“Mr. Darcy,” Lizzy said, interrupting, “are you saying that you were bitten by a wolf in the forest and that this wild animal was trying to apologize for biting you?”

“That is close to what I am saying, but I need to add one other detail. It was not a wolf who bit me, but a werewolf.”

Lizzy now burst out laughing. “Shame on you, Mr. Darcy, for going on in such a way. Is this what I have to look forward to? Scary stories on the night of a full moon?”

Lizzy waited for Mr. Darcy to break out into his wonderful smile—to let her know that he had been teasing her—but he did not.

“Mr. Darcy, please tell me you are in jest.”

“I wish I could, but that would be a lie, and I promise that I shall never lie to you,” he said, and Lizzy could hear the tension in his voice. “Elizabeth, as a result of that bite, I became a werewolf.”

Darcy recounted for an ashen-faced Elizabeth the sequence of events that followed his being bitten in the Black Forest.

“As soon as I got back to the carriage, I told my father what had happened and showed him the bite mark. When he saw it, he was greatly relieved. ‘A mere scratch,’ he kept saying over and over as if to convince himself that it was impossible for his son to have ever been in danger of being harmed by a wild animal. But Herr Beck, our translator, was alarmed by the she wolf’s actions, insisting, quite correctly, that no true wolf would have acted in such a manner and informed my father that it was known that there were werewolves in the Black Forest. ‘Werewolves? Those are stories invented for the amusement of the uneducated,’ Papa insisted. Everything Herr Beck said was met with the same dismissive attitude by my father.