He looked at Anne. She was watching him now, her fingers frozen mid-shred. There was no hope in her expression, no plea. Just flat, quiet waiting. She had placed her life on a table and was waiting to see who would pick it up.
“Very well, Aunt,” he said, his voice steady. The rest of him was not, but his voice could be relied upon to performits duties even when its owner had been gutted twice before noon. “We need to make it quick.”
Lady Catherine exhaled, then nodded.
Anne closed her eyes. When she opened them, her face had rearranged itself into the same pale, pleasant blankness she wore to every dinner, every tea, every Sunday service. The mask was back. Whatever had been underneath it—fear, relief, grief for a man she would not name—was packed away and no one could reach it.
Darcy rose from the chair, his legs functioning as they were supposed to.Small mercies, he thought.
“I will need a moment, Aunt,” he said from the door. “It has been a rather full morning.”
Lady Catherine narrowed her eyes, uncertain whether he was being flippant.
He was. He had earned that much.
Collins arrived the following morning happy as a puppy summoned to its master’s table, which was his natural state in the presence of Lady Catherine.
“Mr Collins.” She addressed him without looking at him. “You will read the banns this Sunday for the marriage of my nephew, Mr Darcy, to my daughter, Miss de Bourgh.”
Collins’s mouth opened. His eyes bulged. For one magnificent, fleeting second, the man was rendered entirely speechless, a miracle Darcy had not previously believed possible outside of Scripture.
“My Lady! What a most—a most distinguished—a most felicitous—” He was attempting to say three complimentssimultaneously and succeeding at none. “I am honoured beyond all expression to be the humble instrument of—”
“Yes, yes,” Lady Catherine cut him off, waving a hand dismissively. “This Sunday, Mr Collins. That will be all.”
It was not all, of course. Collins lingered, orbiting the edges of the conversation like a moth too dim to avoid the flame. And it was in this lingering, this infuriating, purposeless hovering, that he mentioned, with the breezy indifference of someone who had never once read a room correctly in his life, that his guests had departed Hunsford that very morning.
“Miss Bennet and Miss Lucas, with Sir William. Returned to London. A great loss to the parish, naturally, though I flatter myself that the society at Rosings more than compensated for—”
“Thank you, Mr Collins.” Darcy’s voice was perfectly level. A marvel of engineering, he reflected. It betrayed nothing of the fact that the name had landed on him like a boot on a bruise.
She was gone. By the time the banns were read, she would be back in Hertfordshire, and she would hear of his marriage through Mrs Collins, and she would think...what?That he had moved on with impressive speed. That his attachment had been shallow enough to discard in a little more than a fortnight. That his proposal had meant nothing.
He said nothing further. Collins eventually exhausted his supply of obsequiousness and departed, leaving the room blessedly quiet.
The banns were read on three consecutive Sundays to a congregation of Hunsford villagers who had no idea they were witnessing the most efficient piece of damage control in the history of the Kentish gentry.
The wedding took place on Sunday, after the third reading of the banns.
The ceremony was brief. Anne wore white and looked as though she might faint. Darcy wore his best coat and felt precisely nothing, which was an improvement on the alternative. Collins officiated with barely suppressed delight. He clearly believed he was presiding over the love match of the century. Lady Catherine sat in the front pew, rigid as a monument, with the satisfaction that comes from averting total catastrophe through sheer force of will.
The ring slid onto Anne’s finger. She did not look at him. He did not look at her. They were pronounced man and wife, and the words settled over Darcy with the warmth and romance of a fishing trip.
They departed Kent the same afternoon.
The plan was a long wedding trip to Cornwall. A small, isolated cottage on the coast, rented under the name Dunmore—Mr and Mrs Dunmore, in delicate health, preferring seclusion. The story was thin but serviceable, and it was far enough from Kent that no one would think to search.
The household was sparse. A trusted maid, one of Lady Catherine’s, naturally, because she did not trust anyone she had not personally selected, vetted, and terrorised into loyalty. A midwife from the nearest village, engaged inadvance and paid handsomely for her skills and her silence, and a wet nurse on standby for after the birth.
And then there was the marriage itself, which was, Darcy supposed, the wrong word for it. A marriage implied some degree of partnership, of shared purpose, of two people going through the same life with mutual intent. What he and Anne had was an arrangement—two people occupying the same cottage with the mutual intent of surviving the experience without conversation.
They were not unkind to each other. That was the strange thing. There was no hostility, no resentment, no cold silences heavy with accusation. There was simply—nothing. Anne sat by the window with her hand on her belly and her eyes on the sea, and wherever her thoughts were, they were not in the room with him. She was elsewhere, with a man whose name Darcy did not care to know.
He wrote letters. To Georgiana, cheerful, carefully edited accounts of his wedding trip that omitted everything of substance. To his steward at Pemberley, instructions, decisions, the machinery of an estate that did not stop turning simply because its master had made a ruin of his personal life. He did not write to Bingley. He could not. Not with Jane Bennet’s quiet, bewildered face surfacing in his mind every time he picked up the quill, and the knowledge that he had separated them, and he had been wrong. The letter that would have confessed it was in pieces in the bottom of his travelling case, where he kept it for reasons he refused to examine.
The weeks passed. Anne grew heavier. The cottage grew smaller. The sea did not care about any of it, and Darcyfound this oddly comforting. He walked the cliffs most mornings, the wind tearing at his coat, and he thought about Elizabeth Bennet constantly.
The labour began on a Wednesday, which Darcy noted only because he had run out of other things to note. He had counted the flagstones in the kitchen and the beams in the ceiling. He had counted the number of times the midwife’s assistant had walked past him carrying linens, and the answer was eleven, which seemed excessive but was apparently standard.