Chapter 11 #2
“I dislike being hounded like a fox at the hunt,” Mr. Darcy muttered. “I do not dislike dancing. Much.”
Elizabeth thought of her own father, who never graced the assemblies in Meryton and felt an unexpected pang of sympathy for her mother.
As the conversation continued around her, Elizabeth bit into a greengage. It was perfect, sweet and almost honeyed, nothing like its plain little exterior had promised.
“The lending library,” Georgiana offered quietly. She smiled at Elizabeth. “People always meet at the lending library.”
“Perfect,” said Mrs. Morgan. “The library, the promenade, and church on Sunday next.”
“And you must not walk three feet ahead of her,” the colonel added.
“I do not —”
“You do,” said Georgiana and the colonel in unison.
Mr. Darcy turned to Elizabeth, and she was amused that he seemed to be appealing for rescue.
“I am afraid I cannot help you,” she said. “I have only known you a week and you have already walked ahead of your sister and me twice.”
“Once,” he said.
“You are not improving your position, Darcy,” the colonel observed.
“Three times,” Elizabeth added. “You did it to me and Mrs. Morgan when we arrived this evening.”
“The promenade is perfect,” Mrs. Morgan said, ignoring Mr. Darcy’s protests. “Walk together, speak to each other. You need not say anything of substance, merely appear as though you are enjoying one another’s company. Can you do that?”
The question was directed at Mr. Darcy. He was silent for a moment too long.
“He is considering it,” Elizabeth said to Mrs. Morgan. “Which means he is not certain.”
“I can do it,” Mr. Darcy said with grim resolve.
How had she come to be engaged to a man who did not like to speak? Lively conversation was her favourite pastime, but she needed a partner to engage in it with her.
“And you must compliment her,” the colonel said to Mr. Darcy. “Which qualities of Miss Bennet’s did you fall in love with first? Knowing that shall assist with your outings.”
Elizabeth watched what appeared to be an internal struggle of significant proportions play out in Mr. Darcy’s expression. He set down his fork. He picked it up again. He set it down once more.
“Miss Bennet’s conversation is . . .” He paused. The pause extended. Elizabeth could almost hear the gears of his mind turning, searching for the right word and finding only wrong ones. “Stimulating.”
The colonel closed his eyes.
“Stimulating,” Elizabeth repeated teasingly. “Like a cold plunge into the sea?”
Mrs. Morgan averted her eyes and sipped her wine. Georgiana pressed her lips together, but a high-pitched sound escaped despite her best efforts.
“I think you mean that you enjoy Miss Bennet’s lively mind,” the colonel supplied, with the patience of a man who had performed this manoeuvre many times before.
“Yes. That is . . . yes. Precisely.” Mr. Darcy looked as though he wished to be anywhere else on earth. The tips of his ears had gone faintly red, which Elizabeth noted with interest.
A kinder woman would have taken pity on him. But the evening had been heavy with all the things they did not, could not say: Georgiana’s near escape; Mr. Wickham, Mrs. Younge, and the trap they had sprung; the wedding that loomed. This was the first moment that had felt normal.
“Stimulating,” she said again, testing the word. “I shall take it as a compliment, Mr. Darcy, though I confess it is not the first word I should have chosen.”
“It was not the first word I chose either,” he said.
Well, she had insisted upon honesty. But before she could pose the obvious question, the colonel did it for her.
“What was the first word you chose?” he asked with undisguised curiosity.
Mr. Darcy fixed his cousin with a look that could have frozen the Thames. “I do not recall.”
“He recalls,” Georgiana murmured just loudly enough for the table to hear.
Elizabeth turned to stare at the girl. Georgiana’s cheeks were pink, but her eyes were bright with a mischief that Elizabeth had never seen in her before.
There was a conspirator hiding inside that shy exterior, and the colonel had drawn her out simply by making the first remark.
“He does try,” Georgiana added, more softly, and the tenderness in her voice was so genuine that Elizabeth felt her throat tighten.
Elizabeth met Mr. Darcy’s eyes across the table and held his gaze. She found this strange flaw of his rather amusing. “I am told that practice improves most skills. Even compliments.”
“I shall endeavour to practise then,” he said.
