Five
The first morning, he went to the nursery to say good morning to Anne.
He had done this every day since she was old enough to expect it. It was routine. Sacred, even—one of those small rituals that held the architecture of fatherhood in place. There was nothing unusual about it. There was no reason for his pulse to be stuttering on the landing.
He opened the door to find Elizabeth already there.
She was seated at the table with Anne, pouring milk into a cup with a steady hand.
She had been awake and working for at least an hour.
Her sleeves were pushed to her elbows. The inside of her wrist caught the morning light, a pale curve of skin, the faint trace of a vein beneath it, and Darcy’s thoughts, which had been functioning adequately until that moment, ceased.
“Good morning, Papa!” Anne waved a piece of bread at him. Muffin was propped against the milk jug, supervising breakfast.
“Good morning, sweetheart.” He kissed the top of her head. He nodded to Elizabeth. “Miss Bennet.”
“Mr Darcy.” She inclined her head. Polite, professional, giving nothing.
He lingered. He asked about the day’s plans: what Anne would be studying, whether the chalk had been replenished, and if the nursery was warm enough. Perfectly reasonable questions. The questions of a devoted father taking an interest in his daughter’s education. No one could fault them.
No one except the man asking them, who was aware that his attention had fixed on the strand of hair Elizabeth tucked behind her ear as she answered. He had retained not a single word she said about Anne’s reading progress and absolutely everything about how her fingers had moved against her temple.
He excused himself and went to his study. He sat at his desk and opened his correspondence, his hand trembling slightly. He read the first line of a letter from his steward four times without absorbing a syllable.
By Tuesday, the pattern had established itself with the inevitability of the tide.
He found reasons. He was appalled at the transparency of them, and he found them anyway.
Anne had requested a book. He could have sent it with a footman, but he delivered it personally.
He stood in the schoolroom doorway and watched while Elizabeth read the inscription aloud to the child, her voice quiet and clear.
And then there was this window latch in the nursery corridor that he suspected was loose.
It was not loose, it had never been loose, and the ten minutes he spent examining it while Elizabeth passed with Anne on their way to the garden were the most dishonest ten minutes of his week.
The corridors were the worst. Darcy House was not small, and yet he kept finding her in every passage.
Or rather, and he was not fool enough to deny it, he kept choosing the passages she used, at the hours she used them.
The east corridor was the most direct route from his chambers to the schoolroom.
It was not the most direct route to his study, which was west, but he had developed a sudden conviction that the east corridor had superior ventilation.
She smelled of lavender. Cheap soap, a bar she had brought from Somers Town, he supposed. The scent was faint, only noticeable when she passed within arm’s reach, and it stopped him mid-stride every single time, a hand closing around his chest and squeezing.
Then there were the dinners.
Three people at a table built for fourteen.
Georgiana at his right, Elizabeth at his left, and a mahogany desert between them that no amount of white soup could fill.
Georgiana carried the conversation cheerfully, determined to civilise every awkward silence her brother produced.
She asked Elizabeth about books, about walking, about Anne’s progress.
Elizabeth answered carefully at first, measured, accustomed to giving nothing away.
But Georgiana was patient, warm, and genuinely interested, and slowly Elizabeth’s replies had grown longer.
Eventually, she ventured a question of her own, about the wedding preparations, about Lord Lofton, delivered with a hesitance that suggested she was not entirely certain she was permitted to ask.
Georgiana seized upon it with visible delight and talked about silk organza for twenty minutes.
Elizabeth listened with an expression that hovered between genuine interest and quiet amusement.
Darcy watched the amusement surface—the slight lift at the corner of her mouth, the brightness returning to her eyes—and felt it in his sternum like a bruise.
On Friday, she made Georgiana laugh.
It was a small remark about Anne’s latest campaign to understand why the sky was blue, delivered in a tone so dry it could have cured leather.
Georgiana’s laughter rang across the dining room, and Elizabeth’s mouth curved in an involuntary, unguarded smile, the first one that reached her eyes since she had arrived.
