Chapter 6 #2
“Because every tortoise needs children to draw pictures, give him strawberries, and build forts and castles.” Bingley’s smile was as natural as a babbling brook.
And then, watching them, the way he spoke to my little cousins and Jane’s expression of dreamy warmth, it struck me. If Jane married Bingley—
The thought arrived without permission, enormous and terrifying and radiant with possibility.
If Jane married Bingley, then Bingley would be my brother.
Darcy was Bingley’s closest friend, and I would see him at dinners and holidays and christenings and long summer visits at Netherfield or Pemberley, and he would be there, in my life, close enough to argue with and laugh at and stand beside at galleries.
I might have a chance to know him better.
But the companion thought came too, cold and corrective: Darcy might be present in my life the way a brother’s friend is present—a man who would bow at family gatherings and ask after my health and remember how I took my tea but never once look at me the way Bingley looked at Jane, as the most beautiful woman in any room.
I turned away from the happy group kneeling on my aunt’s carpet talking about tortoise digestion, sleeping habits, and whether he could be trained to jump, knowing that I would have to sit across a dinner table from Fitzwilliam Darcy for years and years and watch him be courteous and proper and friendly and never more, never closer, never mine—
After all, who wanted a second daughter who was neither pretty nor gracious, whose tongue was sharper than her features and whose eyes missed nothing?
No matter the dress, I would never be admired beside Jane.
In that moment, I decided it would have been far more convenient if the youngest had been the family beauty than for the eldest to claim that distinction.
I needed to breathe. I needed to govern myself. I needed to stop staring at the line of his jaw when he tilted his head to answer Rose’s question about whether Sir Bertram dreamed.
“All creatures dream,” he told her. “I expect he dreams of a field full of dandelions and not a single gardener in sight.”
Rose considered this. “Does he dream of us?”
“I am certain of it.”
“Then he will never be lonely.” She patted Bertram’s shell with the absolute confidence of a child who has decided the world is kind, and Darcy looked up from the carpet and caught my eye.
I don’t know if anything passed between us, but I felt the jolt inside of me, and when I looked over at Jane, I knew she had seen it too.
“Mrs. Gardiner,” my sister said. “The day is quite warm for March, isn’t it? Perhaps the children would enjoy a walk to Gunter’s. Lizzy, might you join us?”
“Certainly.” I seized the suggestion as one seizes a rope thrown to a drowning woman, because the drawing room had grown too warm and too full of suggestions I wasn’t prepared to consider.
“Gunter’s!” Bingley sprang to his feet. “What a capital idea. Miss Bennet, I am told they do a very creditable strawberry ice. Darcy, you must come. You have that look about you, the one that says you are about to invent an excuse to leave, and I absolutely forbid it.”
Darcy rose to his feet with Sir Bertram’s cape still dangling from his fingers. “I was not inventing an excuse.”
“Then we shall make an expedition out of it,” Bingley said, and of course, the children jumped up and down, scurrying for mittens and pelisses.
Sir Bertram was carried back to his garden with a supply of strawberry tops by way of apology for the snub.
And I was tying the ribbon of Rose’s bonnet when I felt, rather than saw, Darcy cross the room to stand at my side.
“Miss Elizabeth, pray tell, what flavor do you prefer?” asking me as if we were spies for the Foreign Office.
I usually had opinions. In fact, I had too many opinions about ices, but my tongue tied up, so I simply said, “You may choose, or guess.”
At that, the children chimed in, arguing and begging me to concur with their opinions, which ranged from pistachio, my favorite, to lemon and chocolate, with Thomas insisting on strawberry.
“Strawberry it is.” I picked up the two-year-old and planted a kiss on his cheek.
“I want a strawberry ice for Sir Bertram!” Rose announced, and was firmly informed by Samuel that tortoises do not eat ices, which prompted a serious debate about the dietary preferences of knights that carried us through the hallway and out the front door.
The walk to Gunter’s was short, but our party rearranged itself with the inevitability of spilled tea.
Bingley and Jane led the way, Rose skipping between them.
Mrs. Gardiner trailed with Thomas perched on her hip, Alice sketching as she walked—a feat that defied logic but not Alice.
Samuel darted everywhere, narrating Sir Bertram’s imaginary cavalry charge through Cheapside.
And Darcy and I walked together, because the party had arranged itself that way, and because neither of us moved to alter the arrangement.
“You did not need to come today,” I said softly.
“No.”
“Then why did you?”
“Because Bingley’s cravat would not have survived the journey without supervision.” He cast me a glance, the corner of his mouth twitching. “And because I wished to see if Sir Bertram had mastered the jump.”
“Sir Bertram’s jumping remains strictly theoretical.”
“Then I shall have to return for further inspection.”
I glanced at him, and it was a mistake, because the March light caught his profile in a way that was thoroughly inconsiderate of my composure.
“Mr. Darcy. If you continue inventing pretexts to visit Gracechurch Street, you will exhaust the supply. You have already deployed the tortoise, the basking stone, the strawberries, and the merino wool. What remains? A silk bonnet for Sir Bertram? A private tutor for Rose?”
“Rose does not require tutors. She issues her own edicts.”
“Then why do you keep coming?”
The question escaped before my judgment could intervene. It hung in the cool air between us, naked and dangerous. We slowed our pace, letting the others drift ahead until the distance felt cavernous.
“Miss Elizabeth.” His voice dropped, stripped of the usual social varnish. “I did not come today for Charles. I came because…” The familiar tightness took his jaw—that devastating, silent tension I had come to recognize as his struggle for control. I stood breathless, waiting.
“I should like,” he said, his gaze holding mine, “to ask your uncle whether I might be permitted to call upon you, specifically.”
My heart seemed to stutter to a halt, then resumed at a reckless pace. The heat in my blood was instantaneous.