She nearly laughed at how solemnly he said it but refrained. “And in return, I shall endeavour to be patient.”
“That,” the colonel told everyone as he reached for his glass, “may require significant effort.”
Elizabeth could hold it back no longer. She laughed. It was not a hearty laugh, but it was a genuine one, for her disposition was one that delighted in the ridiculous. This evening, this entire situation, was bordering on the absurd, and there was no other response she could make.
The sound seemed to startle the room. Georgiana looked up, Mrs. Morgan’s mouth curved upward, and whatever it was that Mr. Darcy’s face was doing as he stared at her was something Elizabeth tucked away to examine later, when she was alone and could afford to be unsettled by it.
It was not much. A dinner, a botched compliment, a moment of shared amusement at the dinner table. But it felt as though they were experiencing a moment that belonged to them rather than surviving what had been done to them.
After dinner, when Georgiana had been persuaded to play, Mr. Darcy was turning her pages, and Mrs. Morgan had claimed the chair nearest the fire to busy herself with some work, the colonel drew Elizabeth aside. He was still smiling, but the amusement had left his eyes.
“Miss Bennet, I must speak plainly.”
“Indeed, I would prefer it.”
“I doubt very much that Wickham is finished.” He said it quietly, but with the certainty of a man who had studied his enemy.
“This will not be enough. He expected Darcy to abandon you to the scandal. It would tarnish Darcy’s reputation rather severely.
Wickham is aware how that would make Georgiana’s introduction to society more complex and gall Darcy to the end of his days.
He did not expect Darcy to offer marriage to a woman of no name, modest fortune, and with no claim on his conscience, because he never would. ”
Perhaps the man was not so charming after all. “Let us set aside ‘no claim on his conscience,’ until you have had time to canvas the entire episode with your cousin,” Elizabeth said.
“You will never persuade me that he has compromised you, Miss Bennet. I do believe that you were innocent in this and I know Darcy. He would never act improperly.”
Elizabeth sighed. “And yet, here we sit.”
The colonel made a low sound of assent.
“Where does Mrs. Younge fall in all of this?”
“I have always seen Wickham as more of an opportunist, but even if the plan is hers, he is the reason she has developed one. He uses people, especially women, to acquire the things that he wants.”
“And you believe they will try again? What can he do now that we are to wed?”
“The manner and timing I cannot yet predict.” The colonel’s mouth tightened. “Darcy has spent years containing Wickham with money. That approach has failed. I intend to pursue a different strategy, but I need you to understand the nature of the threat.”
“Mr. Darcy has not told me this.”
“No.” The colonel met her eyes. “He would not. My cousin’s instinct is to protect the people he loves by shielding them from the world’s dangers. It is his finest quality and his greatest flaw, and as you are to marry him, you should understand it now.”
Elizabeth glanced across the room to where Mr. Darcy stood beside the pianoforte, turning pages for Georgiana. He was listening to his sister play with an expression of such unguarded tenderness that Elizabeth had to look away.
“Thank you, Colonel,” she said. “For the honesty.”
His gaze was approving. “And Miss Bennet, for what it is worth, I have never seen my cousin propose anything, let alone matrimony, without being certain of its soundness. He does not make rash decisions.”
She held up one hand. “Again, you may wish to defer persuasion on that subject for now. I believe you and your cousin ought to have a more thorough conversation.”
Later, in the quiet of her own rooms with Mrs. Morgan brushing out her hair, Elizabeth turned the colonel’s words over in her mind. His instinct is to protect the people he loves by shielding them from the world’s dangers.
She had asked Mr. Darcy for respect and trust. He had offered it.
He had taken her hand on it. And yet the very next person through the door had told her, with evident affection, that her future husband’s defining impulse was to decide what the people around him could bear and then arrange his actions accordingly.
The colonel loved his cousin. Mrs. Morgan reluctantly respected him.
Georgiana adored him. Elizabeth did not yet know what she felt, but she was beginning to understand something of the man she was marrying: good, honourable, protective to a fault, and entirely convinced that the people in his care were better served by his judgement than by their own.
It was a quality that could be an issue between them. Time would tell if Mr. Darcy could keep his promise.