Page 3

He had known Darcy almost thirty years. He knew the Darcy who was silent because he was bored, and the Darcy who was silent because he was shy, and the very rare Darcy who was silent because he had decided upon something and would not be turned from it by God or man. This was the third type of Darcy, and it had descended during the soup, and had gone on descending through the fish, so that by the time the second course came in Lady Catherine had asked her nephew three questions upon the subject of the Pemberley drains and received three monosyllables, and the Colonel, who had been in the army long enough to recognise a man loading his piece, had set down his glass.

Darcy had risen before the cloth was removed. He had made some civil excuse about air, and been told by his aunt that there was a great deal of air in the room and that he might sit; and he had said, “I beg your pardon, ma’am,” in a voice that had no beg in it whatever, and gone out. A moment after the door closed Richard heard the front door of the house; it was not shut. No, thought the Colonel, it was pulled, with a violence the porter would likely remark upon in the morning.

He gave it one minute by the clock, which was all the decency required. Then he said something about a letter that must go by the early post, and left his aunt to the lamentations of Mr. Collins’s absent wife, and went after his younger cousin. The Colonel was not afraid, exactly. But he had seen a man go out into the dark with that particular set of the shoulders once before, at Badajoz, the night before the breach was stormed, and the man had not come back.

It was a mile across the park to the parsonage lane, and Darcy made it in what Richard judged to be a quarter of an hour, which was not a walk but a march. The Colonel followed at a distance, keeping to the edge of the drive where the beeches threw shadow, and was a little ashamed of how readily his old habits reasserted themselves.

He had no business tracking his cousin like a poacher. He told himself so twice. By the third time he had reached the gate of Hunsford Parsonage, and was watching a lit window, and had stopped telling himself anything.

The front door was opened to Darcy by a maid who looked as though she had been struck. It closed. Richard stood in the garden for some minutes, among Mrs. Collins’s cabbages, and considered his position, which was ridiculous. He had left his aunt’s table and walked a mile in evening dress to stand in a vegetable patch; he knew if it were discovered, he should be a laughing-stock from Rosings to Whitehall.

It was no use, he thought, and he went in. The maid had retreated to the kitchen, from which came the clatter of a person busying herself very loudly with nothing at all, and no one stopped him in the passage. It was a small house, and a cheap one, and the boards in the hall had the dry complaint of timber that has never been properly seasoned.

He went upon his toes; he knew it was absurd to be creeping in this fashion, he thought, like a spy in a Drury Lane farce; and yet his heart was going in the old fashion, steady and hard, as it had gone on picket duty in the Peninsula, when every sound was a decision.

He had no need to wonder which room, for he heard it before he reached the door. It was not Darcy’s voice that he first distinguished, but a woman’s, clear and low and trembling with a fury she was visibly mastering, and the cadence of it stopped him as though he had walked into a wall. The man who has been, perhaps, the means of ruining, perhaps for ever, the happiness of a most beloved sister.

Richard closed his eyes. He had done a good deal of damage in his life, in the usual course of things, but he did not think he had ever before been the direct cause of an accusation of that kind. It was he, Lord help him, who had Miss Elizabeth Bennet. They had spoken, over his coffee at Lady Catherine’s, that very afternoon, as easy as breathing. He had told Miss Bennet how his cousin had congratulated himself on preserving some friend of his from an imprudent match, and had watched her put down her cup. The Colonel thought he was praising Darcy’s strengths in that he was an admirable friend; he did not know the speech had sent his cousin to the gallows.

He opened his eyes. Wickham, said the voice beyond the door. He did not hear all of it. The planks were thick, and Darcy’s answers came pitched too low to carry; but he heard enough. He heard the words “poverty” and “withheld” and “deprived,” and he stood outside a stranger’s door with one hand flat on the wall and felt a slow, cold, military fury come up in him on behalf of a man he sometimes wished at the bottom of the Thames.

Then Darcy spoke again, and the Colonel flinched. He had never heard his cousin laugh like that; he knew it was not a sound a man makes in company. Rather, it was the sound of something being broken in a closed room, and under it, a moment later, came the words themselves, rough and clipped, in a voice stripped of every layer of Pemberley that Darcy had spent twenty years putting on. Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connexions?

