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He saw her, and she saw him see her.

Darcy pulled the horse up so sharply that it threw its head, and sat quite still, a black figure against a pale grey sky, with the mist smoking about the horse’s hocks. He did not come on. He did not so much as lift his hand. He only waited, with a kind of dreadful patience, and she understood that if she turned around, at that moment, and went home, he would not follow her, and would not remark upon it, and would carry it for the rest of his life without a word.

She walked up the hill. He dismounted when she was within ten paces. It was done awkwardly, with one hand on the rein, and when he turned she saw that his face was grey with fatigue and that there was a day’s growth of beard along the jaw. He looked as though he had been dragged behind something. He stood by the horse’s shoulder and said nothing at all, and the wind blew his coat against his boots.

She issued him a polite bow. “Mr. Darcy.”

“Miss Bennet.” His voice was hoarse.

Elizabeth did not beat around the bush. “I have read what you sent me.”

He looked into her eyes; it was a look of genuine concern. “Yes.”

The single reply was all he said. She had been prepared for any of fifty things: for reproach, for relief, for the soft gratified murmur of the man who has been proved right. She was not prepared for the plain, grim, immovable silence with which he took it, like a man standing before a firing party who has been told only that the order is given.

“I was wrong about Mr. Wickham,” said Elizabeth firmly. She lifted her chin a mite. “I was wholly wrong, and I was wrong with a kind of certainty that I am ashamed to remember. I took his word without question, because he was agreeable, and because I wished to think ill of you. I should like to say that I did not. I did...” She stopped.

He did not triumph. She watched for it; she watched every muscle of his face. What she saw instead was a flinch, very faint, at the corner of the eye, like that of a man who has had a splinter drawn. “You had every reason to think as you did,” said Darcy.

She shook her head. “I had no reason, other than one man’s word.”

“I did not tell you because I thought you had no right to ask.” He drew a breath through his teeth. “That was wrong of me. I should have told you the first night and told you directly.” He let out a little scoff. “I thought silence was a kind of strength and now look; it cost me,” said Darcy, quite bluntly, “more than I thought.”

There was a silence. A rook went over, and the horse shifted, and the wet branches overhead let fall a few slow drops. And then, it came to her that she should say something further. There was a great deal to say. She had a full heart and a lamentably empty mouth, and she found, to her despair, that all the things which came uppermost were the wrong things: I am sorry for your sister, or I did not know, or how could you bear it, none of which she could say, without implying that she had been told what was hers only to guess.

“Your sister. Is she.” she began, and checked herself.

He understood. She saw him understand, and his grey face did something she had not seen it do before; it went quite still, and gentle, and terribly tired. “She is well,” he said. “She is very much better than she was.”

Elizabeth nodded gently. “I am glad.”

“Thank you,” he replied, rather quietly.

That should have been the end of it. They were standing on the verge of an open road at six in the morning, with a horse blowing between them, and a conversation drawn so thin that she could feel the wind through it. She said at last, in a rush, because she did not like to be dishonest, “I do not apologize for refusing you.” She looked at him directly. “I should refuse you again. I should.” She added, more quietly, “There was a great deal besides Mr. Wickham.”

“I know there was,” said Darcy. “I have not forgotten one word of it.”

He said it without bitterness. Elizabeth felt it was merely a statement, set down in the road between them, like a stone. And the whole of what she was feeling came to a sudden, silent stop. She stood with her hand on her shawl and looked at him, at the wet coat, the grey face, the split knuckle gripping the rein, the plain level eyes.

She found that it had not occurred to her till now that two people might both have been wrong. She thought it had been so simple, in the parsonage. One had been proud, and one had been prejudiced, and she had been very sure which was which. And now, she was less sure.

He took a step back. “I will not keep you,” he said. “You should not be out in the damp.” And he turned the horse, and put his foot to the stirrup, and went up in one hard movement, and was gone before she could frame an answer. She heard the hooves on the chalk go fast, and then faster, and then fade into the beeches.

Elizabeth stood where he had left her, in the road, with the mist breaking up about her ankles. He has gone, she thought, before the thing could go anymore wrong. He had seen the moment coming, she thought, and he had left her the last word. That realization was perhaps the single most irritating thing that he could have done, and she was standing in a lane in the wet, with her fingers tight in her shawl, wishing with all her heart that he had stayed to quarrel with her.

CHAPTER 9

He heard the screaming a quarter-mile before he saw anything. Darcy had been riding for three hours, which was the only cure he knew; it was the afternoon of the twelfth day. He had kept to his word; there had been no lane, no chance meeting, no sudden decision to ride by the parsonage gate.

He had gone east, away from Hunsford, on the long Westerham road, with the black horse blowing under him and the sun going slowly gold across the stubble, and he had thought of nothing at all, which was an accomplishment that he practised daily and had never yet got right. Then the wind changed, and he heard a child.

Darcy did not think. He put the horse to the bank and over it, across a dry ditch and a stretch of rough pasture, and came out at a gallop upon the bend in the road where the lane dropped steeply to a brook. What lay at the bottom took him a moment to read.

A hired chaise had gone over, and it lay on its side in the ditch with one wheel still turning and the splinters of the other scattered across the gravel; the horses had been cut loose, or had broken loose, and stood trembling in the field beyond, trailing harness.

A woman sat in the road in a torn pelisse, with a girl of five in her lap and a baby against her shoulder, and the screaming was coming from the three of them, in turn, in the dreadful steady rhythm of people who have lost the power to stop. Beside the wreck a man in a stable-apron stood with his mouth open and his hands hanging at his sides. And under the chaise, pinned to the thigh by the iron rim of a door, lay the man.

Darcy was out of the saddle before the horse had stopped. “You!” He did not raise his voice, but spoke hurriedly. He had learned long ago that the quickest way to be obeyed was to speak low and flat. “What is your name?”