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“I am saying it better. You went into that house with a speech. You had it written, I would guess, from the day we came to Kent, and you have been rehearsing it to your shaving-glass. And the speech was a list of everything wrong with her. Her relations. Her connexions. The degradation. You were not proposing marriage. You were reading her a bill of costs!”

“I was honest with her.” He looked defeated just then, his eyes hallowing, as he stared into the path’s abyss.

“You were cruel with her, and you thought it was honesty because it hurt you to say it.” Richard shook his head. “A surgeon is honest. A butcher is merely thorough.”

Darcy said, through his teeth, “You had no right to come into that room.”

Richard nodded twice. “None whatsoever; though, I should do it again.”

“You humiliated me before her!” Darcy lashed out then.

“No,” said the Colonel, with a quiet that was worse than any shouting. “You did that yourself, long before I got to the door. What I did was stop you from making it permanent.”

That went into Darcy’s heart somehow; it tucked right under his ribs and stayed there, and Darcy, who had been walking fast, found that his legs had slowed of their own accord and that he was looking, not at the road, but at nothing at all. That was not entirely true. He was actually seeing her face.

He had not meant to look. He had trained himself for years, in a hundred drawing-rooms, never to look at a woman when she was angry; it was the sort of thing that cost a man his composure. But he had looked at Elizabeth Bennet in that parsonage, because he could not do otherwise, and he had seen what was under the fury. Not hatred, though she had said hatred. Not contempt. He had seen the look of a person standing in a doorway who has just been told that her house has been valued at a third of what she paid for it.

She had been wounded, and he only realized it after he had said it. She had stood there white and shaking and defended her family to the last syllable, with that clear stubborn courage he had loved from the first, and he had sat in the wreck of it, afterward, and thought, how dare she.

He stopped in the middle of the lane. “I said she was beneath me,” he said. His voice had gone odd. “I thought.” He did not finish.

The Colonel said nothing. He had the good sense, for once in his life, to say nothing at all. After a few minutes., it was the Colonel, in the end, who spoke of the three weeks.

They had come out onto the high road, within sight of the lodge-lamps at Rosings, and Darcy had stopped talking, which Richard had learned over thirty years to read as the worst sign and the best. He was leaning against a gate-post with his hurt hand wrapped in his handkerchief and his hat in the other, and he looked, the Colonel thought, about twelve years old, and about forty, in the same breath.

“We are due to leave on Saturday,” said Richard. “Our Aunt Catherine has been told so. You have a note ready for Pemberley, a servant sent ahead, and a trunk half-packed in the east wing. So I have a proposition.”

Darcy shook his head. “I am not in the humour for propositions.”

“Fitz, I believe we should stay.” Richard had stopped and his voice was calm.

Darcy stared at him, but did not reply.

“Three weeks,” said the Colonel. “Three weeks from tomorrow. I shall give out that I am waiting on word from the Horse Guards; there is always something to wait on. I shall keep our aunt occupied, which I have been doing since I was breeched, and which I am, if I may say so, quite uncommonly good at. And you, in that time, will make yourself useful.”

“Useful?” Darcy repeated, perplexed.

“To Miss Bennet in particular. Not by begging; goddess spare me, and not by begging. But there is a village full of people at Hunsford, and a parson who cannot reckon a tithe-barn without help, and a Miss Elizabeth Bennet who has just learned that she may have been wrong about a certain person’s character. Find out where the work is, and do it. Do it without being asked, and without being thanked.”

“I do not… I cannot.” Darcy began, and stopped. “You are suggesting I stay in the neighbourhood of a woman who has told me, in as many words, that she would rather be hanged. And dance attendance?” His voice was soaked in bitterness and regret.

“No, nothing of the sort. I am suggesting you stay and prove her wrong,” Richard urged.

“By doing what? She has told me what she thinks of my character, Richard. It is not a thing that is mended by carrying parcels.” Darcy’s anger began to rise again, as his voice got louder.

“No. It is mended by the long, dull, daily business of not being what she said you were. That is the only cure there has ever been.” The Colonel shifted. “I have seen men take a hill in an afternoon and I have seen men take it in a week, and I will tell you which kind hold it afterward.”

“This is not a hill, Richard,” Darcy replied flatly.

His cousin shook his head in disagreement. “Everything is a hill. That is the first law of the profession.”

Darcy turned his face away. He was breathing hard through his nose. It was, he understood, the most humiliating suggestion that had ever been made to him. He was a man who acted. He had walked into a house yesterday with a plan, and been broken by it; and now his cousin proposed that he plan again, and wait, and be seen, and be looked at, by the woman who had said what she said, on terms where the whole result must hang on another person’s verdict.

There was no stratagem in it, he told himself. There was no wall to be breached, no negotiation to be driven, no point at which he could say enough, and take the thing by main force. If she chose to find him bearable, she would; and if not, no amount of conduct would alter it. It was the most frightening thing anyone had ever asked of him.

And, finally, after a long moment of silence, Darcy made a decision. “I will not be managed,” he insisted.

“No. You will be ordered, which is a different thing.” Richard held up three fingers. “Three rules. One. No boasting. Not a syllable, not a hint, not a sidelong look. You do a thing and you shut your mouth and walk away. If she hears of it, she hears of it from somebody else.”