Chapter 4
Mr. Darcy
The Meryton Assembly, held the following Saturday, was everything Darcy had expected, and none of what he wanted.
The room was too warm. The music was enthusiastic but imprecise, with a fiddle that strained at the high notes and a pianoforte that was half a tone flat.
The ceiling was low enough that the candle smoke hung in a faintly amber haze, and the press of bodies made the air close and thick with the smell of tallow and perfume and someone's lavender water applied with excessive generosity.
Darcy stood near the wall with a glass of punch he had not tasted and counted the ceiling beams. There were fourteen.
He knew because he had counted them twice.
He wondered how many more minutes constituted a socially acceptable appearance before he could leave without causing Bingley to lecture him in the carriage about the importance of being neighbourly.
Bingley was dancing. Of course Bingley was dancing.
Bingley was always dancing. He had found Miss Bennet within moments of arriving and secured her hand for the first two dances with a boyish eagerness that made several older women smile and several younger women sigh — and was now hovering near her with the transparent hope of securing the supper dance as well.
Caroline stood beside Darcy, her expression arranged into her practised mask of tolerant disdain she wore at public gatherings below her station. She surveyed the assembly as though composing a letter to a friend in town about its deficiencies.
"The decorations are resourceful," she said, in the tone of a woman who meant "desperate."
"Mm," said Darcy.
"The musicians are local, I presume."
"One would assume."
"That woman's feathers have been dyed. One can tell."
Darcy did not respond. He was looking across the room at Miss Elizabeth Bennet.
She was laughing. She was standing with her friend, Miss Lucas, and another young woman he did not know, and she was laughing at something with such complete, unselfconscious pleasure that it changed her entire face.
Her eyes crinkled. Her shoulders shook. She covered her mouth with one hand, which did nothing to muffle the laugh, and the sound of it carried across the room above the music and the chatter.
He noticed her eyes. They were dark and bright and full of something he could not quite name. Wit, perhaps. Or defiance. Or the kind of intelligence that sees everything and forgives very little.
He looked away.
He had thought about her since Lucas Lodge.
Not willingly, and not with any clear purpose, but in the way one thought about a song heard in passing that lodged itself in the mind and refused to leave.
The pig's total certainty — the way it had ignored every other person in the room and come directly to him, as if drawn by some invisible thread.
And the young woman, kneeling before him in a room full of onlookers, trying to pry a boneless pig off his boot with the quiet desperation of someone who knew the entire evening had just become a story about her.
The colour in her cheeks. The mortification she had worn like a garment she could not remove.
He had not handled it well. He knew that.
He had been stiff when he should have been gracious.
He had said "it is of no consequence" in a tone that suggested the opposite, because his throat had locked the way it always did when he was the centre of attention, and the words that emerged bore no resemblance to the ones he intended.
And then there was the pig itself, which kept intruding on his thoughts at odd moments. The warm weight of the creature against his waistcoat in Meryton. Its absurdly large ears. The way it had looked at him, just before she took it back, with an expression that he could only describe as trust.
He did not want to think about a pig. He was Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley, master of ten thousand a year and a thousand acres, and he did not think about pigs. And yet here he was, at a country assembly, thinking about a pig.
Bingley appeared at his elbow, flushed from dancing and radiating happiness.
"Come, Darcy, you must dance. You cannot stand here all evening. It looks ill."
"I am tolerably well as I am."
"There are several young ladies without partners. Miss Elizabeth Bennet, for instance. She is sitting this dance out."
Darcy glanced at Miss Elizabeth. She was seated now, watching the dancers with her chin propped on her hand.
Her foot was tapping faintly to the music.
She had not looked in his direction all evening, not once, and he was aware of this because he had checked more than once, which was a fact he preferred not to examine too closely.
"She is tolerable, I suppose, but not handsome enough to tempt me," he said. "I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men. You had better return to your partner and enjoy her smiles. You are wasting your time with me."
