Chapter 8 #2
Dinner was a small affair. Bingley talked about Jane's progress.
Louisa talked about the weather. Mr. Hurst ate in silence.
Caroline talked about London, about the theatre, about the opera they had attended last season, steering the conversation, topic by topic, toward ground that Elizabeth could not follow.
"Do you enjoy the opera, Miss Eliza?" Caroline asked, with the careful emphasis she placed on the diminutive, as if trimming the name to size.
"I have not had the pleasure," Elizabeth said. "The pig and I do not often go to London."
Darcy's mouth twitched. He covered it with his glass.
"You must find the country very entertaining," Caroline said, "if it provides sufficient amusement."
"I find it more entertaining every day," Elizabeth said, looking directly at Caroline with an expression of absolute pleasantness that was, Darcy suspected, absolute war.
Bingley, who had noticed none of this, launched into an account of the local hunt.
Darcy listened with half an ear. He was watching Elizabeth.
She ate with small, precise movements. She held her wine glass by the stem, as a woman who had been properly taught would.
She listened when others spoke and responded with intelligence and wit.
She argued with him about something. He could not afterward remember what it was.
Something about books, or reading, or the relative merits of the country versus the city.
She took a position and defended it with a sharpness that delighted him and a stubbornness that infuriated him.
She was wrong, he was certain. Or possibly he was wrong.
The details blurred. What remained was the heat of the exchange, the way her chin lifted when she disagreed, the flash of her eyes.
"You are very decided in your opinions, Miss Elizabeth," he said.
"I am. Is that a fault?"
"It is if the opinion is wrong."
"And you, of course, are always right."
"No. But I am right about this."
She looked at him. The corner of her mouth curved. It was not quite a smile. It was something more dangerous.
"We shall see," she said, and rose to check on Jane.
He watched her leave the dining room. Truffles, who had been sleeping under his chair throughout dinner, woke and trotted after Elizabeth, catching up at the foot of the stairs.
The pig paused, considered the staircase with the sober assessment of a creature who understood the difference between flagstone and polished oak, and then ascended — one determined step at a time, hooves clattering on each tread, her whole body listing slightly to the left.
A housemaid on the landing pressed herself against the wall to let her pass with the expression of a woman who had been in service long enough to know when not to ask questions.
Bingley was talking about something. Caroline was watching him.
Darcy realised he had been smiling.
He stopped. But the feeling did not stop with it. It remained in his chest, warm and alarming, like a fire in a room that had been cold for a very long time.
Later, he walked the corridor to his room and found Truffles asleep outside his door.
She had left Elizabeth and Jane and come back downstairs, navigated the house in the dark, and found his room.
She was curled on the carpet with her nose pressed against the gap beneath the door, as close to him as she could get without being inside.
He stood in the corridor and looked at the pig. The house was silent. The rain had stopped. The only light was the candle in his hand, which cast long, wavering shadows down the hall.
He should step over the pig and go to bed. He should close the door and leave her in the corridor, because she was not his pig and this was not his house and sentimentality about a farm animal was beneath him.
He opened the door. The pig's eyes opened. She lifted her head.
"Come in," he said, very quietly, so that no one else could hear. "But only this once."
Truffles trotted into his room and settled on the rug beside his bed. She circled twice, in the way dogs did but which he now knew pigs did too, and lay down with a sigh.
He closed the door. He changed for bed. He turned down the lamp. In the darkness, he could hear the pig breathing, steady and slow, and it occurred to him that this was the first night since arriving in Hertfordshire that the house felt like something other than a place he was enduring.
The pig had been right about him. She had known it in Meryton, when he held her for thirty seconds and she decided he was worth following. She had known it before he knew it himself.
He was a man who let pigs into his room.
He was a man who fed them bread crusts and scratched their ears and talked to them about Latin.
He was a man who, for all the weight of his name and his carefully maintained distance from the world, wanted nothing more than to be the person a small, determined creature believed him to be.
He closed his eyes. Truffles' breathing slowed. The house settled around them.
Somewhere down the corridor, Elizabeth Bennet was asleep in a chair beside her sister's bed, and he did not think about her.
He did not think about the way she had looked at him in the library, or the quiet certainty in her voice when she said the pig did not do this with everyone. He did not think about any of it.
He thought about all of it. He fell asleep thinking about all of it.