Chapter Eleven A Meeting in the Shade #2
"Miss Bennet," he murmured, his voice thick and rough with sleep. "Are you real?"
Mary felt her face flood with heat. "I am quite real, Mr Bingley. And I apologise for the assault. Charles has no manners."
Bingley let out a breathy chuckle, rubbing a hand over his face.
He looked at her again, his expression softening.
"I thought you were a dream. I was just dreaming of you.
" He blinked, as if realising what he had just said, but he did not retract it.
Instead, he offered a helpless shrug. "I suppose it is because my mind is so firm on the plan. The strategy."
Mary swallowed hard. She gripped her skirts to keep her hands from shaking. "I understand, Mr Bingley."
She turned, desperate to escape the intimacy of the copse, the heat of the day, and the devastating honesty in his sleep-hazed eyes. "I must return to the house."
"Wait."
The word was spoken softly, but it arrested her movement as surely as a physical tether. Mary paused, her back to him, her breath caught in her lungs.
She heard the rustle of leaves as he stood up. When she finally turned, Mr Bingley was on his feet. Charles-the-cat was now draped comfortably over his shoulders like an orange, purring stole. Mr Bingley did not seem to mind. He simply supported the animal's weight with one hand.
"Can you sit with me for a while?" he asked. The confident, eager-to-please gentleman of Meryton was gone. In his place was a man who looked genuinely, simply lonely. "I would like someone to talk to who is not Tepper. He is too judgmental."
Mary looked at him. She looked at the muddy boots, the rolled-up sleeves, the treasonous cat, and the pleading in his eyes. Every instinct of self-preservation screamed at her to flee. But the scholar in her, the woman who had spent her life observing from the shadows, could not deny him.
"Very well," she said, her voice admirably steady.
She walked over to the base of a neighbouring oak and sat down, carefully arranging her skirts so she was as far away from him as the shade of the grove would permit. It was a defensive distance, a physical manifestation of the walls she was desperately trying to keep intact.
Mr Bingley slid back down the trunk of his tree, the cat settling contentedly across his lap. For a long while, they said nothing. The silence was broken only by the rustle of the wind and the deep, vibrating purr emanating from the orange menace.
Slowly, the tension began to ebb. Mr Bingley started to talk.
He did not speak of strategies or fences or Lady Lucas.
He spoke of the clay, complaining good-naturedly about how it seemed to possess a personal vendetta against his boots.
Mary found herself responding, sharing a dry observation about her father's similar complaints years ago.
The conversation flowed easily, drifting from the ridiculous humidity to the merits of different types of timber.
It was light, it was uncomplicated, and it was the most dangerous thing Mary had ever experienced.
Sitting there, maintaining her distance but feeling her intellectual defences crumbling, she realised how entirely comfortable she was in his presence.
The dappled light shifted as the afternoon wore on. Mr Bingley had been quiet for a moment, his hand absently stroking the cat's fur. He looked up, his gaze catching hers across the grassy divide. The easy banter faded, replaced by a sudden, intense seriousness.
"Miss Bennet," he said, his voice dropping in volume. "May I ask you a question?"
"You may ask, Mr Bingley. I cannot guarantee the quality of the answer."
He smiled faintly, but his eyes remained intensely focused on her face. "What is the wildest, secretest dream you have?"
Mary stared at him. The air in the copse seemed to vanish. She had spent her entire life listing her thoughts, organising her mind into neat, accessible ledgers of morality and fact. But this? This was a key turning in a lock she had hidden even from herself.
She looked down at her hands. What was her wildest dream? A month ago, it would have been simple: to read every book in her father's study without interruption. But now?
Her mind supplied the answer with absolute clarity.
Her wildest, secretest dream was to stop being invisible.
Her dream was to be the centre of someone's universe, not just a fixture in the background.
Her dream was to have a man with unkempt red hair and muddy boots look at her as if she were the only woman in Hertfordshire.
She opened her mouth to speak. The truth hovered on her tongue. She looked up at him. He was waiting, completely still, offering her a space to be entirely known.
It was too much. The walls slammed back into place with the force of a falling portcullis.
"I dream of a well-organised library, Mr Bingley," she lied, her voice crisp, flat, and entirely without emotion. "Nothing more."
Before he could respond, before he could see the panic in her eyes, Mary scrambled to her feet. "I have stayed too long. Good day, sir."
She did not wait for his reply. She turned and fled the copse, her sensible boots carrying her back to the boundary of Longbourn as fast as propriety would allow. She did not look back, not even when Charles-the-cat meowed accusingly at her. He followed her, though.