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He looked affronted. “I do not boast.”

“You are the most dignified braggart I have ever met,” Richard declared. “It isn’t in your words, it’s all in the way you stand. Two. No purchasing. Not a guinea, not a bauble, not a favour that could be turned into a debt. You do not buy the townspeople out of their difficulties, and you do not buy her. She would sooner be hanged, and I would have helped to hold the rope.”

Darcy flinched.

“And three. No expecting a reward. Not tomorrow, not next week, not in three weeks. The point is not to win her. The point is to be a man she cannot say those things to, and be right. If she should come, in the end, to think better of you, that is her business, not yours. Can you do that?”

The lodge-lamps burned yellow in the dark. A long way off, a door shut in the great house, and a dog barked once and was still. Darcy looked at his bound hand. He thought of the letter that was not yet written, the four true lines that he did not yet know he would manage. He thought of the white face in the candlelight, and of what she had said, and of how it had felt, in the instant after she said it, to understand for the first time in his life that there was a person in the world who could not be impressed.

“I think,” he said, slowly, “that you have lost your senses.”

Richard smiled. “Probably.”

“I think this is the most absurd thing you have ever said to me, and I have heard you propose to storm a French position with a regiment of Scots and a tea-kettle,” Darcy spat out.

“But, we succeeded,” Richard pointed out, his voice sounding like he was teasing. Darcy did not respond, and the Colonel waited. He had always been good at that, when it mattered. He had stood on a ridge outside Salamanca for a day and a half, once, without moving.

“Three weeks,” said Darcy at last, and it came out of him like a tooth. “No boasting. No buying. No reward.”

“Splendid,” Richard explained, and he grabbed his cousin’s shoulder.

Darcy shook his head. “I am not agreeing that it will work.”

“No,” said the Colonel, mildly. “Of course not.”

And so, at one in the morning, Darcy passed the open door of his cousin’s dressing-room on his way to a night he did not mean to sleep through, and saw the candle still lit.

Richard was at the writing-table with his coat off and his sleeves rolled, bent over a sheet of foolscap with the intent, unlovely frown he wore when he was reading dispatches. He had pinned a corner of the paper under an inkwell. A fresh pen lay across a pile of discarded ones, and there was a smear of ink along his jaw, as if he had been rubbing his face. A second glass stood at his elbow, and it was empty.

He did not look up, but wrote on, in the large clear hand he had learned from a drill-sergeant, with the pen going swift and ruthless across the page. Darcy had seen that hand put down the dispositions for a night attack. He felt a very curious feeling, watching it, and was ashamed to find that part of it was comfort.

He was about to go on when the Colonel, without lifting his head, said, “It is rude to read a man’s private papers.”

Richard insisted, “I have not read it.”

“You are about to.” He sat back, flicked the paper round with one inky finger, and stretched. “Go on. You are the principal party.”

The letter was headed, in capitals: OBJECTIVES. Below it ran a column of numbers, and against the first of them a single line, underscored twice: 1. Establish whether Miss Bennet will permit D. within ten feet of her without wishing him dead.

Darcy looked at it for a long time. “And the second?” he said, finally. His voice was rougher than he intended.

“There is no second yet,” said the Colonel. “There may be, if we survive the first.”

Darcy gave a short, ugly, involuntary breath, which in another man might have been called a laugh. Then he went to his own room, and shut the door, and sat down in the dark to find out whether it was possible to write four true lines to a woman who he had, only an hour ago, found out despised him.

CHAPTER 4

The key had been turned in the lock, and Elizabeth found that she could not remember turning it. She stood for a long while with her hand against the door, listening to two sets of footsteps go down the path and out at the gate. One was brisk and even. The other was heavy, and dragged a little, like the tread of a man who has been walking a long way and has only just been told so. Then the lane took them, and the parsonage was silent but for the mantel clock, which resumed its ticking with an air of having been wronged.

She went back to the table and sat down. Her knees, she noticed with some interest, were not entirely to be relied upon. This is absurd. She had told herself so in the first moment after the Colonel closed the door, and again in the second, with the whole of her strength, as one repeats a sum in order to be sure of it.

Mr. Darcy had separated her sister from the man she loved, and said so without shame. He had spoken of her family as of a bad road. He had called his offer a sacrifice. Whatever else might be said of the night, it could not be said that she had refused him without cause. Her heart raced recounting the horrid ordeal.

But, every time she reached the bottom of it, a new idea appeared in the margin, a stranger’s voice in a bare room saying three thousand pounds, in cash, and Newmarket, and a lady’s safety that is not mine to tell.

She did not like it. She had not asked to be given the Colonel’s evidence. She had been perfectly satisfied with her own, which had been delivered by a charming man in a Meryton drawing-room, with a candid air and a quiet, rueful regret for the whole sad business, and she had been satisfied precisely because it fitted. The story fitted Darcy as she had seen him, stiff, cold, contemptuous, a man who looked down at a room as if it owed him an apology for the width of it.

Elizabeth had never thought to ask whether a tale that fitted so beautifully had been cut to measure. “You are being unjust,” she said aloud, to the empty room, and her own voice made her start. I have not been unjust, she told herself soon after. She was being careful.