Page 24 of Darcy's Legacy Tortoise
“Darcy?” Elizabeth’s voice cut through my muddled thoughts. “You wished to converse, and I had assumed it was with me instead of the window pane. Or were you counting the streaks left by the shower?”
“I hadn’t counted.”
“I contemplate details when I am nervous, like the way your jaw clenches in synchronicity with your scowls, and occasionally, you would relax, as if you’d convinced yourself that the weather would be sunny, but then the clouds sweep over your countenance, and the furrows between your eyes would deepen. Whatever it is, you might as well enlighten me before I concoct a story far worse than anything you can possibly recall.”
I turned from the window and blinked, taking in everything I loved about dear Elizabeth. Her kindness and ability to piece together puzzles, yet I could not forget her ire, and the not-speaking was agony, because my chest had tightened to the point where drawing a full breath required a great act of will.
“Miss Elizabeth.” My voice came out hoarse. I cleared my throat and tried again. “I need to… There is something I must tell you, and I would ask…” I drew another breath, and this oneshuddered. She noticed it, of course, and she sat up straighter. Her lips parted, and those eyes widened. Alerted, her cheeks flushed with color.
She believed I was about to propose. Or at least, she anticipated something pleasurable—a prelude before showering her with silks—the kind of trip that suggested a bright and happy future.
“God help me,” I muttered as my knees weakened, and I dropped in front of her chair. “Will you hear me without interruption? I need to say this entirely… I need to get through it. All of it. Before I lose the—” I pressed my thumb into the chair’s leg until the wood bit into the pad. “Before my nerve fails.”
The hope in her face flickered and held. She folded her hands in her lap with a deliberateness that told me her heart was doing something extraordinary, and she nodded.
“It is not what you believe.” I stumbled through, my throat tight. “I have not been honest with you.” I watched her eyes—those fine, dark, devastating eyes—and saw the expectation now tinged with confusion, but she nodded encouragingly, as if I still had something worth anticipating. And her nod was a knife, because what I was about to say would extinguish her spirit, and I would have to stand here and watch the light go out. “It concerns Bingley, and your sister, and the events of last November.”
A gasp, followed by the covering of her lips. “What are you saying?”
Her expression dimmed, hope retreating but not extinguished—just wary now.
“I was wrong, abjectly so, and…”
The light went out of her eyes, and I saw the exact moment when she realized this was not a proposal. Her hands tightened, and those eyes narrowed, guarded.
“Go on.”
I remained on my knees—the only proper posture for a penitent—looking up at the devastation I had caused.
“You believe that Caroline and Louisa Bingley maneuvered the separation by concealing Jane’s presence in London and by disparaging her family. That is true. They did.” I paused. My hands were shaking, so I pressed them flat against my thighs. “But they did not act alone.”
Elizabeth’s chin lifted. The gesture was involuntary—a bracing, as though she were preparing to receive a blow—and the sight of it made something in my chest crack, because I was the blow. I was what she needed bracing against.
“In November, I told Bingley that your sister did not return his regard.”
The words came out of my mouth, and I heard them as if from a great distance, flat, terrible, irrevocable. Elizabeth’s face went very still, and I hated the anguish I saw frozen.
“I told him—” My voice scraped. I cleared my throat, but the scraping would not resolve. “I told him that her composure indicated indifference, that her manners, though pleasing, did not suggest a particular attachment, and that a continued pursuit would be both futile and imprudent.”
I could not look away from her eyes. I watched happiness die there—the excitement from Gracechurch Street, the hope of a woman expecting a declaration—all slipping away. The last grip, the sickening release, and then nothing where something had lived.
I forged ahead. “Bingley trusted my judgment, and he left Netherfield without saying goodbye.”
“I know.”
Breathing was suddenly difficult. Something pressed against my ribs—not pain, but the warning before pain, that awful tightness before everything breaks loose.
“I believed I was acting in his interest. That I was protecting him from an unequal match and an uncertain attachment. I was wrong. On every count, I was wrong, and your sister suffered for it, and Bingley suffered for it. And then, when I was in Hurst’s drawing room, watching your sister walk away and saw the suffering I had caused written on her face…” I took a ragged breath. “I had to rectify my mistake.”
Elizabeth did not speak. She sat in her chair, her face utterly still—that terrible, struck stillness—and I waited. The waiting was the worst thing I had ever endured, worse than my father’s death, worse than Wickham’s betrayal, worse than the night I sat in the Netherfield library and told myself that separating a man from the woman he loved was an act of friendship.
“Darcy?” Her voice was surprisingly gentle—the kind of gentleness one used before deploying the decapitation. “I believe you’ve said enough.”
I nodded, slowly rising to my feet and taking the seat next to her. The gentleman reading the Gibbon did not look up, although I presume he had heard the entire conversation.
And so I waited, much like a prisoner at the dock. My hands trembled, and I was not ashamed of it. Sweat prickled my brow. I tried not to scowl, because I was at her mercy. She would not overlook my faults; if anything, she would add them to her vast compendium of everything she had weighed and found wanting. She would despise me again, and my only consolation would be Bingley and Jane’s happiness.
When I had confessed my role to Bingley, how mistaken I was, and how I had given Sir Bertram to the Gardiner children, arranged for Jane’s presence in society, he had looked at me with an innocent confusion that had cleared immediately.By jove, Darcy, he had said.You’ve made a mistake, and you’ve admitted it. Why, we must call on Miss Bennet immediately and see if her affections are still amenable.And I had consoled himthat I had, during the course of my visits on the tortoise’s behalf, already taken the measure of Jane Bennet’s affections and found them to be not only amenable but hopeful.
