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“I am not stomping about,” Darcy replied icily. “And I am, in fact, ecstatic.”

Fitzwilliam straightened. “I find it rather ridiculous that you have not forced Bennet’s hand and simply married her! Instead, you brood and grumble at those of us who have yet to achieve such a blessed state and enjoy her company.”

“Forced her father? Forced Elizabeth? You are too accustomed to ordering others on the battlefield but know nothing about affairs of the heart.”

Fitzwilliam rolled his eyes. “So says the man who goes here and there, arranging things to please himself, yet cannot manage it with his own lady love.”

“You must stop pleasing yourself with the company of a lady you cannot have, would never have had,” Darcy said in a low voice.

Fitzwilliam’s eyes narrowed, and his jaw tightened; it was, to Darcy, a great improvement over his prior impudence. “Cannot have? When did I have the opportunity? Last spring, you fancied yourself in love and I ceded the field?—”

“Ceded the field! You flatter yourself to imagine you were even on the field!”

“Yet here it is, nearly a year later, and still you are uncertain of your hold on her heart and accuse me of dallying with her? You are the dallying one, old man. Had another man your fortune, what is to say she might, even now, have a different bridegroom?”

“A different bridegroom?” The burning rage Darcy had felt pulsing through him stilled.

They were at a tipping point now, he and his cousin, and he was acutely aware that the next question could be one whose answer would destroy their friendship.

It is best not to know his heart; all that matters is Elizabeth’s.

“Elizabeth has made her choice. I am hers and she is mine,” he said carefully after a long moment spent retreating from the abyss.

“My duties, my responsibilities are to my future wife and her happiness—no matter that it requires my own short-lived unhappiness. I shall wait as long as required to make her my wife.”

Darcy’s calm reply earned him a nod and another devilish smirk from Fitzwilliam. “Since you seem content to pass the time disdaining and misunderstanding the desires and intentions of others, perhaps I shall continue to warm my cold heart upon the flame of her conviviality.”

His tenuously held composure fled. “You are the last man in the world Elizabeth would ever marry.”

“Ha, let us see whether you ever become the first!” Fitzwilliam smiled meanly as he began to move past Darcy.

Anger rising, Darcy caught his cousin’s arm.

Fitzwilliam shook him off roughly and pushed Darcy against the wall. “You will be a grey beard before you understand what you have lost.”

With a loss of control he had not felt since he was a boy witnessing Wickham’s petty cruelty to a lame dog, Darcy pushed back.

Saye was red-faced and nearly unable to speak when Elizabeth encountered him at the top of the stairs.

“Saye? Are you well?”

“Where is Darcy? Where is my brother?” He stopped in front of her and affected a cooler countenance. “Where is he?”

“He—Darcy, I mean—should be along shortly. I saw him but a few min?—”

“He must come now. He is the only one of any use.”

Saye began to stalk towards the corridor where Darcy’s rooms were located. Elizabeth followed, picking up her hem to more quickly cover the distance between them.

“What is it? Has something happened to Georgiana? Has someone taken ill? Is it Lilly?”

Saye slowed and gave her an odd look before pressing his fingers to the bridge of his nose. “My wretched sister has schemed to destroy our tableaux . She has burnt my drawings. All hope is lost until I find Darcy, for only he shares my knowledge of the paintings.”

Elizabeth nearly laughed at him, relief and hilarity flooding through her, before hearing voices—speaking her name amongst a flood of angry words—and then a commotion of curses and punches.

Saye left her in a trice, taking off at a run and disappearing around the corner; seconds later she heard him shout, “Enough!”

For a moment, she was frozen in horrified comprehension, thinking surely she had not heard what she thought she had.

Then, Elizabeth quickly followed Saye, rounding into the next corridor to find Darcy and Fitzwilliam, with Saye between them, their chests heaving and faces angry; a trickle of blood was on the lips she had kissed not ten minutes earlier.

Saye pushed the two men farther apart. If she had not known of the colonel’s gentleness with Georgiana, Elizabeth might have been afraid of the blistering scowl he shot at his brother. Darcy’s expression was little different, sullen, and—as he avoided her eyes—at least somewhat contrite.

“My dreams are en feu in the library, and the two of you are fighting over Elizabeth’s charms in a common corridor.”

Fitzwilliam shrugged at his brother’s angry glare. “The library is on fire?”

Saye’s charge of ‘fighting over Elizabeth’s charms’ prompted an embarrassed look from Darcy.

Her own face was aflame with similar sentiment, but her vexation was paramount.

The phrase ‘you are the last man in the world Elizabeth would ever marry’ seemed to linger between them, making her less sympathetic to Darcy’s split lip than she might have been otherwise.

“I heard only a little of the argument, but I shall remind you both I am not an object to be fought over,” Elizabeth said and watched as the anger drained from their faces, both of them shifting uneasily on their feet.

“The first man I marry will also be the last, and he will be a gentleman who respects not just his wife, but all in his family and household. He, like all in his family, will be kind and generous, and will not tease or mock anyone meanly.”

She looked directly at each of the brawlers. “And he certainly will not tolerate insults and throw punches in the corridor of his uncle’s house.”

Saye chuckled. “Or his aunt’s. Hardly fair to exclude Lady Catherine from these strictures.”

“Lizzy,” Fitzwilliam began but she interrupted him in a cool voice.

“Colonel Fitzwilliam, we soon shall be cousins. I gladly anticipate your future wife becoming one of my closest friends.”

Elizabeth stepped towards Darcy, pulled his handkerchief from his pocket, and dabbed his lips. She tried to ignore the look of remorse and embarrassment in his eyes. “We shall speak later.”

Elizabeth turned and walked off, towards the staircase and, undoubtedly, the smoky ruins of Saye’s tableaux vivants .

As he watched her move away, Darcy strove to understand the fierce stupidity of the last five minutes.

He could take some solace in hearing Elizabeth refer to his cousin so formally; Fitzwilliam had looked properly abashed.

It was a small and petty reward for his own foolish behaviour, but Darcy took some satisfaction in it nonetheless.

“Now, being that I must do everything for everyone,” Saye announced, “I am going to recommend you both go and make some music with the whore’s pipe, because I daresay it is confounding?—”

Fitzwilliam growled something vulgar under his breath and walked off in the direction opposite from where Elizabeth had gone.

“Well!” Saye huffed. “See what you get for trying to be helpful!” He pointed at Darcy, “You, at least, have a ship on the horizon, but if he does not get a woman soon, I cannot say what will happen.”

Darcy stared down the corridor before closing his eyes and sighing deeply. “Somehow, I am the only man here who is engaged, yet I am still fighting other men to get my bride to the altar.”