Shadows of Rosings Park (Elizabeth and Darcy Variations)

Chapter 1

ELIZABETH

The path to Rosings was thirty minutes on foot, and Mr. Collins used every one of them.

"Cousin Elizabeth, you must observe the particular elegance with which Lady Catherine has had the hedgerows trimmed this season.

The uniformity of the cut speaks to a mind of exquisite precision — a precision I can only aspire to emulate in the arrangement of my own modest shrubbery, though of course my efforts are but pale reflections of her ladyship's horticultural genius—"

Elizabeth stopped listening somewhere around shrubbery and focused instead on the backs of Charlotte's shoes.

Sturdy half-boots, recently re-soled. Practical footwear for a woman who had married practically and now walked, with practical steps, toward a dinner she had not chosen but would endure with the same cheerful efficiency she brought to everything.

Charlotte had a gift for endurance. Elizabeth had once mistaken it for contentment.

The April evening was cool enough to justify a spencer but not cold enough to excuse silence. Collins required responses the way a mill wheel requires water — without them, the mechanism seized and the grinding noise only increased.

"You are too kind, Mr. Collins," Elizabeth said, which was untrue but served.

He beamed. The compliment, such as it was, struck him with the force of genuine praise.

It always did. Collins occupied a world in which words meant precisely what they said, hidden meanings did not exist, and his wife's closest friend had come to Kent purely for the pleasure of his company and the improving proximity of Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

Charlotte glanced back over her shoulder. The look she gave Elizabeth was brief and perfectly legible: I know. I'm sorry. Keep walking.

Elizabeth kept walking.

She had been at Hunsford for a fortnight now, and the shape of each day had become as predictable as a clock's face.

Mornings: walking alone, as far from the parsonage as her legs would carry her, the dew soaking through her half-boots while the sky went from grey to pale blue above the Kent woodlands.

Afternoons: reading in the small front parlour while Collins composed sermons in his study, his pen scratching like a mouse in the wainscoting, and Charlotte sat across from her pretending to embroider and actually doing arithmetic — the household accounts, the tradesmen's bills, the quiet mathematics of a marriage that would have to be managed if it could not be enjoyed. Evenings: Rosings.

Always Rosings.

The great house came into view as they crested the hill.

It sat in its grounds like a fat man in a good chair — expensively situated, immovable, and accustomed to being admired.

The windows caught the last of the daylight and threw it back, blank and golden.

Elizabeth had seen grand houses before, but Rosings wore its grandeur the way Lady Catherine wore her opinions: loudly, and at every opportunity.

"Observe, Cousin, the south facade," Collins breathed, as though the building might hear and be gratified.

They were admitted by a footman who looked through Elizabeth as though she were made of window glass. The entrance hall smelled of beeswax and hothouse flowers — lilies, overwhelming and funereal. Their footsteps echoed on marble.

And then they were in the drawing room, and everything else fell away, because Fitzwilliam Darcy was standing beside the fireplace.

She had known he was in Kent. Charlotte had mentioned it two days ago with studied casualness — Mr. Darcy has arrived at Rosings with his cousin, Colonel Fitzwilliam — and Elizabeth had arranged her face into an expression of perfect indifference and kept it there until she was alone in her room, where she had sat on the edge of the bed and pressed her hands flat against her knees and thought, very clearly: Damn.

She had not seen him since Hertfordshire.

Since those weeks at Netherfield when he had haunted every dinner, every dance — including that interminable ball where he had asked her to stand up with him and she had been too astonished to refuse — every morning call, his presence as unavoidable as weather.

But the image that had lodged itself most stubbornly was from that first night, the assembly rooms at Meryton, where he had stood against the wall with that look on his face — the one that said he was cataloguing every person in the room and finding them all insufficient — and told Bingley, within her hearing, that she was tolerable but not handsome enough to tempt him.

She had dined out on the insult for weeks.

It made an excellent story. It was considerably less excellent now that the man who had delivered it was standing twelve feet away in an evening coat that fit as though it had been stitched to his body.

He was taller than she remembered. Or the fireplace was shorter.

Some trick of scale made his presence fill the space around him in a way that left less room for everyone else.

His dark hair was cut closer than it had been in Hertfordshire, and the candlelight found planes in his face that she did not recall — the sharp line of his jaw, the shadows beneath his cheekbones.

He looked older. He looked like a man who had not been sleeping well and had no intention of discussing it.

His eyes found hers across the room and something happened in her chest — a small, involuntary contraction, like a fist closing around nothing. She named it irritation and moved on.

"Miss Bennet." He inclined his head.

"Mr. Darcy." She curtsied and sat down as far from the fireplace as the room's geography would allow.

It was not far enough. The drawing room at Rosings was vast, but Darcy's presence had a way of compressing distance.

She could feel him watching her the way you feel a change in temperature — not through any single sense, but through all of them at once, a general shift in the atmosphere that made the fine hairs on her arms stand up.

Lady Catherine held court from her customary chair, a piece of furniture so large and ornate it might have been a lesser throne.

Her daughter Anne sat beside her, small and pale and silent, her companion Mrs. Jenkinson hovering like a nervous moth.

Colonel Fitzwilliam, Darcy's cousin, made up the rest of the party — a sandy-haired man with an easy smile who possessed the social grace his cousin so conspicuously lacked.

