Chapter 19 #2
The rest of the evening passed without catastrophe.
Elizabeth navigated two further attempts to extract the particulars of their courtship, accepted a compliment on her gown from a woman who clearly wished to know its cost, and listened to a lengthy account of someone’s nephew’s commission with every appearance of interest. Fitzwilliam spoke when addressed, was courteous to the ladies and somewhat more at ease with the men.
Once, when the conversation turned to horticulture, he offered a remark about the intricacies Pemberley’s orchards that was so unexpectedly detailed and fluent that Elizabeth looked at him with genuine surprise.
He could talk. He simply could not talk about her. Not here, not like this, not in public where there was so much scrutiny on every word.
She thought about how he had improved in his private speech to her, how everything he said seemed to mean something, and how he would never be able to articulate those sentiments in a room full of strangers. Fitzwilliam was a man who gave his warmth easily only to those he cared for.
She was crossing the drawing room towards Lady Drummond, her hostess having beckoned with a crooked finger and a look that promised further interrogation, when a murmur caught her ear.
Two women near the fireplace, their heads inclined together.
One spoke behind her fan, her voice a low, carrying whisper.
“Ramsgate, of course. Miss Darcy’s companion, what was her name? She told Lady Sigmund’s maid the whole of it, and she spoke to my maid, who told me. The version I heard was not flattering.”
The second woman touched the first on the arm. The whisper stopped. Both looked up, saw Elizabeth four feet away. The smirks they wore meant they knew she had caught them gossiping but did not particularly care.
“Mrs. Darcy,” one of them said, her smile as smooth as glass. “What a charming evening.”
“Charming,” Elizabeth agreed. She smiled. It cost her nothing and would not give them the satisfaction of seeing her rattled.
The word Ramsgate sat in her stomach like a stone, the companion could only mean one person, and the details of whatever story was being told was not going to be favourable to Elizabeth.
She did not yet understand what it meant, but she knew the sound of a narrative being crafted by someone else’s hand, and the longer it circulated without correction, the harder it would be to undo.
In the carriage on their way home, the silence lasted approximately eight seconds.
“Formidable?” Elizabeth asked.
He exhaled through his nose, not quite a sigh, not quite a laugh. “It was the word that came to mind.”
“You are a man who owns an enormous library and reads in it every night. Of all those words, the one you selected to describe the woman you are said to love before fourteen people who were openly hoping you would say something disastrous, was formidable.”
He was quiet for a moment. The lamp cast a shifting light across his face, and she saw the corner of his mouth pull upward.
“You are formidable,” he said. “It was not inaccurate.”
“You have been spending too much time with your cousin. That was not a compliment, it was a military assessment.”
“You handled the table better than most generals I have observed.”
“Have you observed many generals?”
“Fitz brings them to dinner. They are invariably less composed than you were tonight.”
She was truly vexed with him but could not help but laugh all the same. It was bright and involuntary and startled out of her by the image of Colonel Fitzwilliam parading generals through the Bereford dining room while her husband sat at the head of the table with his typical stoic endurance.
He was watching her. In the half-dark of the carriage, with the streets of London passing beyond the window.
“You were extraordinary tonight,” he said.
“You see?” she said with a sigh, “That was an excellent compliment.”
“It was an observation.”
“You are capable of complimenting me in private. You shall have to do so in public as well from time to time. Perhaps you ought to practise.”
“Practise,” he repeated, as though the word required examination.
“Yes. As one practises any skill. You might begin with something simple. ‘My wife has lovely eyes.’ ‘Mrs. Darcy is charming company.’ ‘I enjoy reading books in silence with her.’ Work your way up from there.”
“Your eyes are not lovely.”
She blinked. Had he truly just said that? “I beg your pardon?”
“They are inconvenient.” He said it quietly, almost to himself, and he was not looking at her face but over her shoulder at the window, as though the observation had escaped without permission. “They make it very difficult to concentrate.”
Elizabeth opened her mouth and found, for once, that nothing came out.
She had a great many words at her disposal—she had always had a great many words—and yet not a single one of them was adequate to the moment, because he had not said it as a compliment.
