Page 47 of Mr Darcy’s Inconvenient Wife

He got to his feet. “Of course. Is anything wrong?”

“No. Nothing is wrong with the house.” She came in and set the candle on the corner of his desk. “I am interrupting you.”

“You are saving me from the Long Parliament. I have been in their company an hour, and I could not tell you one thing they decided.” He put the book face down, which was hardly fair to Lord Clarendon, and came round the desk. “Will you sit?”

She took the chair nearest the fire. He took the other and waited. She drew the fringe of her shawl through her fingers, one strand at a time, and seemed to be counting them.

It had been a strange sort of day. The carriage had gone at eleven, with Lady Catherine sitting bolt upright inside it and Anne waving from the window with two fingers, where her mother could not see. Since then the servants had been walking about the house as if they had been let out of school. At dinner Elizabeth had talked about the weather and a letter from Longbourn, in which Mrs Bennet's nerves took up three sides and the fourth was crossed. His aunt's name had not come up once. Nor had his cousin's. Then Elizabeth had pleaded a headache and gone up early, and he had come in here, because nobody expected him to be pleasant in the study.

“Miss de Bourgh came to see me this morning,” she said. “Before they left.”

“I thought she might have. She had that look about her at breakfast.”

“She told me about Mr Wickham.” Elizabeth raised her eyes to his. “All of it, I think. Her maid, and the stables, and what he said to you there.”

For a moment Darcy did not answer. He thought of Anne in the window seat the night before, lifting her hand to stop him. He had taken it for tiredness. She had not promised him anything. He had simply assumed she would do as she was asked, because she always had.

“I did not ask her to tell you.”

“I know. She said you had asked her not to.”

“Then it is the first time in her life she has disobeyed anyone,” said Darcy, “and she picked me to practise on.”

The corner of Elizabeth's mouth moved. It did not quite become a smile.

He leaned forward with his arms on his knees and looked at the coals. “I never wanted you to hear it like that. It was not mine to tell. Whatever it did to me, it was Anne he meant to ruin, and Anne who would have been ruined if I had got there an hour later. I could not buy your good opinion with her secret. I would sooner you thought me a scoundrel.”

“You very nearly had your wish.”

“I know.”

“I do understand why you kept it,” she said after a little while. “I think I understood it while she was still talking. And I am grateful to her. She had no reason to trust me. I am the woman who married her cousin while her mother was in Kent choosing the lace. Yet she told me the worst thing that ever happened to her. I am not sure I deserved it.”

He had no answer to that which would not sound like a compliment, and he did not think she wanted one.

Neither of them said anything more for a while. A hackney went through the square with its wheels hissing on the wet stones. Somewhere towards Oxford Street the watchman called half past ten. Darcy could hear the clock on the chimney-piece, and it seemed to him to be going very slowly. Elizabeth had stopped playing with the fringe. Her hands lay still in her lap, and she was looking at the carpet between them as though she had lost something there. He thought she might get up and go. If she did, he would not stop her.

She did not get up.

“I owe you an apology, Mr Darcy.”

“You owe me nothing.”

“I think I had better be the judge of what I owe.” There was a little of the old spirit in it, and it seemed to steady her. “For months I believed every word that man told me. I did not only believe it. I repeated it. I let it colour everything you said and did. When you walked over to the parsonage in the rain, I would not let you finish a sentence. And in the carriage, the day after the wedding, I told you he loved every stone of Pemberley.” She shook her head. “I would not have treated a stranger like that. I would at least have asked a stranger for his side of it. I never asked for yours.”

Darcy had imagined this conversation more often than he would have admitted to anyone. In none of those imaginings had he felt so little like crowing.

“You had no reason to think well of me,” he said. “I made sure of that. I was proud, and I was rude to your family and to you, and I interfered where I had no business to. What I did to your sister was a real wrong, Elizabeth. Wickham's lies do not make it any smaller, and I will not hide behind them. You have every right to hold it against me. I will not ask you to stop just because he has turned out worse than I.”

She was looking at him now. He found it easier to talk to the fire.

“But he has hurt too many people I love. My father paid for his schooling and never saw him for what he was, not to the day he died. My sister still thinks of him fondly. She cannot understand why I will not have him in the house, and I cannot tell her without telling her what he is. Anne you know about.” He stopped, and started again more evenly. “And all that while he was welcome in every drawing room from here to Meryton, and wherever he went I was the man who had wronged him. He told it very well. I have had it told back to me by people who had never set eyes on me. I could not say a word against him without giving away the very people I was trying to protect. So I said nothing. I will not pretend it was easy.”

The clock ticked on. Elizabeth pulled the shawl a little closer, though the fire was warm enough.

“I am beginning to think I misjudged you,” she said at last. “Not in everything. I cannot forgive you about Jane yet, and I do not think you would respect me if I pretended I could.”

“No. I should not.”