"Miss Bennet," Lady Catherine said, and the name in her mouth was an inspection. "I trust you are finding your stay at the parsonage tolerable?"

Tolerable. The word landed with private irony. "Most agreeable, your ladyship," Elizabeth replied. "Mrs. Collins is an excellent hostess, and the countryside is very fine."

"The countryside is mine," Lady Catherine corrected, which was, Elizabeth supposed, much the same thing.

"I own everything you see from the parsonage windows and a great deal you cannot see.

It is important to understand what belongs to whom in this world, Miss Bennet.

The confusion of such matters is the root of a great many evils. "

"I shall endeavour to keep the boundaries clear in my mind, your ladyship."

Darcy's mouth moved. It was not quite a smile — more the faintest disturbance of an otherwise controlled surface, like a stone dropped into still water.

He was watching her, and for a fraction of a second his expression was something other than cold assessment.

She could not identify it. It was gone before she could try.

Dinner was served. Elizabeth found herself placed between Colonel Fitzwilliam and Mr. Collins, which was either a kindness or a punishment, depending on which direction she turned her head.

She turned it toward the Colonel, who proved to be intelligent, well-read, and possessed of a dry wit that reminded her painfully of her father.

They spoke of books, of travel, of the regiment's recent posting.

She laughed at his observations and felt, for a few minutes, almost like herself.

Darcy, seated at the far end beside his aunt, said almost nothing.

He cut his meat with the exactness of a man who found disorder intolerable, even on a plate, drank sparingly, and watched.

She could feel his gaze even when she wasn't looking — a weight at the periphery of her vision, steady and patient, the way a hawk watches from a high branch.

Once, when she glanced up, their eyes met directly, and the impact of it — the sheer focused intensity of his attention — made her set down her fork.

"You seem to have captured my cousin's interest," Colonel Fitzwilliam murmured, following her gaze. His tone was amused but not unkind.

"I cannot imagine why," Elizabeth replied, picking up her fork again. "I have nothing to recommend me to a man of Mr. Darcy's consequence."

"On the contrary. I suspect it is precisely your lack of deference that intrigues him. Darcy is accustomed to being agreed with. It bores him tremendously."

"Then he must find the whole of England a great yawn."

Fitzwilliam laughed. At the other end of the table, Darcy's head turned at the sound, and Elizabeth saw something flicker across his face — not jealousy, exactly, but a sharpening of attention, as though his cousin's laughter in her company constituted a development that required assessment.

After dinner, when the ladies withdrew, Charlotte was speaking quietly to Colonel Fitzwilliam about the parish gardens — he had followed the gentlemen in sooner than custom required — and Elizabeth noticed, with the idle attention one gives to a detail that does not yet have significance, that the Colonel was listening.

Not with the polite half-attention most men gave to women's conversation, but with his body turned toward Charlotte and his head inclined, as though what she was saying about roses and drainage actually interested him.

Charlotte, who had spent her marriage being spoken at rather than spoken to, looked briefly startled by the novelty of being heard.

Lady Catherine demanded music. Elizabeth obliged with a piece she knew well enough to play without concentration, which freed her mind for the more pressing work of ignoring Mr. Darcy.

He had stationed himself near the instrument, leaning against the wall with his arms folded, watching her hands on the keys.

"You do not play perfectly," he observed.

"No," Elizabeth agreed without looking up. "But then, I did not practise as a child, which I believe is the explanation most commonly offered for feminine failure."

"I was going to say that your imperfections are more interesting than most women's accomplishments."

She looked up then. He was close enough that she could see the candlelight in his eyes — amber flecks in dark brown, warm against the hard planes of his face. His expression was intent, almost severe, as though he were trying to solve a problem she presented and could not quite find the equation.

"That is either a compliment or an insult, Mr. Darcy, and I cannot determine which."

"Perhaps it is neither. Perhaps it is merely an observation."

"You observe a great deal."

"I do."

The single syllable sat between them like a door left ajar. Elizabeth returned her attention to the pianoforte, but her fingers stumbled on a passage she had played a hundred times, and she knew he noticed.

Collins appeared at her elbow when the music ended, radiating self-importance. "Cousin Elizabeth, Lady Catherine has expressed her satisfaction with your performance. What a singular honor! I must say, her ladyship's condescension in permitting you to play at all—"

"Thank you, Mr. Collins."

She rose from the instrument and found Darcy still watching her. He had not moved. He stood against the wall in that posture of studied ease that she was beginning to suspect was anything but easy, and his eyes tracked her across the room with an attention so focused it was almost physical.

The evening ended as such evenings do — with Lady Catherine's pronouncement that they had been sufficiently entertained, with Collins's effusions in the carriage home, with Charlotte's quiet hand finding Elizabeth's in the dark of the cab and squeezing once. I know. I'm sorry.

Elizabeth lay in her narrow bed at the parsonage and stared at the ceiling and listened to the old house settle around her.

Through the wall, she could hear Collins's snoring — a wet, rhythmic sound that she found obscurely depressing.

Charlotte slept beside him, or did not sleep, or lay still and did her arithmetic in the dark.

She pressed her fingertips to her collarbone where Darcy's gaze had seemed to rest during dinner.

The skin was warm. That meant nothing. Skin was always warm.

She turned onto her side and closed her eyes and thought about the way his mouth had moved — that almost-smile, there and gone — and then she thought about nothing, deliberately and at length, until sleep came.