Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Elizabeth was forced to remain indoors the day after Mr. Darcy had called. The next, Elizabeth and Mrs. Morgan were invited for dinner. When Mr. Darcy met them in the hall, he was more animated than she had yet seen him.
“My cousin Colonel Fitzwilliam arrived several hours ago,” he told them. “Fortunately, he was in London and received my summons.”
“Should I be nervous?” Elizabeth asked Mrs. Morgan, as Mr. Darcy disappeared down the hall ahead of them.
“You should be curious. A man may be judged by the company he keeps.”
“And if Mr. Darcy’s cousin is dreadful?”
“Then at least you will know what you are marrying into.” Mrs. Morgan straightened her shawl. “Come. Let us take the measure of this colonel.”
They met in the parlour. Georgiana was sitting next to a man who was dressed well, but not in uniform. Mr. Darcy performed the introductions with wooden formality.
“Miss Bennet, may I present my cousin, Colonel Fitzwilliam. Fitz, this is my intended, Miss Bennet, and her companion, Mrs. Morgan.”
The colonel bowed, and as he straightened, Elizabeth observed that he was not what she had expected.
Where Mr. Darcy was tall and striking in a way that drew the eye, Colonel Fitzwilliam was of middling height, with sandy hair, an open countenance, and the kind of pleasant, unremarkable features that one might pass in the street without a second glance.
He was not handsome, but he was attractive in a mild, forgettable sort of way that would serve him very well if he wished not to be remembered.
Elizabeth suspected, watching the easy way he greeted them, that this was precisely the point.
A man who looked like Mr. Darcy could never enter a room unnoticed.
A man who looked like the colonel could enter, observe everything, and leave before it occurred to anyone to ask what he had been looking at.
“Miss Bennet, Mrs. Morgan.” His smile was warm and seemed entirely genuine. “I have heard much about you from my cousin.” He smiled. “I refer to Georgiana, of course.”
Mr. Darcy’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. “I wrote what was necessary.”
“What you wrote was incomprehensible.” The colonel turned back to Elizabeth. “I understand you were the one who alerted my cousin to the danger concerning Georgiana, and for that I owe you a debt.”
“You owe me nothing, Colonel. I did what anyone would do.”
“No,” he said, and the warmth left his voice entirely for a moment. “You did what a great many people would not. Anyone might have noticed. Few would have acted.”
“You are very kind,” she replied, and turned to Mrs. Morgan, who had been assessing the colonel while he was assessing Elizabeth. He saw where her eyes had travelled and turned his attention there as well.
“Mrs. Morgan,” the colonel said, turning to her companion with a bow. “Darcy tells me that your husband was in the army.”
“He was.”
“Which regiment?”
“He was a major in the 50th West Kent. He came back from Walcheren with the fever, and I nursed him here in Ramsgate for a year before it took him.”
The colonel’s bearing changed. The easy charm did not vanish, but something deeper rose alongside it, a recognition, perhaps, of shared ground. “A terrible business. I am sorry.”
“He survived the campaign. He did not survive the disease. That is the way of it.” Mrs. Morgan’s tone was dry, but Elizabeth saw her chin lift fractionally. “He was a good officer and a better man, and he left me well provided for and with a thorough education in how the army operates.”
“Then you know more than most civilians.”
“I know that men in uniform often assume that women in drawing rooms do not have eyes or ears.” Mrs. Morgan met his gaze squarely. “My husband knew better and I presume you do as well.”
Elizabeth watched this exchange with quiet fascination.
She had seen Mrs. Morgan at ease, Mrs. Morgan displeased, and Mrs. Morgan in the grip of a fury, but she had never seen the woman in the presence of someone who spoke her language.
The colonel did. Within five minutes, they were discussing troop logistics as though they had known each other for years, and Elizabeth understood that Mr. Darcy’s cousin would be an ally of considerable capability.
She turned to Mr. Darcy, who was standing by the mantelpiece. His shoulders had dropped. His hands, which she had often seen clasped behind his back, now hung loosely at his sides.
“Your cousin is charming,” she observed.
“He is.”
“And clever.”
“Very.”
“Is he always so . . .” She searched for the word she wanted. Before she could find it, he had answered.
“Yes,” Mr. Darcy said with a lopsided smile that transformed his features into something almost boyish. “It is his most persistent and irritating quality.”
