Page 102 of When Elizabeth's Cat Chose Darcy
“And this is why Papa likes you.”
Darcy did not blush, because men don’t blush, but the tips of his ears turned pink. We walked in silence for a stretch, the path narrowing between hawthorn hedges, Cinnamon disappearing into the undergrowth and reappearing twenty yards ahead with the satisfied air of a cat who had investigated a mouse hole and found it wanting.
“Elizabeth.”
Not Miss Bennet. Not the careful formality of the drawing room. My name, spoken in a November meadow with no one to hear it but the hedgerows and the cat.
“There is something I must tell you. About Georgiana. About what happened before—the reason I am the way I am and why I could not hear you when you warned me about Caroline.” He stopped walking. His hands went behind his back, gripping each other, a posture Georgiana adopted when she was bracing for something difficult, and the recognition that the gesture was inherited made my chest ache.
“Darcy.” I stopped, too. Turned to face him on the path, with the stream now visible through the trees, glinting silver in the sun. “Georgiana told me.”
He went very still.
“In the bath,” I said. “At Longbourn, the night she crossed. She was shivering and brave, and she told me everything. Wickham, the lies, the trunk in the hallway, and your fortuitous arrival. All of it.”
His face—I cannot describe his face. I had seen Darcy angry and formal and tender and broken and laughing, and I had never seen this. Stripped. As though the last wall had been dissolved.
“You knew.” His voice was barely audible. “That night, when I crossed the room to you, wet and cold. You already knew.”
“Yes.”
“And you danced with me.”
“Yes.”
He turned away, one hand pressing against his mouth, and I gave him the moment because some things require air. When he turned back, his eyes were bright.
“I manage everything,” he said, and the saying had the quality of a confession delivered to a court he has finally decided to trust. “I managed Ramsgate until the management became a cage. I managed Georgiana until she had to cross a stream to choose her own people. I managed my feelings for you until they escaped in a kitchen over ginger biscuits and I said things I had no intention of saying aloud.”
“Magnificent,” I said.
He blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“You said I was magnificent. And remarkable, and extraordinary.” I was smiling, and it didn’t surprise me. “You were mumbling between biscuit bites, and I was not supposed to have heard.”
“I was not mumbling. I was stating facts under duress.”
“Under the duress of ginger biscuits.”
“Your ginger biscuits are a force beyond mortal resistance.” His voice was steadier now. “Elizabeth, I need you to understand. Georgiana chose to tell you, and I did not authorize or orchestrate the telling.”
“I know that, and I would never betray that trust. She came to me in the middle of a storm, and she knew that I would open the door, and that I wanted nothing from her but her trust.”
He was quiet for a moment. The stream glinted through the trees, the sound of flowing water bubbly and delightful.
“Words will always be inadequate—” hisbreath caught.
“Then let me show you,” I said, glancing at Cinnamon, who had reached the bank. “This is where she crossed.”
Darcy stood at the bank and looked at the water. I watched him see it—the smallness of it, the ordinariness. A girl’s stepping-stone crossing between two estates, between two worlds, between the brother who caged her with love and the woman who taught her the cage had a door.
“She said not to look down,” he murmured. “To look where you wish to step next.”
“She was afraid of the water, and I told her to pick a stone and commit to it.”
“You taught my sister to be brave.”
“I taught your sister to cross a stream. The bravery was hers.”
