Chapter 2 #2
“Strawberry tops are his particular favorite, but he is fond of dandelion leaves and clover. He does not care for lettuce, although I have been offering it to him for five years, which I suspect says more about my stubbornness than his appetite.”
Rose leaned in until she was nose to shell with Bertram. “Hello, Mr. Tortoise. My name is Rose, I am four, and I am going to be your best friend.”
Bertram, with the timing of a creature who has lived long enough to understand an audience, extended his ancient head from his shell and regarded Rose with one dark, steady eye.
Rose shrieked with joy. Thomas, who was two and understood only that something magnificent was happening, sat down with a thump and reached for the tortoise with both hands.
“Gently.” Darcy caught the boy’s small fists with a gentleness that surprised me. He guided Thomas’s hands to the shell. “There. Can you feel how smooth?”
Thomas let out a deep sigh of satisfaction and patted Bertram with the generous enthusiasm of the very young.
I stood by the sofa, watching, and felt the uncomfortable pinch of evidence poking holes in my convictions.
The man kneeling on the carpet did not match the man at the window.
The gentleman showing a toddler how to pet a tortoise hardly resembled the figure who had glared at my sister as she was turned away from a door.
Both could not be real; one had to be an act, and I meant to find out which.
“Mr. Darcy,” I said, seating myself in the chair opposite with my cup poised and my composure solid, “you are very generous to part with a creature your father treasured. One might wonder what prompted such magnanimity.”
He rose from the carpet, brushing his knees. “Bertram required a home with children and a garden. Your uncle’s notice described such a household.”
“And you happened upon this notice… at my uncle’s warehouse?”
“I did.”
“How very fortunate that your interest in fine wool led you to Gracechurch Street. It is not, I think, a quarter where gentlemen of your acquaintance generally conduct their business.”
His jaw tightened, very slightly. “I found Mr. Gardiner’s firm to be excellent in every particular.”
“Did you? How refreshing. Not every gentleman of your rank would trouble himself to discover the merits of Cheapside.”
“Elizabeth.” Mrs. Gardiner’s voice carried the precise blend of warmth and warning that only an aunt of long standing can achieve. “More tea, Mr. Darcy?”
“Thank you, Mrs. Gardiner.”
My aunt poured, handed Darcy his cup, and settled into her chair, turning the conversation to Derbyshire.
“My husband tells me you are from Pemberley, Mr. Darcy. I grew up near Lambton, and I confess I have the warmest memories of the country. Do you spend much of the year there?”
“As much as I am able, ma’am. Pemberley is my principal home.”
“I remember the grounds as being very fine. The stream, and the hill, and the most extraordinary old oak on the south lawn. Is it still standing?”
“It is, though it has lost a branch in last winter’s storm. My housekeeper was quite distraught.”
“I am not surprised. That oak was ancient when I was a girl.” She smiled. “How strange that your father’s tortoise should find his way to the household of a woman who grew up five miles from where he was raised. Bertram will think he has come home.”
Darcy’s expression loosened at the word home, and he glanced toward the garden where the children’s voices carried through the glass: Rose issuing instructions, Samuel proposing expeditions, Alice counseling patience in the tone of a child who believes she is the sensible one.
“Miss Bennet,” he said, turning to Jane with careful courtesy. “I hope your stay in London has been pleasant.”
“It has, sir. My aunt and uncle have been very kind.”
“I am glad to hear it. London can be… unforgiving in winter.”
Jane met his eyes, and she held his gaze with a grace I could not have managed, a composure that did not flinch or accuse or even, to the untrained eye, reproach.
“It can be,” she said. “But one finds kindness in unexpected quarters.”
Darcy looked away first. I noticed his hand tightening on his teacup, how he avoided my eyes when he spoke to Jane, how his voice softened at the mention of his father, how gently he had caught Thomas’s hands. I would have preferred not to notice any of it.
He is performing, I told myself. He is being charming because it suits him. Mrs. Gardiner is welcoming, the children are delightful, and it costs him nothing to be kind for an hour in a drawing-room he will leave and never think of again.
He stayed a quarter-hour longer, answering Mrs. Gardiner’s questions about Bertram’s diet and temperament.
He described how the tortoise liked to bask on a warm stone in the afternoon, how he would dig himself a shallow bed in soft earth if permitted, how he had once escaped the Pemberley kitchen garden and been discovered by the gamekeeper in a flowerbed half a mile distant.
“He has a will of his own,” Mrs. Gardiner said, laughing.
“He has outlived three kings, ma’am. I believe he has earned one.”
When he rose to leave, he bowed to Mrs. Gardiner with a warmth I could not fault, to Jane with something quieter and harder to name, and to me with the careful formality of a man who knows he is under judgment and has chosen, for now, to endure it rather than contest it.
“I hope Bertram will be happy here,” he said from the doorway.
“He will be treasured,” Mrs. Gardiner replied. “And Mr. Darcy, you must come whenever you wish to see him. Our door is open.”
Our door is open. I watched his face as the words reached him, and I watched him hear them as I heard them: as the precise opposite of everything that had been done to my sister yesterday at another door, in another drawing-room, by people who did not deserve to breathe the same air.
He left, and the house settled into the hush that follows the departure of an unexpected squall.
I sat in my chair with my cold tea and told myself that nothing had changed, that the man who knelt on a carpet to show a child how to hold a tortoise was the same man who stood behind a curtain watching my sister walk away in heartbreak.
I did not intend to soften simply because a proud man happened to look less proud with a tortoise in his hands and a two-year-old clinging to his boot.
I did not intend to soften one bit.
“Well,” said Mrs. Gardiner, folding her hands in her lap with an expression that promised a thorough accounting. “Would either of you care to tell me who Mr. Darcy actually is?”
From the garden, clear and unconcerned with any complication the adult world might furnish, Rose’s voice rang through the open window: “Sir Bertram, I am going to teach you everything.”