Chapter 5
Elizabeth
The neighbourhood would not stop talking about it.
Elizabeth discovered this on Friday morning, when she walked to Meryton with Jane to return a book to the circulating library and was stopped four times in the space of a single street.
Mrs. Phillips seized her arm outside the haberdashery and declared that half the town had already asked her about it.
Mrs. Long, who was coming out of the post office, said she had never seen anything so amusing in all her years and that the pig was clearly a creature of superior discernment.
The baker's wife leaned over the counter and asked if the pig had escaped again, and a woman Elizabeth did not recognise at all said, from across the street, "Is that the Bennet girl? The one with the pig and Mr. Darcy?"
Elizabeth smiled at everyone. She laughed when it seemed expected. She said things like "yes, very amusing" and "she is quite the escape artist" and "I assure you, the pig's affections are entirely unsolicited."
She wanted to scream.
Jane walked beside her with the serene, untroubled composure of a woman who had not been publicly humiliated at an assembly.
Jane had not had to cross a room full of laughing strangers to retrieve a pig from the boot of a man who thought her not handsome enough to dance with.
Jane had danced with Mr. Bingley and been admired. Elizabeth had been made a joke.
"You are being very quiet," Jane said, when they had turned off the high street and were walking along the lane toward home.
"I am savouring the silence. It is the first moment in twenty-four hours when no one has mentioned the pig."
Jane was quiet for a moment. "People will forget."
"People will not forget. In fifty years, they will still be telling the story of the pig that fell in love with Mr. Darcy at the Meryton Assembly. I will be ninety years old and they will still ask me about it."
"You will not be ninety. You would be seventy."
"The maths are not the point, Jane."
They walked in silence. The lane was muddy from the night's rain, and the hedgerows dripped.
Truffles trotted at Elizabeth's heels, as she always did when Elizabeth walked to Meryton, and Elizabeth had not had the heart to leave her behind.
The pig had done nothing wrong. The pig did not understand humiliation or social consequence or the casual cruelty of a room full of people laughing at you.
The pig had simply wanted to be near the person she loved.
Elizabeth could not fault her for that. She could fault the person in question, however. She could fault him thoroughly and at length.
"Not handsome enough to tempt me," she said aloud.
"What?" Jane looked at her.
"Nothing. Something I overheard at the assembly."
Jane waited. Jane always waited. It was one of the best and most infuriating things about her.
"Mr. Darcy said it. To Mr. Bingley. When Bingley suggested he dance with me." Elizabeth kept her eyes on the lane. "He said I was tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt him."
"Oh, Lizzy."
"It is not a wound. It is merely an observation by a man whose opinion means nothing to me."
Jane's silence said everything her words would not.
"I am not injured by it," Elizabeth insisted. "I found it amusing. A man who stands at the side of a ballroom like a statue in a museum, judging everyone in the room, and the one creature who sees any good in him is a pig. There is a justice in that."
"Perhaps he did not mean it as it sounded."
"He meant it precisely as it sounded. He is proud and cold and disagreeable, and the only thing that baffles me is why Truffles will not believe it."
They reached Longbourn. Elizabeth unlatched the gate and Truffles trotted through, making straight for the garden and the turned earth of Mrs. Bennet's much-abused flower beds. Elizabeth did not stop her. The roses had suffered enough already. One more pig-shaped indignity would make no difference.
Inside, the house was in its usual state of controlled chaos.
Kitty was coughing by the fire. Lydia was writing a letter to someone, which was alarming, as Lydia's letters tended to contain information that would be better left unwritten.
Mary was at the pianoforte, producing sounds that were technically music in the same way that a recipe was technically food.
Mrs. Bennet was in the sitting room, being comforted by Mrs. Phillips, who had evidently rushed straight from Meryton to deliver the gossip in person.
"That pig," Mrs. Bennet said, the moment Elizabeth appeared. "That pig has ruined us. The whole of Meryton is laughing. I cannot show my face. Your aunt says even Mrs. King was speaking of it, and Mrs. King never speaks of anything."
"The neighbourhood will find something else to discuss soon enough, Mamma."
"They will not! They are calling her the Darcy Pig. The Darcy Pig, Lizzy! As if Mr. Darcy were a breed of swine!"
Elizabeth pressed her lips together very hard.
"It is not amusing," Mrs. Bennet said, who had noticed.
"I did not say it was."
"You were thinking it. I can see you thinking it. This is your father's influence."
Mr. Bennet, as if summoned by the mention of his name, appeared in the doorway of his library. He had his newspaper in one hand and his spectacles perched on the end of his nose.
"I find it interesting," he said, addressing no one in particular, "that your pig, who has shown excellent taste in all other matters, should fix her affections on a man you find so objectionable. Perhaps one of you has misjudged him."
"The pig has not judged him at all," Elizabeth said. "The pig is a pig. She does not assess character. She sat on his boot because he smells of horse and carried her once. That is the whole of it."
"Is it?"
"Yes."
Mr. Bennet regarded her over his spectacles. He had a way of looking at people that suggested he could see through all the layers they had built up over a lifetime and straight down to the small, uncertain creature underneath. Elizabeth found it extremely irritating.
"As you say," he said, and returned to his library.
Elizabeth went upstairs and stood at her bedroom window.
The view was of the garden, where Truffles was rooting happily in the flower bed, her small pink body half-buried in soil.
Beyond the garden, the fields stretched toward Meryton, and beyond Meryton, somewhere in the direction of Oakham Mount, was Netherfield Park.
She wondered if Mr. Darcy was thinking about the assembly. She wondered if he was embarrassed, or angry, or if he had already forgotten it entirely. Men like that forgot easily. They moved through the world shedding the consequences of their words the way a duck shed water.
