“I THOUGHT Ihad been going mad,” he said, coming across the kitchen towards her. “I kept telling myself, ‘Fitzwilliam, you are only thinking of her, and that is why you are seeing her everywhere.’ But it is you. What are you doing in my kitchen?”
Elizabeth swallowed the bite of boiled, parsley potatoes she was chewing, and wiped at her mouth, looking up at him, at a loss for words.
“You’re eating, clearly,” he said. “But you’re in the dower house, aren’t you? I thought I saw you, hiding behind a door, but I told myself that was mad, that I was losing my mind, and I walked on past you, and if you are a hallucination of some sort now, I suppose I am going to have to have myself committed.”
Well, that hiding space behind the door had not been a very good one, clearly. Caroline had seen her easily and Mr. Darcy had seen her, too.
He looked her up and down and his gaze stopped at her midsection and his eyes widened in alarm and then he looked at her plate.
She set it down. What did it matter now? “It happens that Mr. Hurst was injured in some way that prevents him from fathering children,” she said in a bland voice. “I happen to be conveniently with a child I cannot claim, and so we are here, hiding away until I—”
“Right,” he said, and he had turned rather white.
“This way, we are all hiding together, and then when we come back later, everyone will think that Mrs. Hurst—”
“I’m aware of the way these things are done, Miss Bennet,” he cut her off.
She felt awful, really awful, but it was a sort of dull awful. She had dreaded his ever finding this out, but now he had, and it seemed to take the last little bit of spark from her, and now everything was nothing but dull, everything was just this, and she would never feel anything except this dull blandness. Nothing mattered now. She had given up entirely.
It was very quiet. He was staring at her midsection, which was not really that rounded, not yet, but was not flat either.
“This is why the extra food,” he said. “This is why Miss Bingley made that request, and I thought nothing of it, for of course her sister who is increasing must need that, but Mrs. Hurst does not look as if she is increasing, not a whit, and now I see—” He straightened. “Wait a moment, the extra she requested, that is all the food you are eating each day?”
She hunched up her shoulders, wishing to disappear. “Well, this is why I’m here, you see. I’m often hungry.”
He let out a noise, a noise of disapproval. “But Miss Bingley did not ask me for more—” He broke off. “Well, I have not been entirely encouraging to her requests, have I? Truly, she bullied me into hosting her, and she is dreadful dinner company, and she is rather aware, not to my credit, that I wish her gone.”
“Oh,” said Elizabeth, looking sheepishly at the food. “Well, I am sorry to be an imposition. We were not supposed to be here, on your property. There was a cottage—”
“I heard about the cottage, the one that didn’t have a dining room,” he muttered.
“The Bingley sisters could not bear it there,” she said. “But here, in your dower house, I must be hidden away, so that you don’t know that I’m here—”
“Except I know now,” he said.
“Yes, and she will not be pleased with me,” said Elizabeth.
“Who will not? Miss Bingley? Caroline?”
This was beneath her, entirely beneath her, but he had once… he had looked at her and said his feelings could not be repressed, and obviously he had no feelings for her now, not with that white-as-a-sheet countenance of his, but he might have amemoryof feelings. “She has struck me before.”
Mr. Darcy’s eyes widened. “I have never liked that woman, and now I see I was entirely justified. She hit you? While you are carrying a child?”
Elizabeth did not know what to do with this, with his anger against Caroline. She had wanted it, but now she felt ashamed of herself. “She was out of sorts, I suppose, and she was disappointed about…”Your rejecting her.“Something else unrelated, and I don’t know that she would do it again. I mean, she has not. But she would not like if she knew that you and I were speaking, I don’t think.”
“Miss Bennet—”
“Perhaps you could simply pretend you had not seen me?” she said softly. “Perhaps it could all go on as it is going on?”
“Well, I hardly think that can be,” he said.
“Yes, you must turn us out,” she said.
“No, of course not,” he said.
“Well, you cannot acknowledge that I am in your dower house, carrying an illegitimate child for Mrs. Hurst to claim as her own, you know.”
He made another noise. This one sounded wounded. “Perhaps not, I suppose,” he said, resigned.