Page 72 of Knowing Mr. Darcy
“You said, even now, that you were ruined.”
“Yes, but he didn’t do anything to me.”
His lips parted. He blinked at her. “Forgive me, I don’t know if I understand.”
She picked up her tea. “I don’t know how to explain it. Perhaps if I begin when it started.”
“I don’t wish to speak of anything that you don’t wish to speak of,” he said. “If you wish to talk to me, though, I am willing to listen.”
“He tricked me, I suppose. Likely from the beginning, it’s all been a trick. He lied to me. Lizzy pointed it out. She said he had been caught in a lie, and I didn’t want to believe it, and I twisted everything up so that he could have been a good man, just misunderstood. She’s right. I always think too well of everyone.”
Nothing she was saying made him want to kill this manless. He didn’t know why he wanted to kill him so badly, of course. By all rights, this woman was not his responsibility, so it wasn’t his place, but the urge had gripped him now, and it felt right. He would not mind if she were his responsibility.
“He said we were getting married. It was late, the middle of the night. He said we would go around London and we would drive straight through the morning on our way to Scotland, and then I fell asleep in the carriage, and I woke up, and we were in London, at some boardinghouse and he had only one room for us, and I tried to ascertain if we would be resting a while and then on our way, but he was… with the woman who owned the boardinghouse, he was… I left. I saw it for what it was, right in that instant. He was never going to marry me. I realized his plan was to ruin me and abandon me here. I was so horrified that I simply ran.”
“Oh, good,” said Bingley. “Exactly right. You didexactlythe right thing. What a blackguard. You deserve better than such treatment, Miss Bennet. You are not a woman to be eloped with. You are a woman to be respectably married, not some shameful secret.”
“Lizzy said that, too. I don’t have any excuse for being so stupid.”
He shook his head. “No, none of that. We are all stupid in love, if it comes to that.”
She clutched her teacup. “Well… I don’t know if it was the right thing or not, you see. Once I was two blocks away, all alone on the London streets, a woman walking alone, I began to think I had only worsened my situation. What was I to say at that point? If anyone discovered me, well, what would they think?”
“No, you had to get away from him.”
“Well, I think I might have been able to get a letter off to someone and stayed there, in relative safety—”
“He would have ravished you.”
“Oh, I don’t think he would have forced me,” she said. Then, she considered. “I suppose I have no idea what he would have done.”
“You were exactly right to run. And I’m glad you found your way into this neighborhood, and that you recognized our house. It’s all going to be all right now. You will not be ruined.”
“But—”
“No, nothing’s happened. And now you’re here, under my protection.”
“Now, I’m here, alone with another man!”
“Well, if it comes to that, I’ll marry you,” he said, and that felt right too. He smiled at the thought. It seemed wondrous in every way. Yes, this woman,her.
“You—” She was stunned.
“If you’ll have me, which… perhaps, with your sister… but it’s not as if I married her or something. If we’d been married, you and I couldn’t marry, of course, because of the laws about not marrying your brother’s wife—sister’s husband—whatever the case, that didn’t happen. So, it’s all above board. Of course, you probably don’t like me. Elizabethobviouslydoesn’t like me after the way I treated her, and—”
“I don’tknowyou, sir,” she said.
“All right, well, I said, ‘if it comes to that,’” he said, but he was still smiling.
“It doesn’t matter if nothing’s happened,” she said. “I was gone, overnight, and if he is questioned, he will likely tell everyone—”
“Well, we shall silence him, then,” said Bingley. “So, who is he?”
“You’re not still saying you would kill him.”
Bingley shrugged. He had never killed anyone. He had been in a duel once, and the other man had taken his bullet, in the shoulder, but the man had survived, and Bingley had sworn off dueling after that. It seemed so petty to try to shoot each other over disagreements. Anyway, whoever this man was, he didn’t deserve the dignity of a duel. Bingley could do it. He felt that with a strange, awful certainty that settled into him.
She peered into her teacup, and a wild laugh came out ofher. “Oh, I don’t know what is wrong with me that it warms me that you would say that. For I don’t wish anyone dead, and his death would do nothing for me, but the fact that you…”