She would not think about him. She would not think about his stiff voice or his cold manners or the way the pig had looked at him, as if he hung the moon, or the way he had almost smiled, just for a fraction of a second, before he caught himself.
She would not think about the almost-smile. It was irrelevant.
Truffles emerged from the flower bed covered in soil, shook herself, and trotted back to the kitchen door. Elizabeth watched her go. The pig who loved a man Elizabeth could not stand. The pig who saw something in him that Elizabeth refused to see.
"You have terrible taste," she murmured to the empty room.
But even as she said it, she thought of his hands. The quick, sure way he had lifted Truffles at the assembly. The firmness that was also gentleness. The way his ears had gone pink.
She pulled the curtain shut and went downstairs.
Charlotte arrived after luncheon. She found Elizabeth in the garden, throwing a stick for Truffles, who retrieved it with the enthusiasm of a dog and the technique of a pig, which meant she mostly rolled it around with her snout before losing interest and chewing on it.
"I have come to check on your spirits," Charlotte said.
"My spirits are fine."
"You are throwing sticks at a pig."
"For a pig. There is a difference."
Charlotte sat on the garden bench. She watched Elizabeth with the patient, appraising gaze of a woman who had known her since childhood and could not be deceived.
"He is shy, you know."
"He is not shy. Shy people do not insult strangers within earshot."
"Shy people say exactly the wrong thing because they are uncomfortable. I have watched him, Lizzy. He does not know what to do with himself in company. He stands apart because he does not know how to do anything else."
"You are very generous."
"I am practical. I observe. And I observed that when your pig was on his boot, he looked down at her, and for one moment, his entire face changed."
Elizabeth did not want to hear this. "His face did not change."
"It did. Charlotte Lucas does not imagine things."
"Charlotte Lucas sees romance in the most unlikely places."
"Charlotte Lucas sees what is in front of her." Charlotte stood and brushed off her skirts. "I am not saying you should like him. I am saying the pig may not be as foolish as you think."
She left. Elizabeth stood in the garden with the chewed stick in her hand and a pig at her feet and thought about Mr. Darcy's face when he looked at a pig, and how different it was from his face when he looked at the rest of the world.
The weekend passed, and Monday after it, and Elizabeth was still thinking about it, against her better judgment, on Tuesday afternoon when the sound of horses came up the lane.
Elizabeth shaded her eyes. Two riders were approaching Longbourn. One fair, one dark. One waving cheerfully, the other sitting very straight in the saddle with the rigid posture of a man approaching enemy territory.
Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcy.
"Jane!" Mrs. Bennet's voice erupted from inside the house with the force of a fired musket. She had spotted them from the window. "Jane, come to the parlour at once! Fix your hair! Kitty, stop coughing! Lydia, sit up! Lizzy, put away that pig!"
Elizabeth looked at Truffles. Truffles was chewing the stick and had not yet noticed the approaching riders. If Elizabeth could get her into the kitchen before Darcy dismounted, before the pig caught his scent on the breeze, there might still be time.
She scooped up Truffles, who protested at being separated from her stick, and carried her through the kitchen door. She placed the pig on the flagstones. She closed the door. She latched it. She wedged a broom handle through the latch for good measure.
"Stay," she said, pointing at the pig through the window.
Truffles looked at her. It was not a look that inspired confidence.
Elizabeth straightened her dress but did not go inside.
She was not ready to sit in a parlour with Mr. Darcy and make conversation while her pulse did things she could not account for.
She would let Jane and her mother receive the visitors.
She would stay in the garden and pretend to be occupied with the flower bed.
She was kneeling by the roses, pulling a weed she had already pulled twice, when she heard the squealing.
It came from inside the house. A crash. A scraping sound. The unmistakable crack of a broom handle hitting a stone floor. Then the squealing, high and joyful and unmistakable.
Elizabeth was on her feet and running before the sound had finished.
She reached the parlour doorway and stopped.
The scene was already complete. Truffles was on Mr. Darcy's left boot.
Mrs. Bennet was white-faced. Mr. Bennet had emerged from his library and was regarding the pig with evident satisfaction.
And Darcy — Darcy was looking down at the pig with an expression she could not read, his hand half-raised as though he had been about to touch the pig's ear and had caught himself.
"Determined creature," Mr. Bennet said. "I admire her persistence, if not her judgment."
Elizabeth crossed the room. She knelt in front of Mr. Darcy, as she had done at Lucas Lodge, as she had done at the assembly, and reached for Truffles.
The pig clung to the boot.
Elizabeth looked up at Darcy. He looked down at her. His face was composed, carefully blank, betraying nothing.
But his ears were pink again.
"Mr. Darcy," she said, very quietly, so that only he could hear. "I am running out of ways to apologise."
His expression cracked. The blankness split, just barely, and underneath it was something she had not expected. Not irritation. Not contempt.
Something that looked, for a fraction of a second, like warmth.
"The pig has nothing to apologise for," he said. His voice was low, and there was something in it she had not heard before. "And neither, Miss Elizabeth, do you."
He was not talking about the pig. Or perhaps he was. Elizabeth could not tell, and the not-telling made her pulse do something inconvenient.
Elizabeth collected Truffles, who squealed but submitted, and carried her back to the kitchen without another word. She stood in the kitchen with the pig in her arms and her heart doing something peculiar in her chest and told herself it was irritation.
It was not warmth. It was not the beginning of curiosity. It was not the faintest, most unwelcome stirring of the possibility that she had been wrong about something.
It was irritation. Definitely irritation.
Truffles bumped her chin with a wet snout.
"You," Elizabeth told the pig, "are going to be the death of me."