“No, sir. Her chambers.”
There was a strange urgency in the woman’s whisper that managed to intrigue him. He followed her up the stairs.
The door to Anne’s rooms stood ajar.
Lady Catherine was there, sitting in a high-backed chair by the window, her face a mask of frozen, aristocratic fury. Her eyes, usually darting with judgemental energy, were fixed on a point in the centre of the rug.
Across the room stood Anne’s maid. The girl was silent, her hands folded primly. She did not look like a servant in distress. She looked like a soldier who had just delivered a report. Darcy recognised the expression. She was his aunt’s creature, and the cold glint in her eyes suggested she had found exactly what she had been paid to look for.
Darcy’s eyes went from his aunt to his cousin. Anne was sitting on the edge of her mattress, her hands fidgeting with a handkerchief.
“What is the matter, Aunt? Is Anne not well?” he asked and closed the door behind him.
Lady Catherine shot a glance at him, as if she only then realised he had entered the room. “Yes, Fitzwilliam. Anne isnot well.” She turned to the maid. “Higgins, you may go now. You shall be rewarded for your loyalty. And your discretion.”
The maid bobbed a small curtsy, gave a side glance at Anne, and swept past Darcy closing the door behind her.
Lady Catherine sighed, which was very much not like her. She usually harrumphed. “Fitzwilliam, sit.”
Darcy was grateful for the command. His Hessians felt heavy on his feet, carrying the burden of his body from the grove and the letter in his pocket. “I am all ears, Aunt.”
“Do not be impertinent, nephew. We have a situation. Higgins informed me that there are signs, or lack thereof, which indicate your cousin,” she pointed an accusatory finger towards her daughter, “is with child.”
Darcy stared. His eyes darted between the two of them, disbelief written all over his features. “What in the blazes...!”
“Do not be impertinent!” his aunt hissed, as if this was the real problem here, and not the world tilting on its axis for the second time in two consecutive days.
He turned to Anne. “Is it true?”
Anne’s fingers stilled on the handkerchief. She did not look up, but her chin lifted a fraction, barely perceptible, and she gave a single, small nod.
Darcy leaned back in his chair and pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose. He had woken this morning with one catastrophe. He had gone to the grove to repair it and had instead acquired a second, considerably worse one. And now, apparently, the Almighty had decided that two were insufficient and had furnished him with a third, because why not? The day was still young.
“How far along?” he asked, because one of them had to be practical, and it clearly was not going to be Lady Catherine, who looked as if she might combust on the spot.
“Higgins estimates five months.” Lady Catherine’s voice dropped to a furious whisper. “Five months, Fitzwilliam. Five months of... of...” She could not bring herself to say it. The word was too vulgar, too real, too much evidence that her fragile, biddable daughter had a body and had used it. “The gowns have concealed it thus far. They will not conceal it much longer.”
Darcy looked at Anne again. She had always been thin, but now that he knew, he could see it. The slight roundness beneath the high waist of her dress. The way she held the handkerchief low, across her lap, a habit he now understood had nothing to do with nerves.
“Who is the father?” he asked.
Anne’s mouth pressed into a line. She shook her head once, and her fingers resumed their work on the handkerchief, as though she intended to shred it to ribbons rather than answer.
Lady Catherine made a sound that was somewhere between a growl and a prayer. “She will not say. I have asked. I have demanded. I have threatened to dismiss every male servant on the estate.” She drew herself up in the chair. “It does not matter. What matters is the solution.”
And here it came. Darcy could feel it approaching the way one felt a carriage rounding a bend before it appeared—the rumble, the shift in the air, the certainty that something large and unavoidable was about to arrive.
“You shall marry her, Fitzwilliam.”
There it was.
He should have been outraged. Any reasonable man, presented with the information that his cousin had got herself with child by an unnamed lover and that he was expected to step in and play the husband, would have risen from his chair, expressed his profound displeasure, and walked out of the room with his dignity intact.
Darcy did not move. He sat very still and felt the torn letter shift against his chest as he breathed, and he thought, with the peculiar clarity that comes when a man has been beaten so thoroughly that further blows cease to register,What does it matter?
Elizabeth Bennet had looked at him this morning with contempt so pure it was almost beautiful, and she had torn his heart to pieces without even bothering to read it first. There was no future waiting for him beyond this room. No grand love. No partnership of equals. No dark-eyed woman laughing at him across a breakfast table for the next fifty years. That door had been shut, locked, and the key thrown into the shrubbery.
What remained was duty. And Darcy understood duty the way a carthorse understood the harness: intimately, instinctively, and without any expectation of reward.