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The silence had a different texture from any that Darcy had known between them. He was standing with his coat over his arm, quite black to the shoulder, and she stood a few yards off with her hair still down, and her gloves ruined, and a bruise coming on her wrist. She was looking at the empty road. Neither of them said anything; though, it was not an uncomfortable silence. Instead, it was the silence of two people who have been in the same fight.

He heard himself say, “I flatter myself that on the whole, that was.” And stopped. The words had come up in his throat, wholly unbidden, the old bright easy phrase that Darcy of Pemberley had used for twenty years to describe a thing he had done well. I flatter myself. He heard it, hanging in the air between them, and felt his face go hot to the roots of his hair.

Darcy shut his mouth. It was, he thought, the hardest thing he had done that day. It was harder than the wreck. He set his jaw, and looked at his boots, and did not finish the sentence, and said instead, in a rough, awkward voice that did not sound like his own, “Your wrist is bruised. You should have it looked to.”

She did not answer at once. He could feel her looking at him. He was braced for something, he did not know what, a laugh, perhaps, or a cool, sharp remark that would send him back where he belonged. She said, very quietly, “Yes. Thank you.”

There was something in her voice that he could not read; her words were attentive, with a thread of surprise in it, like the voice of a person who has put her hand into a pocket and found something there she did not remember leaving. He bowed to her then, stiffly, and she curtseyed, and he walked away up the road to find his horse, and did not once look back.

***

The Colonel had it from Cowper, who had it from the groom, who had it from the stable-lad from the Crown, who had been telling it to everyone in Hunsford since six o’clock; and by the time Darcy came into the east parlour that night, his coat in ruins and his hair wild, Richard had assembled the whole of it from four separate sources and was sitting, with a glass in his hand, in a state of profound and almost religious contemplation.

“A whole afternoon gone off in the presence of Miss Bennet, Fitz,” he said with an eyebrow cocked up.

Darcy was not in the mood. “Do not.”

“An entire afternoon, in her company, in the open road, with an audience of one stable-boy. And no quarrel?” The Colonel's voice was laced with a tease.

Darcy was livid. “There was a man under a carriage.”

“I do not question the carriage.” The Colonel took a pull, and set the glass down, and drew a mental line through the first objective in his private list. Mission accomplished, he thought, with a surge of purely professional satisfaction. It was a better result than he had dared to plan. It was what happened when you stopped managing the thing and let it go.

Then he looked up, and saw his cousin’s face.

Darcy had not sat down. He was standing at the window with his back to the room, looking out at the dark park, and he had the look of a man listening for a sound. It was a very faint sound. He was not aware that he was doing it. But the Colonel, who had spent half a lifetime reading men by the set of their shoulders, saw the way the head turned slightly toward the south, toward the parsonage, a mile off in the dark, and understood, with a small cold shock, that this was no longer anything to do with strategy.

He had made a plan to win a battle. And somewhere in the course of the campaign, without orders, without so much as a signal, the plan had walked off the field and left the real thing standing there in the open. He did not know what to do with it. He had no doctrine for this.

“Fitz,” he said gently.

“What?” Darcy looked up, exhaling as he did.

“Nothing.” The Colonel picked up his glass. “Go to bed. You look like the devil.”

Darcy went, and the Colonel sat on in the firelight for some time. He did not take out his list, but it had occurred to him, with a faint, rueful clarity, that some things cannot be put on one.

CHAPTER 10

There is a moment in every campaign when the commander learns that he has been observed. Colonel Fitzwilliam had known such moments. He had felt the quiet at Salamanca when a column of dust rose on the far ridge, and the small cold drop in the stomach at Albuera when the French cavalry came out of the rain. They had always the same character: a stillness, a sharpening of every sense, a sudden terrible sense of the width of one’s own flank. He had it now, at ten o’clock of a bright morning, in the breakfast-room at Rosings, with a rack of toast between himself and his aunt and his left hand quite steady on the handle of a cup.

“I do not understand it,” said Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

She said it to the room at large, which was her habit. It was a large room, hung in yellow silk and dominated by a table at which twelve could sit and at which, on this particular morning, three were seated, the Colonel, his aunt, and Mrs. Jenkinson, who was eating a small egg as if she hoped it would not notice her.

“What is it, ma’am?” said the Colonel, pleasantly.

“You were to go on Saturday, and it is now Tuesday of the second week. Mr. Darcy had business at Pemberley. You had your regiment. And yet here you both are, taking up the best rooms in my house and the whole of my carriage-horses, and neither of you, so far as I can learn, doing anything whatever.”

“Horse Guards,” said Richard. “I am waiting on a letter,” he said directly.

Lady Catherine’s voice rose in surprise. “You have been waiting on it for eleven days.”

Richard nodded solemnly. “The Horse Guards is a very slow animal, ma’am. I have known them keep a man waiting a twelvemonth for a signature.”

“And your cousin?” She asked, her eyebrows furrowing.

The Colonel had been expecting that. He had, in fact, prepared for it with some care, in the manner of a man who has sapped a wall and is waiting for the powder to take. He set down his cup. He wore an air of reluctant candour.