What had he noticed? What had she missed?
She lay awake that night, listening to the sounds of the parsonage — the creak of floorboards, the tick of the clock in the hall, and, from the room next door, a sound so faint she might have imagined it.
A woman, weeping. Very quietly. As though she did not wish to be heard.
CHAPTER 3
ELIZABETH
It happened on a Tuesday.
Elizabeth would remember this detail later with the peculiar precision that shock bestows on irrelevant facts. Tuesday. The fifth of April. Lamb for dinner. Charlotte had worn her grey muslin. The clock on the parlour mantelpiece had stopped at ten past three and no one had wound it.
The evening at Rosings had been unremarkable — Lady Catherine's usual interrogations, Collins's usual worship, Darcy's usual watching from his position by the fire. Colonel Fitzwilliam had been absent, called to the garrison at Maidstone on regimental business — a half-day's ride, and without his easy conversation to act as a buffer, Elizabeth had found herself more exposed than usual to Darcy's scrutiny. Twice during dinner their eyes had met and held for a beat too long, and twice she had looked away first, which annoyed her, because Elizabeth Bennet did not look away first. It was not in her constitution.
But there was something different about Darcy tonight. A tension in the set of his shoulders, a sharpness in his attention that went beyond his customary observation. When she hadrisen from the dinner table, his gaze had followed her with an intensity that felt less like interest and more like alarm — as though he were watching someone walk toward a cliff edge and debating whether to call out.
She had not understood it then. She would understand it later.
The carriage brought them home at half past nine. Collins had been quiet during the ride — unusual for him, and Elizabeth had marked it without attaching significance. He entered the parsonage first, went directly to his study, and closed the door. Charlotte exchanged a glance with Elizabeth that was difficult to read in the dim hallway — relief, perhaps, or its opposite.
They settled in the parlour. Charlotte took up her mending. Elizabeth opened a book — Johnson'sRasselas, which Fitzwilliam had lent her — and tried to read. The words swam. She kept seeing Darcy's face across the dinner table, that expression of urgent attention, the way his hand had tightened on the stem of his wine glass when Lady Catherine had asked Elizabeth about her family's connections.
An hour passed. Charlotte's needle whispered through fabric. The fire cracked and settled. From the study came the scratch of Collins's pen, and then silence, and then the sound of his chair pushing back.
He appeared in the doorway. Elizabeth looked up from her book and registered several things simultaneously: his face was flushed, his cravat was loosened, and his eyes — his small, damp eyes — were fixed on her with an expression she had never seen in them before. Not the usual simpering admiration. Something harder. Something that had edges.
"Cousin Elizabeth." His voice was different too — thicker, slower, as though the words were being squeezed through something. "I wish to speak with you about your conduct this evening."
Elizabeth set down her book. "My conduct, Mr. Collins?"
"Your behaviour at Rosings." He stepped into the room. Behind him, the study door stood open, and Elizabeth could see the decanter on his desk — sherry, half-empty, though it had been full that morning. "Your manner toward Lady Catherine was impertinent. Your manner toward Mr. Darcy was" — he searched for the word, his mouth working — "familiar."
"I was civil to everyone present, Mr. Collins. I fail to see?—"
"Do not contradict me." The words came out louder than the room could hold. Charlotte's needle stopped.
Elizabeth sat very still. She had spent her life reading people — it was her sharpest skill, the instrument she played with far more precision than the pianoforte — and what she was reading now in Collins's face sent a cold thread of fear through her stomach. This was not bluster. This was not Collins the pompous, Collins the ridiculous, Collins the fool. This was a man who had been drinking alone for an hour and had worked himself into something that the sherry had not created but had freed.
"Mr. Collins," Charlotte said from her chair, her voice carefully neutral. "Perhaps we might discuss this in the morning, when?—"
"I am not speaking to you." He did not look at his wife. His eyes stayed on Elizabeth. "I have watched you, Cousin. I have watched the way you look at him. The way you speak to him. The way you encourage his attentions."
"I have encouraged nothing?—"
"Do you think me blind?" He advanced. Two steps. His shadow fell across her lap, blocking the firelight. He smelled of sherry and something sour beneath it — sweat, stale and sharp. "Do you think I cannot see what passes between you? You have spent every evening at Rosings casting your lures at Lady Catherine's nephew, making a spectacle of yourself, and by extension making a spectacle ofme. I will not have it."
Elizabeth stood. The movement was instinctive — she would not sit while he stood over her, would not give him the advantage of height. They were nearly the same stature, Collins slightly taller but thickened with drink and bad posture. She held his gaze.
"Mr. Collins, you are mistaken. Mr. Darcy and I have exchanged nothing beyond common civility. Your imagination has supplied what reality has not."
The blow came without warning.
His open hand struck the left side of her face with a force that snapped her head sideways and sent her stumbling into the chair. She heard the impact before she felt it — a flat, meaty sound, like a hand slapping a table — and then the pain arrived, bright and immediate, filling her cheekbone and radiating outward to her temple and jaw. Her vision blurred. She tasted copper.
Charlotte screamed. A short, sharp sound, cut off almost as soon as it began.
Elizabeth caught herself on the chair arm. Her hand went to her face and came away clean — no blood, not yet — but the skin was already tightening with heat, the bruise building beneath the surface. She turned to face Collins and saw him breathinghard, his hand still raised, his expression a mixture of righteous fury and something else — a flicker, there and gone, that might have been shock at what he had just done.