Page 28 of Only Mr Darcy (Obstinate, Headstrong Girl #1)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

E lizabeth was alone for once, staring blankly out of the drawing room window when she spotted the two mounted riders. They were still afar off, but there was no mistaking the erect posture, the broad shoulders of Mr Darcy accompanying his friend.

Fury filled her at the sight of him, come to invade her home once again. It was…it was ungentlemanlike of him, to come so near her, to chip away, by his mere presence, at the wall she was so carefully building.

I will not stand for it. Not today.

Rapidly, she hurried to her room; if she took the time to don sturdier shoes and coat, she would be too late to make her escape before their visitors arrived. Instead, she grabbed the outdoor wear and made haste down the back stairs, fleeing as if demons chased her. She did not slow until she was long out of sight of the house, to the bridge she had so easily avoided for the last three weeks.

Sinking down onto the damp boards, too out of breath to run any farther, she studied her muddy hems and ruined slippers. Mama would not be pleased. Sighing, she exchanged the slippers for her half-boots and set them aside. Too overheated from her flight to don her coat, she made a cushion of it instead, contemplating the murky waters flowing beneath her seat.

The Gardiners would be arriving on Monday, just a few days from now. When her relations departed Longbourn after Christmas, she decided, she would leave with them if they would take her. Life in town would be welcome; the countryside, with its unexplored paths and endless skies, was entirely too romantic—a word no longer describing her. New and practical Elizabeth could be a creature of the city. Who needs angling when there are plays and music and architecture and museums?

It was also too quiet here, making her thoughts too loud, the only disruptions to a vast silence the water’s gurgling and the distant honks of geese.

I shall not have any such problems with nature’s stillness in London.

In that moment, without any sort of warning or the slightest disturbance that might have caused it, a large carp leapt out of the water and landed beside her on the bridge. Startled, she shoved herself backwards so violently, she nearly fell off into the water on the opposite side, only just saving herself from a plunge into the river’s icy depths. She scrambled to her feet, staring at the fish as if it were a burning bush.

It lay wriggling on the boards, staring back.

“If this were a fairy-tale, you would either grant me a wish or I should find a ruby in your innards that would be worth a king’s ransom,” she said aloud to it. It declined to answer.

Life, she understood, was no fairy-tale, and it promised no happily-ever-afters. Still, the strength of the wish that sprang into her mind at that moment was as clear as her memories of a summer’s sky.

Mr Darcy .

It mattered not whether she was in town or the country, whether she gained a veneer of practicality or set aside romance forever. So it was, and so it would always be.

“Is this a sign, Grandmama?” she asked. “A sign I am doomed to misery for the rest of my life?”

No one answered.

“I ought to fetch you to Mrs Hill’s cook-pot, you nasty reminder of all that is wrong in my life,” she told the carp resentfully. “You are fortunate that I have no basket or string.” Rebelling against the part of her nature that wished to lug it home regardless—to search it for rubies, perhaps—she nudged it with her booted toe, back into the river with hardly a splash to mark its exit.

Elizabeth could not help waiting for a few moments to see if it popped back up again, but no expressions of gratitude—or fairy wishes—emerged from the watery depths. Bemused, and finally feeling the cold, she donned her coat and shoved her ruined slippers into its pocket, sorry she had not remembered gloves, scarf, or hat. Without paying much attention to her direction, she wandered country paths at a pace brisk enough to keep warm, trying to make sense of what her life might become.

“I am not formed for unhappiness,” she told the clouded sky. “I do not wish to become bitter and lonely. I want…I want children one day, and a family of my own.”

She had walked for miles before she truly became aware of her surroundings, before she recognised where, unbidden, her feet had taken her. She was at the end of a curve of a seldom-travelled country lane; to her right was a long hedgerow, holding back the forest; on the other side of it, she knew, were the beginnings of Netherfield’s more formal gardens. But this recognition was not what caught her attention.

A carriage was stopped near a break in the hedgerow ahead of her. A man was tugging a plainly reluctant young lady towards it, her tear-stained face obvious even at this distance.

George Wickham, it seemed, had not departed Meryton forever after all. For the second time that day, Elizabeth broke into a run.