Chapter 9
Elizabeth
Elizabeth had been at Netherfield for three days, and the household had rearranged itself around the pig like a river around a stone.
The servants had adapted first. Mrs. Nicholls, the housekeeper, had placed a folded blanket near the kitchen hearth for Truffles, though the pig rarely used it.
The cook had begun setting aside vegetable scraps.
A young footman named Thomas had taken to greeting Truffles each morning with a "good day, miss" that Elizabeth suspected was only partly ironic.
Bingley had adapted next. He found the pig amusing, in the easy, uncomplicated way he found most things amusing. He had begun referring to Truffles as "our little guest" and had twice been caught slipping her food from his plate at dinner.
Mr. Hurst had not adapted, because Mr. Hurst had not noticed. The pig could have been replaced with a small ottoman and Mr. Hurst would not have registered the difference.
Caroline had not adapted. Caroline was conducting a campaign.
Elizabeth noticed it on the second day. Small things at first. A door to the drawing room closed just as Truffles was trotting through.
Instructions to a servant, spoken at a volume designed to carry: "The kitchen is the appropriate place for livestock, is it not?
" A comment at breakfast about the smell, when there was no smell, directed at Louisa with a glance at Elizabeth.
On the second evening, Elizabeth came downstairs to find Truffles shut in the cold pantry. The pig was pressed against the door, shivering, making soft, distressed sounds that were nothing like her usual confident squealing. Her eyes were wide and her ears were flat and she was afraid.
Elizabeth lifted her out, wrapped her in her own shawl, and carried her to the drawing room. She sat by the fire and held the pig against her chest until the shivering stopped.
She did not accuse Caroline. She did not need to. When she entered the drawing room with the pig in her arms, Caroline looked up from her embroidery with a smile that did not reach her eyes.
"Oh, is the pig cold? How unfortunate. I do think the kitchen is warmer, Miss Eliza. More suitable."
"The kitchen was not where I found her," Elizabeth said. She did not raise her voice. She did not need to. "She was in the pantry. The door was shut."
"How odd. She must have wandered in."
"The pantry door latches from the outside."
A silence. Bingley looked between them with the expression of a man who sensed something was wrong but had not worked out what. Louisa examined her embroidery. Mr. Hurst was asleep.
Darcy, in his chair by the window, looked at Caroline. He did not speak. But something in his gaze made Caroline look away.
Elizabeth sat down with the pig in her lap and said nothing more about it.
The evening continued. Caroline attempted several more sallies, each more pointed than the last. She remarked on the difficulty of cleaning pig marks from upholstery.
She observed that the Bennets' neighbourhood must be very different from what she was accustomed to, as livestock in the drawing room was not a feature of London society.
She asked Elizabeth whether there were other animals at Longbourn, her tone suggesting that the Bennet family might also keep a goat in the parlour and chickens in the bedchambers.
Elizabeth parried each one. "Only the pig, I am afraid. We tried a sheep, but she preferred the library and my father would not share it."
Bingley laughed. Caroline did not. Darcy turned a page of his book, and Elizabeth could have sworn the corner of his mouth moved.
After that evening, Caroline did not shut any more doors.
But her silences grew louder, and her glances at the pig grew sharper, and Elizabeth understood with the instinct of a woman who had five sisters and a mother and no illusions about feminine warfare that this was not over.
It was merely beginning. Caroline Bingley had found her target, and the target was twelve inches tall, pink, and sleeping on the rug at Mr. Darcy's feet.
What Elizabeth noticed but did not examine was the way Caroline touched Darcy's arm when she spoke to him.
A light touch, barely there, proprietary in a way that assumed permission.
The way she angled her chair toward his.
The way her laugh, directed at something he said, was pitched lower and warmer than the laugh she used for anyone else.
Caroline Bingley looked at Mr. Darcy the way a woman looked at something she had already decided belonged to her, and the feeling this produced in Elizabeth's chest was sharp and unfamiliar and had absolutely nothing to do with jealousy, because there was nothing to be jealous of, because she did not care.
She did not care at all.
Jane was improving. The fever had broken on the second day, and by the third, she was well enough to be settled on the sofa in the morning room, wrapped in a blanket with a cup of tea and a colour in her cheeks that owed nothing to the fever.
Bingley found reasons to pass through the morning room with a frequency that fooled no one, each visit accompanied by flowers from the hothouse or a book he thought she might like, and Jane received each one with a blush that grew deeper every time.
Elizabeth sat with her sister and fielded questions about the household that she suspected were really questions about Mr. Bingley.
"He came to ask about my health again," Jane said. "He asked if the sofa was comfortable enough, and whether the fire needed building up."
"That is the third time today."
"He is very attentive."
"He is very in love."
