CHAPTER 13 #3
“That is no recommendation of the practice. Mrs. Marwood was convinced that hungry people are mostly useless.”
He paused.
Miss Bennet’s expression had softened, though she did not seem aware of it. The name of the aunt altered her face by the smallest degree, not into grief exactly, but into the memory of being governed and loved by the same hand.
“She did not confine the rule to solicitors,” Miss Bennet continued, “but I think they must be included. A person must first be fed. Then one may reasonably expect sense from him.”
“A broad household doctrine.”
“A necessary one. Law cannot be exempt from nature.”
“I have work waiting.”
“Then you must be made fit for it.”
Had she asked whether he wished to come, he might have found an answer. She did not ask. She observed a fact, pronounced a rule, and made hunger a matter of professional competence. It was, in its way, impossible to oppose.
He entered the carriage.
Portman Square received them with the same well-ordered indifference with which it might have received a bishop, a bill, or a rescued dog.
Mrs. Albright took the cheese as if its arrival had always formed part of the morning’s design; Mrs. Doddridge removed Lord Pomington’s fur cloak with the gravity due to royal disrobing; and Miss Bennet informed Darcy that luncheon would be brought directly.
He had begun to protest when she looked at him.
“Mr. Darcy.”
“Miss Bennet.”
“You were collected at eleven, employed through silver, detained by a colonel, and made to accompany me for cheese. You cannot possibly do good work until you have eaten.”
The statement was so unjustly comprehensive that he found no immediate reply.
“There,” she said. “You see? Already diminished.”
“There is a difference between hunger and disagreement.”
“Not always.”
The luncheon, when it appeared, had no pretension to elegance and was therefore much more dangerous.
There was cold chicken pie, bread still warm from the kitchen, the cheese Miss Bennet had chosen, pickled walnuts, mustard, and a sharp apple cut cleanly into quarters.
The pie was excellent; the bread better than it had any right to be; and the cheese, most inconveniently, remained precisely to his taste.
Darcy ate one mouthful, then another, and discovered, with some resentment, that Miss Bennet had been right in yet another particular.
He was hungry.
Miss Bennet watched this discovery with unconcealed satisfaction.
“You see?” she said. “You are already improved.”
“By pie?”
“By being fed. Pie is only the present instrument.”
“I had not understood my professional competence to depend so much upon luncheon.”
“Most competence depends upon luncheon. Men only conceal it under longer words.”
The tea came next, brewed with strength and conviction.
It was hot, dark, and entirely without apology.
Darcy, who had intended to return to chambers by one, found himself seated in Miss Bennet’s morning-room at half past two, fed, warmed, and treated as if his presence had been the natural conclusion of the day all along.
Lord Pomington, restored to a cushion near the fire, regarded him with the measured suspicion of a prince considering whether a tolerable foreigner might be permitted at court.
Miss Bennet took her cup and looked, for a moment, toward the empty chair near the hearth before returning her attention to him.
“Mrs. Marwood used to say that one should never ask judgment of an unfed person unless one wished to receive nonsense and deserve it.”
“She sounds,” Darcy said carefully, “like a woman of practical wisdom.”
“She was a woman of practical tyranny.”
“And wisdom?”
“Often. That was how the tyranny escaped correction.”
There was no display in the answer. No demand that he admire the dead.
Yet he felt, in the room around him — in the good fire, the excellent tea, the food produced without fuss, the dog dressed like an outraged prince, the servants who moved as though care were an established system rather than an emotion — something of the woman who had made Miss Bennet what she was.
A household doctrine, Miss Bennet had called it.
Feed a person first. Expect sense afterward.
He had been invited to houses before. He had been summoned, tolerated, excluded, and once or twice received as a duty owed to old acquaintance.
He had not, until Miss Bennet, been collected in a carriage, employed against bad silver, discovered by Richard, captured by cheese, and conveyed home under the authority of luncheon.
“There,” said Miss Bennet, when he accepted another slice of bread. “You will do much better now.”
“At Cotton Lane?”
“At everything.”
Darcy looked at her across the small table.
The winter light caught at the curve of her cheek, the edge of her glove where she had not yet removed it, and the loose curl near her temple that no bonnet had entirely subdued.
Her expression was bright with practical triumph, as if feeding him had been no more than the successful correction of an administrative defect.
It was becoming increasingly difficult to pretend that his life remained under his own management.