Swipe Left on Mr. Darcy — The Last Man, Page 6

About this chapter

Trapped for a week at Ms. de Bourgh's cold estate while she visits Charlotte, Lizzie keeps colliding with the last person she wants to see: Fitzwilliam Darcy, who turns out to be de Bourgh's nephew and keeps 'happening' onto her path. He is stiff, watchful, and — she's sure — as arrogant as ever, while his aunt makes it witheringly clear that Darcy is promised to his own kind. At a frigid family dinner Lizzie refuses to shrink, and something in Darcy cracks. Then, on an evening she's begged out of an outing with a headache, he appears at the cottage door, undone, and it all pours out — an admiration he's fought for months, delivered as a backhanded confession that everything sensible about her family and station said no, and yet here he is. Lizzie refuses him. When he asks why, she stops being polite: he broke Jane's heart on a guess (he doesn't deny it — he defends it), he ruined George Wickham (his face turns to ice), and from the first moment they met his arrogance made him the last man in the world she could ever be talked into wanting. He leaves white and formal, the wall slamming back up. The next morning he presses a thick sealed letter into her hands — read this, then think what you like of me — and walks away. Alone with the unopened envelope, Lizzie's cold certainty about exactly who Darcy is flickers, for the first time, into doubt.