Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
London had been quiet, but a few families were at last beginning to trickle back to town. Elizabeth was about to descend the stairs and accompany her husband to their first dinner party, but paused before the sixth tread when she saw the colonel in the entrance hall.
“My mother writes,” he was saying to her husband, “to enquire why her nephew married without so much as a note to the family. She is, she says, ‘deeply wounded by the omission.’”
Elizabeth glanced at Fitzwilliam, who had been adjusting his cuffs with intense focus.
“You said you would write her.”
“I did,” the colonel assured him.
“Then you might inform my aunt,” he replied, without looking up, “that I have lately foiled a plot against my sister, been caught in a public scandal, married, and am now attempting to care for a wife who was an innocent party in it all.” He tugged his cuff once more and looked up. “I have been occupied.”
The colonel had smiled, mischief in his eyes. “I will paraphrase.”
“Do.”
Elizabeth rather liked her husband when he was exasperated, because he forgot to be careful. She stepped very deliberately on the sixth stair, and as he turned, looked up, and smiled, she had to admit that she rather liked him in other moments too.
“Shall we?” he asked, offering her his arm.
The colonel had disappeared, and she thought briefly about the letter he was to write before she accepted her husband’s escort.
She was adjusting her gloves in the carriage when she decided that preparation was, on the whole, preferable to hope.
“When someone asks how we met,” she said, “perhaps do not say ‘by unfortunate circumstance.’”
Fitzwilliam looked at her from the seat opposite with an expression she was beginning to catalogue as affronted dignity, mild.
“I would not say that.”
“You said precisely that to your cousin on Tuesday.”
“My cousin is family. One speaks plainly to family.”
“Very well,” she said, and pretended to scold.
“Please recall that Lady Drummond is a friend of your aunt’s, not family.
She has invited us to dinner so that she might inspect me on Lady Matlock’s behalf, and if you hand her ammunition, she will discharge it across every drawing room in Mayfair by Friday. ”
He considered this. “I would have said Saturday. Lady Drummond is thorough.”
Elizabeth pressed her lips together to suppress a smile. He was improving. Three weeks ago, he would not have understood that she was jesting in order to soothe her nerves, and he certainly would not have attempted such a joke.
“Also,” she said, “do not mention Ramsgate.”
“I was not planning to mention Ramsgate.”
“Do not mention the weather in Ramsgate, the sea in Ramsgate, or anything else that contains the word Ramsgate.”
He arched a single eyebrow and she secretly wished she knew how to do the same. “I shall endeavour to avoid all coastal towns in conversation,” he said.
Elizabeth met his gaze. “That would be safest.”
They turned onto a broader street and the evening light caught the windows of the houses they passed, turning them briefly gold.
Elizabeth smoothed the fabric of her skirt— the deep rose silk was one of the new gowns she had acquired on her trip to the modiste.
No one would know, after the alterations, that it had been left behind by another lady and that she had purchased it because it could be made ready in a day or two.
Fortunately, it was not the season and many people her husband would be expected to meet were not yet in town, but she did require new gowns to attend even the few engagements they had planned.
Thank goodness for her lady’s maid, who had known everything she required. They had both pretended that Elizabeth was allowing Waverly to do the ordering, and they had performed their little play rather well.
Elizabeth was not nervous about tonight.
She refused to be nervous. She had dined with people before, even people who considered themselves above her.
But she had never done it as Mrs. Darcy, and the distance between Miss Elizabeth Bennet of Longbourn and Mrs. Darcy of Pemberley and Bereford House was rather extensive.
“Elizabeth,” Fitzwilliam said. “I have every confidence you will do well. There is no need to fret.”
“I am not fretting. I am reviewing everything I do not know and assessing the scale of the problem.”
“Which is fretting with more syllables.”
She could not help but smile and admit to herself that he had made her feel better.
The Drummond house was everything Elizabeth had expected.
It was tall, well-lit, and designed to remind visitors that the family had been important since before the visitors’ families had been anything at all.
She wondered if that was true of the Darcys, and it was with some small pleasure she learned that this house was only four storeys and that its garden was half the size of Bereford’s.
Lady Drummond was a handsome woman of perhaps fifty, with sharp grey eyes and an effortless warmth.
