Page 3 of Miss Bennet is Gone

At Gracechurch Street, he handed her down and saw her to the door, though it was four steps and a forgiving household. The maid who let them in took one look at the pair of them and discovered she was wanted somewhere down the hall.

Darcy did not let go of Elizabeth's hand. He turned it palm-up instead, drew the glove back from the inside of her wrist, and set his mouth to the bare skin there. Once, without hurry.

It was a thing he had no business doing on an open step and did anyway. Her breath caught, and he heard it, and was not sorry.

"There," he said, very low. "Now you have something to remember that is not my failings."

Her laugh came out unsteadily. "You are determined to be remembered."

"By you? Always. It is the whole of my ambition." He pressed her gloved fingers once and let them go. "Goodnight, Elizabeth."

"Goodnight Fitzwilliam,” she said, her face glowing and her eyes bright with mischief and her love for him, and went in.

He stood a moment on the step after the door had closed, as though he had forgotten the way to his carriage.

Darcy boarded and gave the coachman his direction and sat back as the horses came round toward home, and for the length of that drive he let himself be simply and uncomplicatedly happy. It was a condition in which he had little practice, and was beginning to believe he might, with application, acquire some.

At home soon after, Darcy saw a letter on the salver and he very nearly let it lie until morning.

The evening had been a good one. He had laughed twice in company, which his cousin Richard thought remarkable in him, and not been wrong.

He had a superstition, privately held and never examined, against opening unknown correspondence at the end of a good day. He knew how readily his own hope rose and had learned to be careful of it.

Darcy looked closer and had his superstition proven correct. He knew the hand at once.

He had carried Lady Catherine's writing in his memory since boyhood. The heavy downstroke, the certainty in every letter, the hand of a woman who had never in her life supposed she might be writing to someone who would not do as she said.

He broke the seal standing in the hall and read it there, and then went into the study and read it again sitting down, but the second reading did not resolve what the first had begun.

It was the tone of the thing. The hand was hers and the tone was not. She wrote with care, each sentence set in its place like a plate laid for a meal long planned.

She had come to town and opened de Bourgh House. She wrote, she said, in the hope of being received as something other than what she had been when last they had spoken under his roof.

She asked, she did not demand, that he bring his bride to take tea, at whatever hour was convenient to Miss Bennet, who he must understand could have no warmer well-wisher than herself however little her recent conduct had given Miss Bennet cause to believe it.

It was, line by line, unanswerable. There was not a word in it that overreached. There was not a phrase a reasonable man could call false.

That was precisely what he could not get past. His aunt was many things and had never once in his memory been humble. Her convictions were not the sort that bent because an argument had gone against her.

A woman did not arrive at humility the way one arrived at London, by simply setting out. And yet here was the letter, complete, coherent, with every word laid true.

He sat with it a long while. The fire went down. In the end he could neither trust it nor dismiss it.

Darcy found he would have to account for it in the morning, because he was already half certain that Elizabeth, who forgave more readily than she admitted and was braver than was good for her, would want to go.

He carried it to Gracechurch Street after breakfast and watched her read it at the parlor table. That quick, expressive face she imagined she kept unreadable was, to him, as plain as print.

"She has apologized," Elizabeth said.

"Yes."

"By name. For particular wrongs." She did not look up. "That is not nothing. It is difficult to apologize in general. It is very difficult to apologize in particular."

"It is well done," Darcy said. "What troubles me is how well."

"Yes." She set the page down on the table and regarded it without picking it up again. "And yet you are here, and you have not refused her, which tells me you do not entirely believe your own suspicion."

He had not refused her. He acknowledged it. She was his aunt. There existed, somewhere among the possibilities, a version of this in which a proud woman had looked at what her pride had nearly cost her nephew and tried, clumsily and late, to mend it.