Page 80 of Till Death Us Do Part: Book 2
They left in good time and arrived in time for dinner prepared by her cook. They broke open the bottle of port of unknown provenance and found it to be excellent; though, truth be told, they mutually agreed not to repeat the incident of their first dinner together.
28.Ptolemy’s Model
“Mr Darcy, grab the crowbar quickly. You will want to see this!”
Darcy had been engaged until the very last moment, and entered the shop right at closing time, so he flipped the sign and locked the door. There was nothing nefarious about it, as Mrs Thorne would have done the same anyway.
“I see you have relegated me to the status of carter or longshoreman, madam.”
“If the shoe fits—” she said with a laugh, and Darcy went to get the familiar crowbar. He suspected she could perfectly well open the box with her teeth if she really wanted to or just have the carter do it. He desperately hoped that she enjoyed his aid and saved the job for him deliberately.
The crate was slightly larger than most he had opened, and Mrs Thorne was leaning over it, looking to see if there were any notes. “This one should be quite special, I think. Our buyer shipped it express.”
Darcy engaged the crowbar, popped off the lid, and they peered inside. There was no wine in this box, but what they did find wasanotherbox, wrapped in oilcloth to protect it from the damp. Once Darcy lifted the inner box out, he set it on the floor and pushed the outer box over into a corner. That done, he cut the oilcloth with his penknife, prised open the inner box, and they were greeted with a stack of books—and not just any books.
Amanda gasped and sank to the floor on her knees, looking at the covers lovingly. Both felt as if they were holding a great treasure, hidden away all through the ages, just waiting for this day. The books were ancient, so Darcy ran back across the store to pick up his gloves from the entrance and grabbed Amanda’s while he was at it.
On his return, they found that they had the thoroughly scandalousThe Plays of Molière, published around 1622. There were either first editions, or at the least very old copies, of four of Shakespeare’s tragedies, all published around 1604–20. There were even incredibly old copies of bothThe Divine ComedyandInfernoby Dante, though since they were published in the fourteenth century, they were obviously not first editions. There were more contemporary first editions by English and Scottish writers such as Burns and Defoe, which both garnered appreciation but not the awe of the older ones. They could wait.
By the time they were into the third tier, Amanda was sitting on her hands and knees, poking around in the box with her gloved hands, while Darcy had abandoned propriety altogether to join her on the floor. He was trying to stay out of her way while still being able to comment on what she found, so he sat back on his knees, waiting for her to hand something to him so he could neatly stack it on a small cloth he had taken from a workbench to put on the floor.
As Amanda pulled a somewhat battered early copy ofHenry VIIIfrom the pile, Darcy gasped in surprise at what was revealed below, and nearly shouted, “This Imusthave—if you are willing to sell it, that is. That isPtolemy’s Cosmographiafrom 1482. The cosmology is of course complete nonsense, but this is real! This is history! This is incredible!”
Amanda laughed openly. “Not so greedy, Mr Darcy! I want that one for my own collection, and besides that, you already ha—”
She gasped in surprise and tried to disguise cutting the sentence off mid-word with a cough, but Darcy was staring at her—hard!
He continued staring at her in shock, then whispered, ‘What was that?’
She stuttered and stammered. “That is to say, I believe I understood you to have—”
Darcy, still sitting back on his haunches, looked over at the woman, and he saw the first sign of trulystrongemotion he had seen since the first time she threw him out of her shop, and this was not the emotion he was hoping for. He thought she was showingfear, closer toterror.
She could not meet his eye, and muttered a bit more, as she gradually leaned back from her knees until she was first sitting on her ankles as he was, and then slumping all the way down until she was sitting on the floor, looking entirely dejected.
Darcy, feeling he had come to the ultimate turning point of his life, very slowly and carefully manoeuvred himself around so he was facing her directly. She would not meet his eye, so he slid over to where their knees were almost together, reached over to put his hand near hers, but not actually touching.
With a shaking voice, he whispered, “Amanda, please—please—I swear to you, on my life, that I will never harm you, nor allow any harm to come to you that I can prevent. Not now! Not ever! No matter what!”
Then he took a shaky breath and continued, “With your permission, though, I will ask only one thing of you. I will only ask once. You may answer or not as you choose. I will never ask again.”
He waited, feeling his hand shaking uncontrollably, and saw her eyes glance up at him, then back down, then up and down, five or six times. There were tears in her eyes that he felt responsible for, but he felt that it was incumbent on him to be strong for these few minutes, regardless of the pain he was feeling or inflicting.
He whispered again, barely audible. “Amanda—please—just tell me. Who are you? If nothing else, please just finish the sentence.”
He saw her swallow once, twice, thrice, then with the back of her glove, she wiped a tear from her left eye, then followed with the right.
She drew a deep, shuddering breath and whispered, “You do not need it, Fitzwilliam, because you already have one on the second black shelf from the top, about three feet from the north end. I leased it to Lord Folenroy for an afternoon for £136.”
Jaw hanging open at the sheer audacity of what she had almost managed to pull off, he looked at her in awe and wonder.
She looked back at him, seemed to take some strength for a moment by striking a defiant tone, and then she slumped back down, hardly looking at him as she continued.
“As to your other question—” then she paused in thought for some time while he waited anxiously, his entire body trembling.
“I amnotElizabeth Bennet, the naïve and carefree girl who once thought her parents and sisters loved her and she would only marry for the deepest love.”
He thought that to be the saddest sentence he had ever heard in his life, and wondered if he should answer, but she shook her head fractionally, as if to tell him she was not finished.