She greeted Fitzwilliam with the easy familiarity of long acquaintance, complimented his coat, enquired after Georgiana, and then turned to Elizabeth with an appraising look she did not trouble to conceal.
“Mrs. Darcy. How delightful. We have heard so little about you, which of course makes you fascinating.” She took Elizabeth’s hand and pressed it between hers longer than courtesy required. “Lady Matlock speaks of the marriage with great interest.”
Interest. Elizabeth heard the translation perfectly, the woman meant alarm.
“Your ladyship is too kind,” Elizabeth said. “In time I hope to become quite unremarkable.”
Lady Drummond’s smile widened with the pleasure of a woman who had expected dull prey and instead found something with teeth. “Come, let me introduce you.”
The company was small, perhaps fourteen at table, and composed of exactly the sort of people Elizabeth had been dreading, for they were well-bred and well-connected without always being well-informed.
She was seated beside a Sir Marcus Holt, whose conversation ran chiefly to shooting and appeared relieved when Elizabeth could speak knowledgeably about pheasants.
Across from her sat a woman in lavender silk who studied her with the same sort of persistent, detailed attention as a naturalist classifying a new species.
The first course passed without incident. Elizabeth ate her soup, conversed about the weather, and answered three variations of the same question with three variations of the same graceful evasion.
“Were you acquainted with Mr. Darcy before Ramsgate, Mrs. Darcy?”
“I had the pleasure of meeting Miss Darcy first,” she said, which had the virtue of being both true and a deflection.
“And was it a long acquaintance before the engagement?”
“It felt very long indeed,” Elizabeth said, with a smile that invited laughter and foreclosed further enquiry. Several people laughed. Fitzwilliam did not, but he relaxed a fraction.
“And your family, Mrs. Darcy? Bennet of Hertfordshire, is that right?” This was Lady Drummond, who clearly already knew the answer and wished to see what Elizabeth would do with the question.
“My father’s estate is Longbourn, near Meryton.” Elizabeth met her hostess’s eyes with the composure of a woman who had nothing to hide and no intention of hiding it. “It is a small estate, but a profitable and happy one. My father is very fond of his library.”
“A reader! How charming. And your mother?”
“My mother is very fond of telling people about my father’s library.”
Lady Drummond laughed with delight, and Elizabeth felt the table tilt slightly in her favour. She had not won the room. One did not win a room like this in a single evening. But she had prevented it from turning against her, and for now that was enough.
The woman in lavender was not so easily diverted. She waited until the second course had been cleared and the table’s attention had fragmented into smaller conversations before she leaned forward slightly and asked, “Mr. Darcy, you must tell us what first drew you to your wife.”
Elizabeth felt the temperature at the table drop.
Every fork paused. Every eye turned. This was the question they had all come for, the reason fourteen people had accepted Lady Drummond’s invitation on short notice.
They wished to hear Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy, who had been the most eligible man in their circle for years, explain why he had married an unknown woman from Hertfordshire in Ramsgate under circumstances that no one could quite account for.
They ought to have practiced.
Fitzwilliam set down his glass. She could almost feel him composing an answer, sorting through his limited repertoire of public speech for something that would satisfy without revealing. His hesitation lasted a beat too long.
“Mrs. Darcy is . . .” He paused. The pause continued. Elizabeth watched him with resignation. “Formidable.”
Formidable. Elizabeth very nearly closed her eyes.
It was, she supposed, an improvement on blue and stimulating, but calling one’s wife formidable at a dinner party had the unfortunate effect of making her sound less like a woman one had married for love and more like a particularly well-built frigate. She could not leave it there.
“He means I talk a great deal, which relieves him of the duty,” Elizabeth said, sending her husband an affectionate glance. “He is simply too polite to say so.”
Everyone laughed openly this time, not the polite titter of a company waiting for blood. Lady Drummond’s grey eyes gleamed with something that approached respect. Sir Marcus chuckled into his wine. Even the woman in lavender smiled, though she did not abandon her hunt entirely.
“Relieve him of the duty!” Lord Drummond said with a chortle. “It had not occurred to me, but that is precisely the sort of wife Darcy would look for.”