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He thought that he could observe, weigh, decide with the same precision he applied to investments or estate plans. That he could control it.

But now?

Who would trust his judgment after this?

Who would want a scandal hovering like smoke over the altar?

What family would want to unite themselves with him , if it came to that?

He stood, pacing. The study was warm, but his hands were cold. He passed the clock. The ledger shelf. The worn edge of his father’s armchair. Every object in the room whispered order, structure, tradition.

None of them could save the one person in the world he was meant to protect.

He would not go to Rosings. He could not.

Lady Catherine would want answers. Poke holes in his carefully constructed story.

She would insist. And Darcy could not give them—could not admit that the girl he had once cradled as an infant had very nearly thrown her life away because he had underestimated the wrong man and left her alone with a charming voice and a borrowed cravat.

He turned back to the desk.

Crossed out the unfinished line.

Started again.

My dear aunt, I regret to inform you I shall not be able to attend Rosings this Easter...

He paused.

His hand clenched.

He would protect Georgiana. At all costs.

Even if it meant rewriting every plan he had ever made.

Even if it meant sacrificing certainty—that precious, brittle illusion.

Darcy dipped the pen again.

And kept writing.

May, 1811 Longbourn

T he letter came in the afternoon post, stained with rain and smelling faintly of lavender soap. Elizabeth recognized her aunt Gardiner’s hand before she broke the seal.

She read the first line three times before folding it again and setting it aside.

Plans canceled.

The summer trip to Derbyshire—the one that had been months in the making—had been postponed due to an “unexpected delay” in Mr. Gardiner’s business affairs. Nothing serious, her aunt assured her. Only a brief postponement. Perhaps September. Perhaps October.

Perhaps not at all.

Elizabeth set the letter down and rubbed her fingers, still faintly stained with ink from copying out receipts. Jane looked up from her careful notes, a faint crease between her brows.

“Bad news?”

“No,” Elizabeth said lightly. “The trip is delayed. Something in Newcastle, I think.”

“Oh.” Jane’s brow creased. “I am sorry. I know you were looking forward to it.”

Elizabeth opened her mouth to agree.

Then changed her mind.

“I was not entirely.”

Jane looked surprised. “No?”

“It is a long journey,” Elizabeth said, picking up a slightly crumpled ledger and smoothing it more than necessary. “And Derbyshire is full of hills. And opinions.”

“I thought you liked hills.”

“I like opinions even less.”

Jane smiled. “Then you shall enjoy your reprieve.”

Elizabeth did not answer.

She went to the window instead. The garden was a mess of high summer—too much green, not enough order.

She could hear Lydia’s laughter from the back lawn, loud and bright and thoughtless.

Mary’s pianoforte trickled in from the sitting room like someone walking slowly down a staircase and forgetting their place.

Elizabeth folded her arms.

She had not thought about him.

Very studiously, she had not.

Not since London.

She had put it all away—the rare smile, the notebook, the insult, the heat of standing too close in a ballroom and pretending not to notice. She had put it all away because there had been nothing to do with it. Because he had made no effort. Because she did not want him to.

The trip’s cancellation felt like a reprieve.

But she hated that it felt like anything at all.

May, 1811 Pemberley

T he letter from Bingley had been far too cheerful for Darcy’s current mood.

It had arrived in the morning post, written in an enthusiastic scrawl and sealed with a haphazard wax stamp that had cracked in transit.

Bingley was “entertaining the idea of an estate” somewhere in the country.

Nothing settled, nothing signed, but he was interested.

Hopeful. The whole thing read like a man proposing marriage to a hypothetical cow.

Darcy set it aside without replying.

He could not think about Bingley’s leisure pursuits. Not while he was still answering evasive questions from Georgiana’s new companion and paying off another tutor who had noticed too much and said too little.

Colonel Fitzwilliam was still in Spain—somewhere near Salamanca, if his last letter could be believed—and therefore utterly useless. Darcy had drafted a reply to him twice and burned both.

That left only one person he might speak to.

Someone who knew enough to be dangerous. Someone who might already be speaking to others.

The dowager Countess of Matlock had never been known for her discretion, only her taste in scandal.

Darcy stood at his study window, staring down at the gravel path where the morning’s rain had turned the stones the color of ash. He had not left the house in three days. Georgiana barely left her room.

And Wickham was gone. Hopefully forever.

Darcy had paid him off a second time—more quietly, this time, with fewer signatures and no receipts. But the damage lingered, like smoke.

There were letters. He had not seen them himself, but Georgiana had admitted to writing them. At least four.

She would not say what they contained.

He had not dared ask Lady Matlock directly whether she had taken some actions toward Wickham herself, but the signs were there. Her tone had shifted. Her last letter had included the phrase “rest assured, my dear boy, no one need know—unless you give them cause.”

Darcy had read that line three times, then set fire to the page.

He now stood with a fresh sheet before him, pen in hand, trying to decide whether the act of writing his grandmother would be worse than the silence.

Lady Catherine was fulminating still that he had skipped his usual Easter visit this year. He could not go to Rosings. That much was decided.

He could not leave Georgiana.

He could not explain anything to Bingley.

And he could not shake the sense that his reputation—carefully constructed, polished like silver—had begun to crack beneath its own weight.

And somewhere in the back of his thoughts, a quiet clock was ticking.

