Page 24 of The Difference of a Darcy
He told himself she was wrong. She had misunderstood. She had misjudged him.
And yet—he had no peace. When sleep finally came, it came poorly.
Darcy awoke the following morning, on Christmas Day, with a start. He was drenched in a cold sweat, his heart hammering against his ribs. For a moment he could not tell where he was—the dim winter light filtering through heavy curtains, the faint scent of coal smoke, the muffled clatter of servants below.
He pressed a hand to his eyes. The dreams still clung to him like cobwebs.
In one, Bingley had stood before him in the drawing room at Netherfield, eyes blank, his usual warmth gone. “You have ruined my life,” he had said, over and over, each repetition flat and expressionless. Jane had appeared behind him, pale and thin, eyes full of accusation and sorrow.
“Why would you do this to me?” she had whispered.
Then Georgiana—sweet Georgiana—crying out to him from Ramsgate, but instead of relief at his arrival, she only lamented his coming. You think you know best,” she had sobbed. “Youalwayssay you know best. You never let us choose. Without you, I should have been free—"
Anne was next to appear before him. “My solitude is all your fault, Darcy. If not for you, my mother would have allowed me the freedom to marry as I pleased.”
And then his father, stern and distant, seated in the library at Pemberley. “You have ruined all of them, Fitzwilliam. Oh, why must I have had such a son?”
At the end of it all, Elizabeth. Not mocking this time. Not furious. Only standing at a distance, her eyes dark and sorrowful. “Everyone would be happier if you had never been born.”
He had woken with a strangled sound and found himself alone, the embers of the fire dying low.
Now the light was gray, seeping around the edges of the curtains. His head ached. His mouth was dry. Every attempt at righteous indignation from the night before had withered; the pages he had consigned to the fire seemed childish, his vow to “set her straight” absurd.
He sat up slowly, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. His cravat hung limp over the chair where he had thrown it. He stared at it for a long time, feeling oddly hollow.
Perhaps she is right,he thought dully.Perhaps I am nothing but a meddler. Perhaps I ruin everything I touch. Bingley. Georgiana. Cousin Anne. Even… even Elizabeth.
He rubbed a hand over his face.
It was Christmas morning. He should have been at Pemberley or at Matlock with Georgiana, presenting gifts and seeing her smile. Instead, he sat alone in a cold room at Rosings, unwanted, unloved, and rejected.
Maybe it would be better if I had never been born.
The thought startled him, but it stayed.
He stood abruptly and crossed to the window, pushing aside the heavy curtain. Outside, the fields were blanketed in snow. A weak sun struggled through clouds, sending pale shafts of light across the white expanse. The hedgerows stood like dark stitches against a seam of silver.
He needed air.
Chapter 5
Darcy dressed quickly and slipped from his room, avoiding the main staircase. Servants moved about with trays and candles, preparing for his aunt’s Christmas breakfast. He left through a side door, pulling his greatcoat tight against the biting wind.
The snow crunched beneath his boots as he walked down the path toward the edge of the woods, head bent. He had no clear destination. Only a vague thought: that a walk might clear his mind, or at least make the echo of Elizabeth’s words recede.
Maybe it would be better if I had never been born.
He turned the words over again in his mind as he reached the stream at the far edge of Rosings Park—the same little grove where he had so often gone to escape his aunt’s lectures. The water trickled under a thin crust of ice, dark and cold, like a vein of glass running through the snow.
Darcy picked up a stone and turned it in his gloved palm absentmindedly. All around him, the woods were quiet. The snow was undisturbed but for his own footprints.
He felt cold clear through.
It was not only the rejection. Not only her words. Though those had cut more deeply than he could admit—not even tohimself. No, it was something more corrosive still: a slow, crawling doubt that he usually kept buried deep.
He wondered again if everyone he cared about might indeed have been happier without him.I have ruined everything,he thought miserably.
Bingley. Jane.
