answer. The fire shifted, and the coal fell through the bars.

“Think what you have done,” said the Colonel, more gently. “You have had that man loose in the world for eight years, and in all that time you have never told a single living soul what he is. Not the neighbours. Not the regiment. Not the people he is lying to at this moment. You have held your tongue like a gentleman, and the result is that he has told the tale as he likes, to anyone who would listen, and not one of them has had anything to set against it. It is not your silence that has kept your name clean, Fitz. It is your silence that has let him use it.”

“There are other reasons; you know there are,” he complained.

The Colonel exhaled. “There is one reason, and she is sixteen years old and asleep in Pemberley.”