Nine months.

He dipped the pen again. The tip caught briefly, snagging on the fibers of the paper, and he was struck—absurdly—by the memory of a page torn from a journal. Hers. A stray scrap he had pocketed without thinking, folded so carelessly it still bore the creases.

His smiles are like an eclipse…

He had read it twice before tucking it away again. It was meant as a joke. Of course it was. But for reasons he did not understand, it had stayed with him. Now, weeks later, it made his mouth twitch.

Elizabeth Bennet… A gentleman’s daughter who had once had the temerity to buy him and spend the afternoon divesting him of all his secrets. A woman who had never demanded anything from him but a smile and a bit of good humor.

Perhaps…

But Elizabeth Bennet was not a solution. She was not a possibility.She was simply... a voice in his memory, sharper than most. And these days, his world held too few of those.

He wondered what she would write about him now.

July, 1811 Longbourn

L ongbourn was suffocating under the kind of heat that made tea seem like punishment.

The drawing room was stifling, even with both windows thrown open.

Mrs. Bennet had insisted on receiving guests “with elegance,” which, in practice, meant too many cushions, too many cakes, and far too much taffeta.

Elizabeth had taken refuge in the far corner, notebook tucked discreetly into the folds of a shawl that was too warm for the day, feigning interest in embroidery while actually jotting down a few particularly florid phrases from Mrs. Goulding, who was in the middle of a long, wheezing tale about her husband’s estate dealings. Again.

She speaks as though her late husband founded the Bank of England rather than purchased shares in a brickworks scandalously adjacent to a piggery.

The moment she formed the last letter, Elizabeth tucked her notebook into her lap, just as her mother passed by with a loud “whisper.”

“Lizzy, dearest, would you pour the tea? You know I always spill when Lady Lucas is looking.”

“Of course, Mama.” Elizabeth rose with the sort of smile one wears to battle and crossed the room. The tea tray sat on the low table between the armchairs, slightly off-balance, already crowded with cups and saucers.

She reached to pour—and as she did, the notebook slipped from the little “pocket” her shawl made and hit the carpet with a soft thud.

Too soft.

“I shall fetch that for you,” said Mrs. Goulding, already leaning forward, her hands outstretched and her expression full of helpful purpose.

Elizabeth’s breath caught. “No—”

But Charlotte had moved faster.

“Oh, let me,” she said smoothly, stepping between Mrs. Goulding and the book with such graceful timing it might have been choreographed.

She bent, scooped up the notebook, and settled herself again on the sofa with a smile that was all warmth and absolutely no mirth.

“I can keep this safe for you until you are quite finished, Lizzy.”

Elizabeth nodded and kept pouring the tea with fingers that felt vaguely numb. “Thank you, Charlotte.”

“What is that, dear?” asked Lady Lucas from her perch beside the fireplace, blinking at her through a veil of well-meaning curiosity.

“Oh, nothing,” Elizabeth said too quickly. “Just… notes.”

“Verse, no doubt,” said Mrs. Long, who had the hopeful tone of a woman ready to start a reading circle on the spot. “Young ladies are always composing now. My niece writes odes to her canary.”

Mrs. Goulding chuckled. “I suppose it is better than pining over a colonel. I once wrote twelve letters to a man in India and burned every one.”

Elizabeth choked on a laugh and turned back to the teapot, pouring with excessive concentration. “I am sure you were far more articulate than I.”

Mrs. Bennet beamed. “Lizzy has always been scribbling something. Since she was but a girl! I told her she ought to try her hand at a gothic novel—something with bandits. Or a governess in danger!”

“There is nothing quite so dramatic as Longbourn,” Elizabeth said, smiling through her teeth. “Truly, most of it is nonsense.”

Lady Lucas leaned forward. “But we must hear a bit of it—surely you have something that would not shame you?”

“I have many things that would not shame me,” Elizabeth said, “and a few that would shame everyone else.”

The ladies laughed, though a few exchanged glances that hovered between amusement and alarm.

Charlotte—blast her ability to look composed, even at a time like this—redirected the conversation with a gentle nudge toward a new tea cake recipe and the price of satin ribbons in Meryton. Elizabeth busied herself with pouring, keeping her eyes low.

It was not until much later, after the guests had gone and the air had cleared of perfumed opinions, that Charlotte found her again in the garden.

Elizabeth was seated on the edge of the bench near the lilac bush, sketching something in the dirt with the toe of her slipper.

Charlotte sat beside her and handed her the notebook—quietly, without ceremony. “I believe this is yours.”

Elizabeth took it with a wince. “I owe you a cake. Or a kingdom.”

Charlotte smiled faintly. “You owe me discretion. But I shall take a cake.”

Elizabeth flipped the notebook open, confirming its contents were still hers alone. “Did anyone see—?”

“No,” Charlotte said gently. “But they wanted to. And they will again.”

Elizabeth sighed. “I suppose I ought to write in cipher.”

“You might start by not writing about people at all while they are in the same room.”

“I was only recording Mrs. Goulding’s views on domestic investment. For posterity.”

Charlotte gave her a look. “I do hope I am not one of the characters in that little journal of yours.”

“Of course not! I only write about the absurd.”

“Then do not leave it unattended,” Charlotte said softly. “Absurdities tend to read.”