“You wish to call on Elizabeth Bennet, specifically?” I managed, clutching at my wit to steady the dizziness. “Not on the household? Not to confer with the children?”
He didn’t smile, but his eyes softened, the expression more intimate than any touch. “I find I have quite exhausted my interest in the tortoise.”
His look unraveled me. The warmth in his face was startling, as if I were suddenly the sun in his sky. It was not Bingley’s open adoration, but something steadier, more serious, and far more dangerous than any pronouncement.
“You may ask my uncle,” I said, my voice not sounding like mine, and I did not care. “Though if he inquires as to my approval, do not be surprised if I reserve the right to be entirely difficult.”
“I would expect nothing less of you.”
“And I reserve the right to change my mind.”
“You will do no such thing.”
“And how, pray, can you be so certain?”
“Because,” he said, his gaze dropping briefly to the line of my bodice, “you wore the green dress to Burlington House and the white dress with the green sash today, and both were chosen with a care that you would deny under oath. A woman who chooses her dress that carefully for a man she dislikes is a woman who has already made up her mind.”
It took me a moment to find a retort. “That, Mr. Darcy, was an insufferably perceptive observation.”
“I have been studying you, Miss Elizabeth, and I don’t find that you dislike me as intensely as you did.”
“I believe a man who visits his tortoise is hard to dislike.” I took his arm to avoid spilling more of my surprising sentiments. If he kept me speaking, I would be liable to declare love, and I could not let down my guard that easily.
Once Jane and I returned to Longbourn, he would continue the Season in London, attend balls we were not invited to and promenade with ladies approved by the ton. I tried not to dwell on the gulf that existed between one who merely visited Cheapside with one who stayed.
The pastry shop was warm and crowded, smelling of burnt sugar and marzipan. Bingley had secured a large table by the window and was already engaged in the serious business of ordering for five adults and four children.
“Rose, strawberry. Samuel, chocolate. Alice, lemon. Thomas—what does Thomas eat? Everything? Excellent. Thomas gets one of each. Mrs. Gardiner, lemon cake? Jane, anything you wish. Darcy, do not even think of refusing. Miss Elizabeth—”
“Strawberry,” I said, without thinking, and then felt the blush rise again because Darcy was looking at me, and the look contained a memory of strawberries brought to Gracechurch Street in a basket.
We sat together around the crowded table, the children between us like cheerful barricades.
Thomas wore his ice more than he ate it.
Rose fed hers to an imaginary Sir Bertram who lived, she explained, inside her napkin.
Samuel debated the military applications of frozen desserts while Alice drew the scene, capturing the angle of Bingley’s gesticulating arm and the precise curve of Jane’s smile.
Bingley, to his infinite credit, did not sit still.
He mopped Thomas’s chin, negotiated a truce between Samuel and Rose over a contested spoon, and managed to convince Alice that her drawing would benefit from the addition of a lemon tart in the foreground.
He did all of this while maintaining a conversation with Jane that appeared to consist mostly of their looking at each other and forgetting to speak.
I watched him and thought: this is the man my sister deserves.
A man who is not afraid to be ridiculous.
A man whose dignity can survive a strawberry stain on his cravat and a four-year-old’s commentary on his hairstyle.
“I am happy,” I admitted to my sister. “That Mr. Bingley is as cheerful as when we first met him at the assembly.”
“Then you may credit it entirely to Darcy,” Bingley declared, his exuberance undimmed. “It has been a grey four months, but the sun is shining again.”
“I should have acted sooner,” Darcy said.
“You acted the moment you saw it,” Bingley said. “No man could ask more.”
“And fewer still would have acted at all,” I added, and found, to my own discomfiture, that I meant it.
Darcy turned his spoon in his untouched ice. “I wonder, though, whether acting correctly can ever undo the cost of having been wrong.”
“Darcy, my good man.” Bingley clapped his shoulder. “Let us not be so morose. You made no mistakes that I am aware of. You are the best sort of friend.”
I looked between the two men. Darcy carried an unease that I could not quite comprehend. What did he believe was his error? That he had not blunted Miss Bingley’s attacks on my sister earlier?
“My father says,” I offered, “that a man’s character is not determined by his worst mistake but by what he does when he recognizes it.”
“Your father is a wise man.” Darcy’s gaze was fixed upon mine, uncomfortably earnest for a place of cakes and sugar.
“He would deny it. He finds wisdom a tiresome quality in others and prefers to call it common sense.”
“I would agree with him on that point,” Darcy said. “Common sense is sometimes not as common as we would like.”
“I cannot argue with you there, Mr. Darcy.” I licked a dollop of ice from my spoon, watching as his eyes dropped to my lips.
He drew a sharp breath; his mouth quirked—the precursor to that almost-smile, the look of a man who had momentarily forgotten to be careful.
“I should like to meet him someday,” he said, and then added, “again. At Longbourn.”
And there it was, the someday read like a declaration, a future I was not quite ready for and the present which was already more than I could hold.
“Perhaps you shall,” I said, and watched the ice melt from his spoon.
I pressed my spoon into the strawberry ice, watched it surrender, pink and cold, and felt his gaze warming my cheek. I knew, as surely as I knew my own name, that his scowl had melted into something I could not yet call tenderness, but could not call anything else.
Jane caught my eye across the table. She was glowing, and her expression held no surprise, only a gentle, knowing gladness.
I looked at my sister, and at Bingley, and at the children smeared with ice and happiness, and at Mrs. Gardiner sipping her tea and at Darcy beside me with his almost-smile and the untouched strawberry ice melting slowly in his dish.
And I thought: Let it all melt. The walls, the fortress of wit and suspicion I have built since the Meryton assembly—let them dissolve like strawberry ice in sunlight, and let what remains be enough.