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“That,” said the Colonel slowly, “is the first mature sentiment I have heard from a Darcy since your father died.”

Darcy scoffed. “Do not be insolent.”

But the corner of his mouth had moved, and Richard looked down at his plate and thought, with a quiet and entirely unmartial warmth, that he had found the thing he had been looking for. It was not in the ledger. It could not have been. But there had been a nine year old boy at Pemberley once, twenty odd years ago, who had stood in a stable yard with a split lip and refused to say who hit him, and the Colonel had wondered for two decades whether that boy was still in there somewhere. He had never been sure. He was sure now.

The carriage was brought round at a quarter to ten. It stood on the gravel before the great door, with the horses stamping and the trunks strapped on behind, and the coachman in his box wearing the air of a man who has been told, rather late, that the horses are no longer coughing.

The Colonel had one more errand. He did not ask leave of anyone. He walked down the avenue alone, in the cold, bright, windy morning, with his hat tilted against the sun, and turned in at the parsonage gate, where Mr. Collins had been watching for him since seven. It took twelve minutes to take leave of Mr. Collins, which the Colonel spent in a state of exquisite patience, receiving thanks for a condescension he had never extended and a series of compliments upon the elegance of Lady Catherine’s dining-room. At the end of it he asked, with great gravity, whether he might have a word with Miss Elizabeth Bennet.

She was in the garden. She had come out to feed the hens, with an apron over her gown and a tin pan in her hand; and she turned at the sound of his step, and straightened, with a quick wary lifting of the chin. “Colonel Fitzwilliam.”

“Miss Bennet. I shall not keep you. The carriage is waiting.” He took off his hat. “I wished to say something, and I could not very well say it in front of the family.”

She waited. The hens, indifferent to the proprieties, went on pecking at her feet.

“I owe you an apology,” said the Colonel. “I am very sorry for the barn, and for the gallery, and for the whole business of the sofa. But, I did not say I was sorry for the principle.”

“The principle, Colonel?” She looked at him seemingly confused.

He nodded. “That I had any business arranging your feelings at all.” He looked at her steadily. “I have been a soldier a long time, Miss Bennet, and it has given me a habit of mind. When I see a thing I want done, I find the shortest line to it and I go. It had not once occurred to me, in three weeks, that I might be working on a human heart; it is a very poor excuse. But it is the only one I have, and I wished you to know that I know it now.”

Elizabeth looked at him for a moment in silence. The wind took a strand of her hair. Her face, in the clear light, was very pale, with a faint shadow beneath the eyes that spoke of two bad nights, and he saw her decide something. “Thank you, Colonel Fitzwilliam; I accept your apology, sir,” said Elizabeth.

He bowed then, and replied, “Thank you.”

“I should say, Colonel, that it was very ill done.” A small dry gleam came into her eye. “But I do not think I have ever been so thoroughly or so sincerely apologised to by a man who might have been expected to go on pretending he had done nothing wrong. I should be ungracious to refuse it.” She tilted her head. “You have great energy, sir, and a most remarkable talent for organisation. I think, if it were me, that I would find some other use for it.”

“The Horse Guards,” suggested the Colonel gravely, “is said to be in need of a man who can hurry things up.”

She laughed. It was a bright, sudden, helpless laugh, and he saw how it changed her face, and understood for the first time, quite clearly, why his cousin had gone to such lengths.

He bowed. “I shall take that as my orders,” he said. He put on his hat. He was at the gate, with his hand upon the latch, when it occurred to him that he had one thing more to say, and that he ought not to say it, and that he was going to anyway.

Before he left, he said, quietly, “Miss Bennet.”

She looked up at him and said, “Colonel?”

“I have been trying for three weeks to win this campaign, and I have lost it, and I have learned a great deal about strategy in the process.” He smiled, rather crookedly. “I think, however, that it is my cousin who will have the use of it.” He went out, and shut the gate, and did not look back.

The road to Westerham ran past the parsonage for a hundred yards before it climbed the long hill. It was a matter of a minute, at a trot. The Colonel sat with his back to the horses and his hat on his knee, and Darcy sat opposite, with his face turned to the window and his hands loose in his lap, and the sun came and went in the bare hedges.

He did not speak. He had not spoken since they left the gates of Rosings. They came round the bend by the church. The parsonage rose on the left behind its low wall, the neat brick front, the pear tree, the dark clump of the vestry roof; and at the gate, with a pan still in her hand and the wind pulling at her skirts, stood a small figure in an apron.

She had not gone in. Instead, Elizabeth was standing quite still at the gate, looking up the road. The Colonel saw Darcy see her. It was only a second. The carriage went by at a good round pace, and the figure at the gate was there and gone, like a thing seen between the spokes of a wheel.

But in that second the Colonel saw his cousin’s head turn, and his hand come up, almost to the glass, and stop. He saw the whole body gather itself. He saw the muscles of the jaw go taut, and the knuckles whiten on the leather of the seat, and every instinct in a lifetime of command rise up and say, stop the carriage. One word to the driver. One rap upon the roof. It was no more than that, and the whole thing might have been undone.

Darcy did not rap upon the roof. In fact, he sat quite still. He did not lower the glass, or call out, or put his head from the window. He did not say a word to the Colonel, or to the coachman, or to the man he would have trusted most to carry a message back. He did not even turn his head again. The carriage went over the crest of the hill, and the church tower dropped behind the trees, and the road ran out before them, long and pale and empty, toward the south.

He had left it with her, and that was all; it was the hardest thing the Colonel had ever seen a man do, and he did it sitting down, in his own luxurious chaise, with his hands in his lap. Richard looked away. He found, to his great annoyance, that he had something in his eye. He studied the roof of the carriage with some attention, and made no comment at all.

CHAPTER 19

Charlotte gave her the letter at the gate. She did it without a word, as the dust of the carriage settled on the lane, and Elizabeth, who had stood there with the hen-pan growing cold in her hand for a full minute after the last wheel had gone over the hill, looked down and found a small sealed packet pressed into her fingers. She knew the hand. She knew it by the cramped, heavy, deliberate strokes, cut into the paper as if the pen had been a chisel.

“He asked me to say,” said Charlotte, “that you were to burn it if you did not wish to read it.”

“Did he?” Elizabeth asked, sounding surprised at the notion.