Prologue
PROLOGUE
On a warm and otherwise innocuous Friday evening in June, Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy entered the British Institution in Pall Mall, London. Therein was displayed a collection of works by several celebrated artists, and splendid were the many exhibits. That, however, was not why Darcy had come. Up the grand staircase and through a series of candlelit rooms he moved, navigating his way with ill-disguised impatience around groups of milling connoisseurs, dilettantes, and proponents of fashionable society. He searched the faces around him, anxious to catch a glimpse of his quarry but increasingly certain he had missed his chance—until he reached the entrance of the upper east exhibition room.
There, beyond a sea of tables, easels, floor candelabras, and what seemed like half the ton , seated on one very particular couch, between two architecturally extraneous but nevertheless imposing marble columns, sat Miss Elizabeth Bennet.
He breathed a sigh of relief to see her there, and to see that she was alone. She looked extraordinarily lovely, the glow of so many candles adding yet another layer of loveliness to her complexion. He knew he must speak to her, yet his feet remained obstinately rooted to the spot. This might be the last time he ever saw her, the last moment before the spark of hope that flickered wildly in his breast was forever doused. He would look his fill before he chanced to hear her say that all hope was in vain.
It had been more than half a year since he last spoke to her—at an excruciating dinner at Longbourn the previous autumn—and they had scarcely exchanged a dozen words on that occasion. He had gone there to judge whether he might ever succeed in making Elizabeth love him.
To his profound regret, it had transpired that no, he could not.
In the eight months since, his admiration and regard for her had not lessened by even the smallest iota, and misery and loneliness had become his constant bedfellows. What Elizabeth had done in those eight months, and with whom she had done it, Darcy knew not. What he did know was that now she was in danger, and he could not—nay, would not—stand by and allow her to be ill-used.
She might not thank him for it, he knew. The cost of his previous interference had been the loss of her regard—or at least the entrenching of her antipathy. Yet the cost of his silence where Wickham was concerned had been greater still, and to more people than him alone. Thus, although he did not relish drawing Elizabeth's ire upon himself again, he would warn her that she was about to ally herself with a different cad.
He would have done so, even if her displeasure were guaranteed. There was, however, one tiny sliver of hope that she might not be displeased to see him. As a consequence of the most unlikely sequence of events ever to have occurred in—or out of, for that matter—an art gallery, an astonishing report had reached him: that against all evidence to the contrary, Elizabeth might be amenable to a renewal of his attentions.
So incredible was this string of coincidences that Darcy could scarcely believe it had happened at all, let alone what it purportedly signified. And yet, had none of it come to pass in the manner it had, he would never have learnt to hope at all. He would have turned away from this exact spot—where, four days ago, he had set eyes on Elizabeth for the first time in months—and left without ever seeing her again. Fortunately, that was not quite how events transpired.