He had said it like a man confessing the truth.
“That,” she said at last, “was either very good or very dangerous.”
Her husband shook his head. “Your eyes are not lovely, Elizabeth. They are arresting.”
The lamp flickered as they passed beneath a row of trees.
The light shifted, dimmed, returned, and in the half second of shadow his gaze caught and held hers, and she became suddenly aware of how small the carriage was.
How closely they were seated. How the rocking of the wheels over cobblestones created a rhythm that narrowed the distance between them somehow.
He leaned forward. Not much, an inch, perhaps two, but close enough that she could see the lamplight catch the line of his jaw, enough that the scent of his sandalwood he wore was no longer faint but distinctive.
His eyes were dark in the low light, and very serious, and fixed on her with an intensity that made her breath catch.
Elizabeth did not move away. She should have.
She should have said something light and amusing, something that would restore the safe, careful distance they had maintained since the cottage.
But she did not move, she did not speak, and the inch between them felt like the most dangerous territory she had ever occupied.
His gaze dropped to her mouth.
The carriage jolted. Elizabeth’s shoulder struck the side panel. The spell broke like glass, and they were once again two people sitting in a coach on a London street with too much space between them and too little air.
They both sat back.
What was she feeling? Elizabeth could not truly say.
There was silence between them but it was the good kind, the library kind, the reading-by-the-fire kind, only more charged. Elizabeth ran over the evening in her mind, especially the way he had said arresting.
She wondered whether this was what he was like with people he truly trusted. Not stiff, not formal, not fumbling for adequate words. Just quiet, intense, and sure.
She looked out the window before her thoughts could go anywhere she was not yet prepared to follow.
Elizabeth’s morning caller arrived Monday morning at eleven.
Mrs. Hadley was the age of Elizabeth’s mother and possessed of the same tireless curiosity.
Elizabeth had been introduced to her by Lady Drummond as “a dear friend of the family,” which Elizabeth had understood to mean “a woman who will report everything she observes in every drawing room in Mayfair by teatime.”
Georgiana was at the pianoforte. Fitzwilliam had gone out. Elizabeth received Mrs. Hadley in the morning room with determination, composure, and the smile she had developed for callers she would rather not host.
Mrs. Hadley admired everything, including the room, the flowers, and the arrangement of the furniture—none of which had changed—before she arrived at her purpose.
“I must say, Mrs. Darcy, what a pleasure it is to see you so well-settled. One hears such things, of course, and one never knows what to believe. But you appear very much at home.”
"I am very much at home," Elizabeth agreed.
“And you were much acquainted with Mr. Darcy before Ramsgate? Or was the meeting entirely by chance?”
The question was poison wrapped in silk, and Elizabeth had been asked a version of it at every social engagement since the dinner at Lady Drummond’s.
But this phrasing was more pointed than the previous attempts, and the careful innocence with which Mrs. Hadley delivered it did not disguise the blade beneath.
“I had the pleasure of meeting Miss Darcy first, and her brother shortly after,” Elizabeth said. “We found ourselves in the same seaside town at the same time, and our courtship followed.”
“One hears such things, of course, about the circumstances at Ramsgate, but I am sure most of it is exaggeration.”
There was a blade beneath the silk. Most, perhaps, but not all. Elizabeth’s smile did not waver, but the warmth left it. “One hears a great many things in London. I find very little of it survives closer inspection.”
Mrs. Hadley’s returning smile was strained. “How sensible of you. I only ask because the version one hears is rather . . . Well. I should not like to repeat it. Suffice it to say the telling is not kind, and you ought to know that it is circulating.”
Elizabeth kept her hands still in her lap. “I am grateful for the warning. May I ask where you heard it?”
“Oh, one can never trace these things. You know how it is, someone mentions it at a card party, someone else repeats it over tea, and before long it is simply known. I could not tell you where it began if my life depended upon it.”
She could not, or she would not. Elizabeth suspected the latter.
“Then I shall not trouble you to try, though in my experience, a report that cannot name its own source has very little claim on anyone’s belief.” She smiled and turned the conversation to the exhibition at Somerset House, which had the virtue of being both safe and inexhaustible.