CHAPTER 8 #3
Miss Bennet did not appear at all crushed by the objection.
She knew he could stop a frightened horse without making a spectacle of himself, which she counted as a character reference.
When he pointed out that it was not a professional qualification, she only replied that character references were seldom so recent.
His coat was good but not indulgent; his boots were well kept; his answers were short where they should be; disorder plainly offended him; and he had, she concluded, the face of a man who read everything before signing it.
Mrs. Doddridge, without looking up, said, “Yes, miss.”
Darcy turned his head very slightly toward her. He had begun to understand that Mrs. Doddridge’s few remarks were not interruptions, but certificates.
From the cushion, Lord Pomington gave one sharp little yip, whether in agreement or objection no one seemed inclined to determine.
Miss Bennet held out her hand, not quite to him and not quite for the dog. “Your card, Mr. Darcy. Not your confidence, not your character entire, and not your immortal allegiance. Only your card.”
“You ask for it very confidently.”
“I ask for most things confidently. It saves time.”
“And if I decline?”
“Then I shall think you either very cautious or very proud.”
“Both are possible.”
“Yes,” she said, with a glimmer of mischief. “But only one would serve me.”
He reached for his card case.
The movement felt unaccountably consequential.
Miss Bennet watched his hand as he drew the card out. He noticed that she watched it. He noticed, too, the small pause before she took the card from him, and the fact that her fingers avoided his this time with a care almost too careful to be accidental.
That unsettled him more than contact would have done.
She read the card.
“Fitzwilliam Darcy,” she said again, more quietly.
He wished she had not.
His name had rarely sounded like a risk to him before.
“And your office?”
“The address is there.”
“Yes.” She looked down again. “I see it.”
She held the card as if it were a simple fact. Nothing in her face said that she had arranged another reason to see him. Everything in her face said it.
The dog whined faintly from his cushion, perhaps bored by legal beginnings.
“Yes,” she told him. “You may consider him.”
Darcy rose.
He did it rather suddenly. Not rudely, he hoped; but with the instinct of a man who has discovered that remaining seated is no longer neutral.
The room had grown too warm. Or rather, he had.
His coat had been restored, his glove sacrificed, his hand uninjured, and his card surrendered.
There was no further respectable reason to stay.
Miss Bennet rose too.
She asked if he was leaving, and he said he ought.
She considered that, and for the first time since the street some of her brightness faltered into something less easily named. “Yes, of course. You must wish to be home.”
If he was honest with himself, he did not.
He had wished it an hour ago.
Now he was not certain what he wished, and the uncertainty was intolerable.
Mrs. Doddridge stood. “Your coat is quite recovered, sir.”
“I am glad to hear it.”
“It was only mud.”
“Then I am indebted to your skill.”
“No, sir,” said Mrs. Doddridge. “To the brush.”
Miss Bennet laughed.
Darcy found he would remember that sound.
At the door of the drawing room, she turned to him with sudden seriousness.
“I am very much obliged to you, Mr. Darcy.”
“You have said so already.”
“Not nearly enough.”
“I assure you, Lord Pomington’s survival is thanks enough.”
“Pom-Pom is not thankful.”
“So I observed.”
“But I am.”
She held out her hand.
He took it because refusal would have been foolish, rude, and impossible.
Her hand was warm. His knowledge of it was immediate, unwelcome, and complete.
She did not hold him long, but for those few seconds her gratitude lost the bustle that had protected them both.
There was no dog, no cloth, no tea, no business, no Mrs. Doddridge’s basket between them.
Only the fire behind her, the grey street waiting beyond the door, and Miss Elizabeth Bennet looking at him as if he had come into her house by accident and might perhaps be made to return by design.
He bowed over her hand.
That, too, was a mistake. It brought him nearer.
Not improperly. Not by any standard another person could condemn.
But near enough to see the small loosened curl at her temple, the warmth still in her cheek, the determined curve of her mouth, the green of her eyes made deeper by firelight.
Near enough that leaving felt, for one unsteady instant, like tearing his attention away from something it had already begun to claim.
He released her hand.
“I wish you a good evening, Miss Bennet.”
“And I you, Mr. Darcy.”
From the cushion, Lord Pomington sneezed once.
“He is softening,” she said.
“I am honoured.”
“You should be. He has made men labour harder for less.”
Darcy’s composure, such as remained of it, survived by the narrowest margin.
The footman opened the door. The hall received him again with its polished stillness. His coat sat correctly on his shoulders; his hat was returned; the ruined glove had been wrapped and presented as if even damaged things in this house deserved proper exit. In another minute he was outside.
The grey street was waiting.
London had not altered. The stones were wet. The air was chill. The sky hung low, as indifferent to him as it had been before. But everything seemed flatter now, not because the street had changed, but because he had come from firelight.
He stood for a moment before turning toward Gower Street.
He had, in the course of less than an hour, left work, checked a frightened horse, rescued a grotesque animal from its own instincts, been pulled into a strange house, stripped of coat and glove by servants, given tea, examined by a beautiful woman with old-household command, offered the possibility of employment, and deprived of more composure than any of it justified.
That was the sober account.
It was not the true one.
The true one was that Miss Elizabeth Bennet had looked at him with gratitude, warmth, curiosity, and something that might not have been invitation but had done unsettling work in its absence.
In any other life, perhaps, a man might have allowed the thought to proceed.
In any other life — one in which his name was clean, his house open to him, his sister not held beyond reach, his father not living under lies, his future not reduced to careful rooms and professional caution — he might have walked home from such an encounter with astonishment, desire, and the first reckless shaping of hope.
He might already have thought of calling again not as solicitor, but as man.
He might, had acquaintance grown by even the smallest proper degree, have imagined courtship.
Marriage. A woman like that at the head of a house not unlike the one she already commanded by nature.
He stopped that thought so sharply it was almost physical.
A gentleman in his position did not meet a wealthy young woman in a warm drawing room, take her card-bound interest for favour, and permit his imagination to run toward her like a fool.
He was not a fool.
He walked home.
His rooms were just as he had left them: orderly, narrow, respectable, and cold enough that the servant had not yet thought him returned.
The grate was laid but unlit. The books stood where they belonged.
The papers on his desk asked nothing but work.
His gloves were one short. His coat, though brushed, still held some faint mark at the cuff where the dog had struggled.
He stood in the middle of the room and, for the first time in months, found the silence too thin.
Later, when the fire was at last lit and his dinner taken without attention, he set Miss Bennet’s possible business from his mind three times. Each time it returned under another name: trustees, card, propriety, dog, hand, eyes, firelight.
He told himself she was young, impulsive, grateful, and lonely.
That was probably true.
It did not help.
Sleep, when it came, was no better governed than waking.
He woke before dawn with Miss Bennet’s voice still too near in memory, and lay for several minutes staring at the ceiling with the grim composure of a man who had spent part of the night betraying himself in dreams he would not name.
The dream itself he refused to examine. Its consequence remained: heat, shame, the sharper recollection of her hand, and the knowledge that his imagination had gone where his judgment had forbidden it.
By breakfast, he had restored himself to reason.
Mostly.
Miss Elizabeth Bennet was a possible client. Nothing more.
If she wrote, he would answer as a solicitor. If she did not, he would forget the green of her eyes, the warmth of her drawing room, and the way she had said his name as if testing whether it might become familiar.
At half past nine, he took out the second-best pair of gloves and went to his office.
He did not look at the cuff of the coat before leaving.
That, he thought, was discipline.