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The Colonel found her in the gallery. She had known he would. It was a long cold room hung with portraits of de Bourghs, who regarded her from their frames with that mixture of hauteur and indigestion peculiar to the dead of good family, and she had stationed herself at the far end, beneath a lady in a ruff, with her hands folded and her back straight. He came down the length of it at an easy pace, and she observed that he looked, for one so thoroughly caught, remarkably untroubled.

“Miss Bennet,” he said lightly, “I wondered where you had gone.”

She laughed at his pretty speech. “I think you knew precisely where I had gone, Colonel.”

He had the grace to pause. “Ah.”

“The sofa,” said Elizabeth, lifting an eyebrow, “is a very good sofa. The view of the instrument is excellent. I particularly admired the card-table, and how you had persuaded Mr. Collins to be so happily employed, and how you contrived that my friend should be seated out of earshot of the window. I have seen a drill-sergeant set pickets in the field, I believe, though never in a drawing-room. You do it very well.”

He did not smile, though she had half-expected it; and, perhaps she half-hoped it. However, she was a little shaken to see his face grow grave instead. “I do it badly,” said the Colonel. “You found me out in minutes.”

“Then you do not deny it,” she looked at him directly, with an eyebrow rising.

“I should not insult you by trying.” He drew a breath. “I am trying to improve my cousin’s chances, Miss Bennet. I will say that frankly, since you appear to prefer it. I think he behaved abominably, and I think he knows it, and I think.” He stopped. “I think, for what it is worth, that he is a better man than he showed you, and I should like you to have the opportunity to see it.”

She looked at the Colonel directly, and said, rather plainly, “By placing me upon a sofa?”

He exhaled. “No, madam. By placing you in a room with him.”

“Without my knowledge, Colonel?” Elizabeth knew she sounded sharp, but she was not entirely sure she liked the idea of being a part of his stratagem.

Colonel Fitzilliwam was silent .

At the same time, Elizabeth found that she was trembling, a little, with something that was neither fear nor fury; it was the clean, sharp, unfamiliar anger of a person who has been made, however kindly, into a piece upon a board. She had borne Mr. Collins’s proposal, and her mother’s whole campaign of marriages, and the soft, steady pressure of a world that does not think a woman capable of knowing what she wants. She had thought that, here, at least, among the guns and the gold and the great house. She knew she must say something, for the silence was becoming unbearable.

“Colonel Fitzwilliam,” she said, “I am grateful for what you did in the parsonage. I mean it. I have thought of it more than I like. But I will not be managed.”

“Miss Bennet.” He tried to explain.

But, she would not let him continue. “Sir, I will not be managed. If your cousin wishes to see me, he may say so, and I will give him my answer. If he does not, I will not be arranged against his will or mine, or against anybody’s, to suit an officer’s notion of what is good for me or him.”

The gallery was very quiet. A clock struck the quarter somewhere in the house. The Colonel stood quite still, with his hat tucked beneath his arm, and she saw, with an odd lurch of the heart, that she had hit something. His face had not changed. But he took a long time to answer, and when he did, it was with a plainness that took the wind from her.

He bowed formally. “You are entirely right.”

“I.” Elizabeth tried to continue, but he raised a hand to stop her.

“I will say it again, in case there is any doubt. You are entirely right, and I am a damned meddling fool, and I beg your pardon. You owe neither of us anything, Miss Bennet. Not a conversation, not a glance, not the time of day. If it should happen that Darcy has some claim upon your good opinion, you will be the one to say so, and in your own time, and there is an end of it.” He bowed, gravely and rather stiffly. “There will be no more contrived meetings. Not without your knowledge. You have my word as an officer.”

She stared at him. It was not what she had expected. She had expected defence, or levity, or one of those smooth, glossy evasions to which charming men are inclined; and instead she was being given a flat unvarnished surrender, with no tricks at the edges, by a man who looked as if it had cost him. “Thank you,” she said, rather feebly.

“I am the one who ought to be thanking you. It is a rare thing to be told the truth by a person who could have laughed.” He straightened, with a flicker of that old humour, quickly put down. “I think I shall go and confess to him now. He will be wanting to hit someone.”

***

Darcy did not, in fact, hit the Colonel. He very nearly did, and the whole of the Rosings stable-yard heard about it afterwards from the grooms. Instead, Darcy had gone out at the end of the evening, and walked a very long way in the dark, and come back, finally, through the stable-gate at a quarter to one, with his coat over his arm and his shirt dark with sweat, and the cold air of the night steaming off him.

He had been walking for three hours, but he realized it had made no difference. He could not remember what he had said at the door. He could remember her face in the gallery lamplight, white and clear, turned to the Colonel, and a voice too far to hear but a shape too plain to mistake. He had stood at the end of the corridor with his back against the wall like a man in a trench, and watched his cousin take a woman’s rebuke in the manner of a gentleman, and understood exactly what had been done, and to whom.

He found Richard in the harness-room, mending a bridle.

“How long Richard,” hissed Darcy, “had you been planning that?”

The Colonel looked up. He had a brace of needles in his teeth, and took them out with great calm. “A day. Two.”

“She knew,” said Darcy, very slowly, “and she looked at me across that room as if I had stood behind it with a rope.” He was breathing hard. The wrath had gone up from his chest to his throat and sat there, thick and vile and shameful, and it was not, he understood, anger at all; it was mortification. It was the particular scalding horror of a man who has been caught, by the one person alive whose opinion he cannot bear to lose, in the act of being clumsy. “I told her I had no hand in it. I stood there like a dog with a bone and I swore to her I had no hand in it, and she thought….”

“She thought you were honest,” said the Colonel. “I should say you may take that as a compliment.”