Page 57

He inclined his head. For a moment she thought he would go in to look at her, but he only glanced at the door, and then he offered Elizabeth his arm.

They went down together without speaking. The servants had gone to bed while she was upstairs. The lamp in the hall had been turned low, and someone had banked up the library fire. He shut the door behind them and turned round, and Elizabeth realised that she had no idea at all how she was meant to behave.

For weeks they had been so very polite to one another. He bowed to her at the foot of the stairs each night. He asked at breakfast whether she had heard from Jane. He called her Mrs Darcy, and she called him Mr Darcy, and they had both been careful never to say anything that the other might mind. All of that seemed to belong to two other people now. Those people had not sat in an inn at Islington tonight and watched George Wickham walk away down a passage. She did not try to pick it up again, and neither did he.

He took off the greatcoat at last and dropped it over a chair. Then he stood behind the chair with both hands on its back.

“Mrs Darcy, I—” He stopped. “No. I cannot call you that tonight. May I call you Lizzy?”

“I think you had better. It would be very strange if you did not.”

“Lizzy.” He said it slowly, as if he was not sure it belonged to him. “I wanted to thank you. I have been trying to work out how, all the way home and all the while I stood on that landing. None of it is any good.”

“Then say the first thing that comes into your head. I promise not to mark it.”

He did not smile. His hands tightened on the back of the chair.

“I do not know what I would have done without you today. No, that is not true. I know exactly what I would have done. I would have gone into that room first, and I would have knocked him down before he could open his mouth. Georgiana would have seen me do it. She would have knelt down beside him and taken his part. She would have hated me for it, and he would have had her after all.” His voice dropped. “Nobody else could have reached her. Not Richard. Certainly not me. I was so frightened in that carriage I could not have told you which road we were on.”

Elizabeth could have told him. She remembered every yard of it, because she had spent it watching him turn his hat on his knee. She had not said anything about it then. She did not say anything now.

“But you did not go in first,” she said. “You stood in a passage that smelt of tallow and beer for a quarter of an hour, and you kept your hand off that latch. I know how hard that was, because I could hear you not opening the door.” She sat down on the sofa rather suddenly. Her knees had held her up all evening, and now that nobody needed them to, they had decided to stop. “It seems we make rather a good pair, Mr Darcy. I should never have thought it.”

“We.” He said it oddly.

“Yes. I threw that word back at you once, on the stairs. I find I do not want to throw it back now.”

He laughed, very short, and then seemed surprised at himself. He did not sit down. The firelight was on one side of his face and the other side was in shadow, and she could not tell what he was thinking.

She had meant to wait. She had been carrying the words about with her for days, and every time she had told herself that a better moment would come. She could see now that it never would. If she did not say it tonight, the polite Mr and Mrs Darcy would come back with the morning. They would sit down to breakfast and talk about Jane's letters, and today would go into a drawer with everything else they did not speak of.

“There is something else I have to say. Will you let me say all of it before you answer? I am very brave when somebody is trying to frighten me. I am not nearly so brave when nobody is.”

He bent his head. He waited.

“When I married you,” she said, “I thought you proud. I thought you cold. I knew you had meddled in Jane's life when you had no right to. I married you because somebody put a bar across a cellar door, and half of Meryton was standing on the lawn when it opened. I would not have chosen you for any other reason. You know that.”

“Yes. I know it.”

“I was wrong.” Her hands had found each other in her lap. She made them stay still. “Not about everything. You did meddle, and I have not forgotten it. But I was wrong about you. I have watched you for weeks now. I have seen how patient you are with Georgiana, when it would be so much easier simply to tell her what to do. I heard you stand up for me in front of your aunt, in your own drawing room, when she would have liked to see me cry. I heard you say you would tell Mr Bingley everything, when nobody would ever have known if you had said nothing. And I have heard you say you were wrong, more than once, and to me, of all people. I do not think you had said it to anyone in your life before.”

He moved as if he would answer her. She did not let him.

“I do not see the man I quarrelled with in the parsonage parlour any more. Sometimes I look for him, out of habit, and he is not there. I see the boy my aunt Gardiner told me about, who carried a basket up the hill and read to a deaf old woman for an hour. I missed my needle twice while she told me, and I told myself she must be wrong. I see the brother Georgiana thinks is the best man in the world. And I see the man who went down into a cellar on Jane's wedding day, with a candle, to look for a child who was never there at all.”

A coal dropped in the grate. Neither of them looked at it.

“I am not here because I have no choice. I had no choice once. I have one now.” She lifted her chin and made herself look straight at him. “And I am choosing you.”

For a long moment he did not move. Then he came round the chair and sat down on the very end of the sofa, as far from her as it would let him, as though he did not trust himself any closer.

“You are tired,” he said at last. “You have been frightened half to death, and you are grateful to me because of Georgiana. I would not have you say something tonight that you will be sorry for in the morning. I do not think I could bear that.”

“Do you think I have not thought about the morning? I have thought about nothing else since we left the inn.”

He looked at her for a long time. Whatever he saw in her face made him draw a deep, unsteady breath, and when he spoke again his voice was not as even as it usually was.

“At Hunsford I came to say something to you. You never let me finish.”