Darcy reached for his wine and drank because the alternative was to say her name aloud at the dinner table in a voice that would have betrayed everything.
He knew her schedule. He had not asked for it.
He had simply absorbed it the way a man absorbed the tides—by paying relentless attention to the thing around which his days had begun to orbit.
She rose early. She breakfasted with Anne at eight.
Lessons ran until eleven. The garden, weather permitting, occupied the hour before luncheon.
Afternoons were quieter—reading, drawing, the occasional battle over arithmetic.
She retired to her room after Anne’s supper and did not reappear until dinner time.
He knew all of this, and it shamed him, because this was not concern. This was not fatherly interest. He was a man mapping a woman’s movements through his own house, and the word for it was not devotion.
He caught his reflection in the hallway glass one morning, on his way to the nursery with a picture book he could easily have sent with Alice.
His ears were flushed. His eyes were too bright.
He recognised the expression. It was the same one that had stared back at him from a tailor’s window on Grafton Street. He had not learned a single thing.
He heard her singing on a Sunday afternoon.
He had not planned to be there. That was the lie he told himself as he shamelessly eavesdropped. It was a poor lie, thin as tissue, and he knew it. The truth was that he had heard Anne ask for a song as he passed the schoolroom, and had stopped, unable to make his feet carry him onward.
The schoolroom door was ajar. He stood to the side of the frame, where the angle hid him from view but gave him a narrow slice of the room. He could see the edge of the table, Anne’s blonde head bent over a drawing, and Elizabeth in the chair beside her, hands folded in her lap.
“Please, Miss Bennet? Just one?”
Anne had asked twice already. She was not whining—Anne did not whine, she negotiated. There was an earnestness in the repeated request that suggested she had identified a weakness in her governess’s defences and was pressing the advantage.
Elizabeth did not answer immediately. Her fingers shifted in her lap, a small, restless movement, the only sign that the question had landed somewhere deeper than a simple yes or no. She was still for a moment. Then a shadow crossed her face—not pain exactly, though he could not name it.
“I am rather out of practice, Miss Darcy. You must promise to be kind.”
“I am always kind,” Anne said, which was not strictly true but was delivered with such conviction that arguing the point would have been futile.
Elizabeth drew a breath and sang.
It was a nursery rhyme. Simple, old, a melody that existed in every household where children slept. A tune carried in kitchens and hummed over cradles, nothing grand, nothing that required training or skill. Just a song.
Her voice was rougher than he remembered.
The years had stripped the polish from it.
The easy, confident instrument that had filled the drawing room at Rosings, her chin lifted, daring him to find fault, was gone.
What remained was thinner, less certain, catching on the higher notes the way a foot catches on uneven ground.
She had not used it in a long time and the neglect showed.
But beneath the rust, the beauty was there.
Not the trained, presentable beauty of an accomplished young lady performing for company.
It was raw and lived in the grain of the voice rather than the technique.
She sang the way she did everything now—carefully, without flourish, stripped to the essential.
The absence of ornament made the melody more honest than any concert piece he had ever heard.
Anne was transfixed. She had stopped drawing, her chalk hovering above the paper, forgotten. Her face wore the expression children held for things that were genuinely marvellous, such as a candle flame, a butterfly, the precise moment snow began to fall.
Elizabeth reached the second verse. Her voice steadied, finding its footing, warmed, grew surer.
A fragment of the old confidence surfaced, like colour returning to a faded painting.
She was remembering. Not just the words, not just the notes, but the act itself, the pleasure of it, the freedom of giving sound to air and letting it fill a room. Her eyes were bright.
Darcy’s hand tightened on the doorframe.
He had fallen in love with her at Meryton.
He had not known it then, had not had the vocabulary for it.
He had called it admiration, fascination, the grudging respect of a man confronted with a woman who refused to perform for his approval.
At Rosings, she had played imperfectly and without apology, and she was perfect.