Georgiana, who had been silent, looked up from her untouched embroidery. She did not speak, but Elizabeth saw her glance from her brother to the colonel and back, and something in the girl’s posture eased. Whatever Colonel Fitzwilliam represented, both Darcys felt safer for his presence.
As for herself, she could not yet be certain.
Within the hour they were dining together, the five of them arranged informally around the circular table.
Elizabeth was seated between Mr. Darcy and Mrs. Morgan.
Georgiana sat between Mrs. Morgan and the colonel, still quiet but not withdrawn.
She followed the conversation with bright, attentive eyes, and twice Elizabeth saw her lips move as though she were about to speak before thinking better of it.
The third time, Elizabeth caught her eye and gave her the smallest nod of encouragement.
“I have been practising the new sonata,” Georgiana said, in a voice barely above a whisper. “Elizabeth suggested it, but it is rather more difficult than I expected.”
“Elizabeth has a gift for recommending things that are more difficult than expected,” Mrs. Morgan remarked, and the colonel laughed.
Elizabeth smiled. “I merely suggested that Georgiana has outgrown the simpler pieces. She has far more talent than she gives herself credit for.”
“My sister’s talent is not in question,” Mr. Darcy said. He appeared to intend this as a compliment, but his delivery was so flat that it sounded more like an accusation.
The colonel glanced at Elizabeth before saying, “High praise from the man who once told me my playing was ‘technically proficient.’”
“It was technically proficient.”
“I made Lady Eleanor cry.”
“Yes, well. She also cried at the squirrels in Hyde Park.”
Elizabeth bit the inside of her cheek. The colonel caught her eye and raised his brows as if to say You see what I contend with, and she understood that this affectionate sparring, the shared shorthand of men who had been provoking each other since boyhood, was a long-established tradition.
Georgiana was watching the exchange with a smile she was trying to hide, and Elizabeth realised that this was what the girl’s life looked like when it was not overshadowed by crisis.
These two men, trading barbs over dinner as though nothing in the world were wrong, had been a part of Georgiana’s world for years.
It would soon be her world too.
“You play, then?” Mrs. Morgan inquired.
“Not in recent years,” the colonel said. “But we were all taught as children. My aunt adored the pianoforte.”
The colonel reached for the salt at the same moment Mr. Darcy moved it towards him without being asked.
The turbot was handed across without request. The lobster sauce followed.
At one point, Mr. Darcy moved the bread six inches to the right for no apparent reason, and ten seconds later the colonel reached for it exactly where it now sat.
“Do you two practise that?” Elizabeth asked.
Both men looked at her with identical expressions of polite incomprehension, which rather proved her point.
“They do it all the time,” Georgiana whispered. “It is worse with the horses.”
It was Mrs. Morgan who finally raised the subject, as the dessert was laid—a dish of greengages from a local orchard, small and green-gold, alongside a bowl of nuts.
“You two will need to be seen,” she said, sounding as though she had been waiting for the proper moment to announce it. “Together. In public. Before the wedding.”
Mr. Darcy looked as though she had suggested he perform a jig on the harbour wall.
“She is right,” the colonel said. “Dinners and tea are well enough, but if you marry without anyone in Ramsgate having seen you so much as walk together, it will look exactly like what it is.”
“And what it must look like,” Mrs. Morgan continued, “is a courtship. The story I have been telling is that you two already had an understanding and that Mr. Darcy believed you in danger, Elizabeth, not his sister. In a protective but utterly wrong-headed display, he burst in on you when you were already finished dressing.”
Elizabeth nodded. How the two of them would have already been engaged when Mr. Darcy had only been in Ramsgate a few days was a detail the gossips had not yet questioned. But Mrs. Morgan likely had an answer for that as well.
“Excellent work.” The colonel picked up his wine glass and held it up. “To quick thinking women who can make even Darcy appear a romantic.”
Mrs. Morgan nodded. “You will need to promenade. And church, you should attend church together.”
“I do not stroll on promenades,” Mr. Darcy said.
“You do now,” the colonel replied as he lifted a pice of greengage to his mouth. “And you ought to attend the assembly rooms.”
“The assembly rooms may be too much for Elizabeth,” Mrs. Morgan mused.
“They are not too much. I am perfectly well.”
Mrs. Morgan sighed. “You are not well enough for dancing. I beg you would wait a few weeks more for that.”
“That is no punishment for Darcy,” the colonel said. “He dislikes dancing.”
“You dislike dancing?” Elizabeth echoed. This was an unpleasant surprise. “I hope that is not true, for I dearly love to dance.”