He said it to make Bingley go away. He said it in the flat, dismissive tone he used to shut down conversations he did not wish to have.
He did not mean it. Or rather, he meant the last part.
He was not in the humour. He was not in the humour for anything that required him to be charming and light and easy in a room full of strangers.
He wanted to go home. Not to Netherfield, which was not home, but to Pemberley, where the rooms were large and quiet and no one expected him to dance.
The words left his mouth and entered the air and he felt, immediately, the slight recoil of having said something uglier than he intended.
Bingley sighed and went back to the dancing. Darcy remained where he was. Caroline had drifted away to examine someone's gown. The punch was warm in his hand.
Across the room, Miss Elizabeth Bennet turned her head. She was very still for a moment. Then she turned back to Miss Lucas and said something. Miss Lucas glanced at Darcy. Miss Elizabeth laughed.
The laugh was different this time. It was bright and sharp and carried perfectly, and it did not reach her eyes.
He had the sudden, unpleasant certainty that she had heard him.
The evening dragged. Darcy stood and watched the dancing without seeing it.
He accepted an introduction to a Mr. Robinson, who farmed something.
He nodded at a Mrs. Phillips, who was Mrs. Bennet's sister and equally excitable.
He spoke briefly with Sir William Lucas, who described the history of the assembly rooms at a length that suggested he was being paid by the word.
He was calculating the earliest possible moment he could suggest to Bingley that they leave when he heard, from the direction of the entrance hall, a sound that had become, against his will, immediately recognizable.
Squealing.
High, determined, joyful squealing. The kind that could only be produced by a very small animal with very large feelings.
It was followed by the rapid clatter of small hooves on a wooden floor, a sound he had heard exactly twice before in his life and which he now recognised with the helpless certainty of a man who hears the huntsman's horn and knows the chase has found him.
No. Not here. Not now.
A gasp near the door. A woman's shriek, high and theatrical.
Someone dropped a glass, and it shattered on the floor with a bright crack that silenced the conversations nearby.
The music stuttered, one instrument at a time, and the dancers nearest the entrance stumbled and separated as something small and pink and astonishingly fast shot between their feet.
Truffles had arrived at the Meryton Assembly.
She had not followed the carriage. A pig could not keep pace with horses, and even Truffles had limits.
What she had done, as Elizabeth would later reconstruct from Hill's guilty account and the evidence of a forced latch, was simpler and more determined: she had escaped the kitchen twenty minutes after the family left, trotted down the lane to Meryton on the same route she walked with Elizabeth three mornings a week — Longbourn sat close to the edge of the village, barely half a mile from the assembly rooms — and let herself into the building through the kitchen entrance, where the staff were too busy with the supper trays to notice one small pig among the bustle.
Half a mile, in the dark, on a route she knew by smell.
It should not have been easy, even for a determined pig.
And yet here she was, pink and determined and utterly unconcerned by the chaos she was causing.
The pig moved through the room with the fearless purpose of a creature on a mission.
She dodged a dancing couple. She skirted a cluster of matrons.
She skidded on the polished floor near the punch table, her hooves splaying briefly before she recovered and pressed on.
She threaded through a forest of legs with the low, determined trot of an animal that knew exactly where it was going and had no intention of being stopped by waxed oak.
A woman in blue lifted her skirts and screamed.
A man stumbled sideways. A footman made a grab for her and missed. The last of the music died away.
The pig reached Darcy.
She sat on his right foot, pressed her flank against his calf, and looked up at him with the absolute contentment of an animal that had been searching for something and found it.
The room went quiet. Then it erupted.
Laughter. Gasps. Whispers that became exclamations.
Sir William Lucas, who was somewhere near the punch bowl, let out a bellow of delight.
Mrs. Long clutched Mrs. Goulding's arm. The young officers near the door were grinning.
Every head in the assembly turned toward Darcy, and on every face he saw some variation of the same expression: amusement, fascination, and the undisguised glee of people witnessing something they would talk about for weeks.