“Oh, you damned fool,” said the Colonel, very quietly, to the empty passage.

He had meant to leave it there. He had meant to stand and listen and then, when the door opened, to melt into the dark of the hall, and be elsewhere, and say nothing, to anyone, ever. It was not his affair. A gentleman did not break in upon a lady’s refusal. But the next words he heard were hers, and they came out low and level, and they were the cruellest thing a woman could say to a man like Darcy, because she said them as if she did not wish to. You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way than as it spared me the concern which I might have felt in refusing you.

And then there was a silence of the kind he had learned, in the field, to distrust above any noise. Something instantly hit Richard’s gut, a type of feeling that perhaps was fueled by justice or pity, or something else entirely, but it told him what he must do, and he knew not to go against his gut.

There was no more waiting after that. The Colonel was nothing if not a man of action, and the man of action in him had been quietly, powerfully offended on behalf of both parties, and reflected for less than a heartbeat on the fact that he would very likely regret this, and opened the door.

He saw the room in a single glance, as he saw all rooms, the exits, the furniture, the persons in it, and which of them was likeliest to do something stupid.

Miss Elizabeth Bennet stood by the table with both hands clasped before her, white to the lips, the candle behind her throwing her shadow across the wall. She was not weeping. He saw at once that she was a person who did not weep in front of the enemy and he thought better of her for it than for anything else.

Darcy was five paces from the door. He had been going, the Colonel judged, and the sight of a third person in the doorway checked him mid-stride, and what came into his face then was not shame, or surprise, but something that made the Colonel’s hand tighten on the latch. It was the look he had seen on Darcy at Cambridge, once, outside a tavern in Trumpington Street, shortly before a certain gentleman named Wickham had gone home with his nose in a handkerchief.

“Richard,” said Darcy. The voice was perfectly level and had a dreadful rasp at the edge of it. “Get out.”

He looked at Darcy square in the eye and said, “I think not.”

“This is not your concern,” Darcy replied, sounding a mixture of horror and vexation.

Richard could hear how livid his cousin was from his tone. “I have been at the door of it for some while, I am afraid, and I find I have a concern.” The Colonel shut the door behind him with his heel. “Miss Bennet. I beg your pardon. I have no excuse that would satisfy you, and I shan’t insult you by offering one. I will say only that if there is a man living who ought to be made to hear what he has just heard, it is this one, and that I could not in conscience let him walk out of this house without it.”

She stared at him. The Colonel recognised the look, too: it was the look of a person who has expected one kind of weather and been dealt another. “Colonel Fitzwilliam,” said she, and stopped.

“I said get out,” Darcy demanded, his voice increasing by degrees.

Darcy had moved, a small movement, a half-step, but the Colonel had been reading men across a field for fifteen years and he knew an advance when he saw one. He crossed the room in three strides, which put him between his cousin and the hearth and, more to the purpose, between his cousin and the lady, and set his open hand squarely against Darcy’s chest.

“No,” he said. “That will do. Stand where you are. You’ve done a great deal this evening, Fitz, and none of it has been a credit to you, and I will not have you lay a finger on a door, a wall, or a piece of this woman’s furniture until I have said what I came to say.”

He felt the heart going under his palm like a fist. Darcy was breathing through his teeth. His knuckles had gone white at his sides and there was a muscle jumping in his jaw, and for the space of three heartbeats the Colonel considered, with perfect equanimity, the possibility that he was about to be knocked down by his own cousin in a clergyman’s drawing-room.

Then Darcy let out a breath, one long hard one, and took a step back. “Say it.” He paused for a moment, in defeat. “Say it, then. You will in any case.”

“I will.” The Colonel nodded and turned. “Miss Bennet, you have said some things this evening, and you will forgive me if I say that you have said them on a short allowance of the facts. I do not tell you this to excuse him. I tell you because I think you would wish to be just, and because I have, very probably, done you a mischief myself this afternoon by what I said at Rosings, and I would rather mend it than let it lie.