3. The Silence Between Them
THE SILENCE BETWEEN THEM
DARCY'S POV
Darcy noticed the change in Miss Bennet before he could name it, the way you notice weather turning before the first drop falls.
She was quieter at dinner. She watched Georgiana with an attention that looked, from certain angles, like worry.
When he spoke to her directly she answered readily enough, wittily enough.
But there was a half-beat's hesitation first, as if she were translating the thought from some less comfortable language before letting him hear it.
He told himself it was nothing. Then he told himself it was everything, and set about cataloguing reasons, the way he did with any problem that refused to leave him alone.
Perhaps she found Pemberley oppressive, too large and too silent and too full of servants who watched a guest's every move and reported it, however kindly, to their master.
Perhaps she regretted coming at all, having let herself be talked into a summer that put her, daily, in his company, without so much as an understanding between them to justify it.
Perhaps—and this cost him the most to consider—she'd begun to suspect his invitation had never been purely about Georgiana.
Perhaps she resented being made part of a courtship she hadn't agreed to.
He turned each possibility over the way he might a difficult clause in a lease, and got nowhere useful.
It wasn't in his nature to leave a problem unsolved.
It maddened him that this one refused every ordinary method.
He couldn't write to her relations, or consult his solicitor, or apply the quiet pressure of position that smoothed nearly everything else in his life.
Elizabeth Bennet was not a difficulty to be smoothed.
She was a woman whose good opinion he'd once nearly lost through exactly the kind of high-handed assumption he could feel creeping back into his thoughts now.
Only the memory of that failure kept his mouth shut.
The simple course would have been to ask her plainly. Darcy saw that, and disliked how impossible it felt. Plain speech had rarely served him well with Elizabeth Bennet. Every time he reached for it, he seemed to find either too much pride or too much fear in his hand.
"Miss Bennet has been remarkably attentive to Miss Georgiana this week," Mrs. Reynolds said, refilling his coffee with the ease of forty years' service. "Does my heart good to see it. Miss Georgiana wants a sister's care, and gets precious little of it from gentlemen, however well-meaning."
"Has she seemed troubled to you? Miss Darcy, I mean."
"A little quiet, sir. Young ladies often are, in summer. Rarely means more than a good night's sleep will mend." She said it with the comfortable authority of a woman who'd watched several generations of young ladies be quiet in summer. Darcy tried to let it settle him. It didn't, entirely.
He found his chance on the terrace after dinner, the last light doing its slow work of turning gold to grey. She stood a little apart from the others, admiring the roses. He came to stand beside her because he could no longer bear to watch her across a room and invent explanations.
"You're very thoughtful this evening, Miss Bennet."
"Am I? I hadn't noticed." She smiled, but it didn't reach the place her real smile usually did. He'd learned, over the summer, exactly where that was, and its absence unsettled him more than he could account for.
"Does anything at Pemberley displease you?"
"No—no, not at all." She said it too quickly, and he heard in it the sound of a door shutting, not opening.
He wanted badly to press—to ask outright whether she found her position here uncomfortable, whether his attention had become a burden she was too well-mannered to refuse, whether some old injury of his own making had resurfaced.
He'd learned already, through a correction that still stung, that Elizabeth Bennet did not respond well to being managed, however gently.
She'd told him once, plainly, that trust which needed constant reassurance wasn't trust at all.
It was only surveillance in a courteous coat.
He remembered the evening she'd said it, plainly enough that it had stayed with him since.
She'd told him that a man who arranged comfort on someone else's behalf, without consulting her, was practicing a kind of care indistinguishable, from the receiving end, from control.
He'd taken the correction like a well-aimed touch in fencing, with respect for the skill of it, and a resolve never to leave that guard open again.
It was inconvenient, he thought now, that the same resolve should disarm him so thoroughly in the one moment he most wanted to act.
So he didn't press. He said something about the roses instead, and she answered in kind.
They stood together in a silence any observer would have called companionable.
He, standing inside it, knew it was nothing of the sort.
He watched her hands where they rested on the stone balustrade and thought of how easily, a year ago, he'd have mistaken this same stillness for indifference.
It was a small relief that he no longer made that particular mistake.
He'd replaced it, he thought grimly, with an entire new catalogue of mistakes he hadn't learned the names of yet.
Georgiana passed them on the terrace steps just then, murmured something about the evening air, and was gone before either of them could stop her. Darcy watched her go with a small crease between his brows. Beside him, Elizabeth went very still, in a way he noticed without understanding.
It was only later, alone in his study with account books he couldn't make himself read, that he named the feeling properly.
He didn't much like what he found. It wasn't only worry for her comfort.
It was closer to envy: envy of whatever thought, whatever weight, held Elizabeth Bennet's confidence so completely, when he, who wanted nothing more than to be trusted by her, held none of it at all.
He was jealous of a silence. He didn't yet know it belonged to his sister.