Page 31 of The Cherry Trees of Rosings
Mr. Darcy nodded. A flash of guilt crossed his face before it settled back to grimness. “I started seeing others again… the day you and Mrs. Collins were having tea in the parsonage sitting room.”
Elizabeth frowned.
“Six days ago.”
It only took her a moment to remember. It was all in his eyes. Elizabeth’s heart squeezed painfully.
It was the day she had told Charlotte that she did not hold him in any esteem.
Because of Mr. Wickham.
Was that why he had asked her to change the letter to his cousin? Shared what he had about his sister and the blackguard?
Elizabeth’s eyes blurred with unshed tears.
Colonel Fitzwilliam startled next to her. But she ignored him.
“Are you dying, Mr. Darcy?” she croaked past the lump in her throat.
“I am sorry, Miss Bennet,” he said, the grimness dissolving into sadness, and even more helplessness. “...I believe so.”
Was that why he kept disappearing when they tried to compose the letter forMiss Darcy?
The tears spilled over. Twin tracks on Elizabeth's cheeks.
“Miss Bennet?”
Elizabeth looked at Colonel Fitzwilliam. Then at Maria and the Collinses gaining on them. She quickly swiped at her tears.
“Is Mr. Darcy dying, sir?” she asked.
Colonel Fitzwilliam’s silence, and the guarded cast to his jaws, told her everything she needed to know. She tried to compose herself.
“I am sorry, sir, I am in no condition to continue our walk,” she said. “I shall have the Miss Darcy's letter ready as soon as I can. If… if you would care to collect it.”
Chapter 20:
I Love You
Elizabeth did not know if Mr. Darcy followed her or chose to remain with his cousin. All she knew was that she was in no state to write any letters right then.
She simply ran to her room in the parsonage and locked the door behind her. Then she collapsed on the bed with unending tears.
In all her twenty years, Elizabeth had never been exposed to anything so raw and heartwrenching.
The deaths she had known of until then were of shallow acquaintances, or people she had not known very well. Her own grandparents on the Bennet side of the family had shuffled off the mortal coil when she was three—right after Kitty’s birth. And those on Mrs. Bennet’s side had been long from the world before her mother had married her father.
Even the tragedy of Napoleon’s ongoing war had not truly affected the gentry of Meryton as much as it could have, though there were plenty of young men in the village and tenant houses who never returned home. The gentility were, after all, above the touch of such deaths.
Elizabeth suddenly felt exceptionally stupid as she realized—for all her satire and wise speak—she had never truly been wise at all.
Everything had brushed past her like the breeze. Unnoticed. Even when she thought she had noticed.
“Miss Bennet, I implore you, do not cry.”
Elizabeth raised her head from the cocoon of her arms. Mr. Darcy was kneeling once more beside her bed, their faces close enough to touch.
“How can I not?”
