Page 52 of The Crown’s Gift

"Good God, Darcy. What happened?"

Darcy removed his wet gloves one finger at a time. "I asked Miss Elizabeth to marry me."

The colonel's surprise became delight, then alarm. "She refused."

Darcy looked at him.

"You look as if she shot you."

"She was more accurate."

The colonel poured brandy but did not offer easy consolation. "What did you say?"

Darcy repeated enough.

By the end, Colonel Fitzwilliam closed his eyes.

"You informed a woman you professed to love that her family was beneath you?"

"Not in those words."

"Words seem to have been the principal difficulty."

Darcy took the brandy and did not drink.

"She accused me of offering the same judgment disguised as love."

"Was she wrong?"

The answer came too quickly in Darcy's mind and too slowly to his mouth.

"No."

Rain struck the windows. Somewhere above, Lady Catherine rang for a servant with imperious force.

Darcy thought of Elizabeth at Netherfield saying the King's greatest gift had been a father who learned to leave his library. Sir Thomas had changed after seeing death an inch away. Darcy had believed himself more disciplined, more responsible, less in need of correction.

Now the future he had privately built—Elizabeth at Pemberley, Elizabeth with Georgiana, Elizabeth across his breakfast table—vanished because he had asked her to enter it as a concession.

"There is more she must know about Wickham," he said.

"Georgiana?"

Darcy nodded.

"You cannot tell Miss Bennet another woman's secret merely to win an argument."

"No. But I can trust her with it so that she may judge me truly."

He went upstairs and began a letter.

* * *

Elizabeth left Hunsford early the next morning because remaining indoors felt impossible.

The rain had passed. Water hung from hawthorn branches, and the path through Rosings Park shone in broken patches of sun. She walked quickly, as though distance might arrange the disorder of the previous night.

Darcy waited where the path entered the grove.