Jane's blush deepened to the shade that Elizabeth associated with her sister being pleased and trying not to show it. "You cannot know that."
"I can. I am looking at it."
"Lizzy."
"He brought flowers. He came three times. He asked about your favourite colour."
"He asked about everyone's favourite colour."
"He asked about yours first."
Jane pressed her hand to her warm cheek and changed the subject.
But there were other things Elizabeth noticed at Netherfield, things she had not expected and did not know how to reconcile with her opinion of Mr. Darcy.
He was kind to the servants. Not with the condescending benevolence of a man performing charity, but with the natural, unremarkable courtesy of a man who considered servants to be people rather than furniture.
He thanked Mrs. Nicholls by name. He stepped aside for a housemaid carrying linens.
When the young footman Thomas knocked over a candlestick in the dining room, sending wax across the tablecloth, Darcy said "no matter" before the boy could stammer an apology, and his voice held none of the coldness he showed in company.
He asked about Jane. Not once, in the obligatory way of a host whose guest was inconvenienced, but several times, with questions that suggested he had listened to the previous answers and remembered them.
When Bingley, in his enthusiasm, sat beside Jane's sofa for the fourth time in a single afternoon, adjusting her blanket and asking whether the fire was too warm or not warm enough, Darcy was the one who said, quietly, "Perhaps Miss Bennet would recover more quickly with rest, Bingley.
Your attention, though well-meant, may be tiring. "
Bingley had looked crestfallen. Darcy had put a hand on his shoulder and said, "Give her an hour. Bring her a book. Stay twenty minutes. That is the correct amount."
Elizabeth, who had been in the corridor and heard this exchange through an open door, stood very still for a long moment.
He was not the man she had decided he was. Or rather, he was that man and also someone else, someone she had not been looking for because she had been too busy being angry.
Elizabeth left Jane dozing on the morning room sofa and slipped out.
It was late morning. The house was quiet.
Bingley had ridden out on estate business.
Caroline and Louisa were in the drawing room, writing letters.
Mr. Hurst was somewhere, presumably eating or sleeping or engaged in the mysterious activities that comprised his entire existence.
Elizabeth walked toward the library. She was looking for the book Darcy had mentioned at dinner the previous evening, a volume of essays he had dismissed as "fashionable nonsense," which meant she wanted to read it immediately.
The library door was slightly open. She heard Darcy's voice, low and conversational, and stopped.
He was talking to someone. But there was no one else in the library. She peered through the gap in the door.
Darcy was in his chair. Truffles was on the rug beside him, lying on her back with her legs in the air. Darcy's hand was resting on the pig's belly, scratching slowly, and Truffles' eyes were half-closed in an ecstasy of contentment.
"You are completely absurd," he said to the pig. His voice was gentle and faintly amused, stripped of the formality he wore in company like armour. "You are a pig. You should be in a field. You should not be in a gentleman's library having your belly scratched."
Truffles grunted. Her back leg kicked rhythmically, the way a dog's did when you found the right spot.
"I am going to stop," he said. He did not stop. "I am going to stand up and close the door and you are going to go back to the kitchen where you belong."
He continued scratching.
"You are exactly like your mistress," he said, more quietly. "You appear without warning and refuse to leave and somehow convince me that I do not want you to."
Elizabeth's breath caught. She pressed her back against the wall beside the door. Her heart was doing something complicated, something that involved heat and surprise and the unwelcome recognition that she had been wrong about something.
He was not cold. He was not proud. He was a man who talked to her pig when he thought no one was listening, in a voice so gentle it made her chest ache.
She must have made a sound, or perhaps the floorboard creaked, because she heard the chair scrape and when she looked through the gap again, Darcy was on his feet. His hand was at his side. His face had snapped back to its usual composure, the gentle voice replaced by the familiar mask.
Their eyes met through the gap in the door.
"Miss Elizabeth." He cleared his throat. "I was merely... the pig was..."
"Scratching her belly. Yes. I saw."
His ears went pink. Elizabeth filed this observation away in a part of her mind that she would examine later and probably regret.
"She is very... insistent," he said. He was not looking at her. He was looking at the pig, as though the pig were a safer object for his gaze. His hand hung at his side, the fingers still slightly curled from where they had been resting on Truffles' belly.
"She is. She gets that from me."
His face changed. Not the mask slipping, but the person behind it looking out. His mouth moved. Almost a smile.
"I had noticed," he said.
From the far end of the corridor, she could hear a housemaid polishing the hall table, the soft rhythmic sound of cloth on wood. The door remained open. The proprieties were technically intact, which was more than could be said for Elizabeth's composure.
She stood in the doorway and looked at Mr. Darcy, who had been talking to her pig about how she appeared without warning and refused to leave, and she thought, I am in a great deal of trouble.
She thought this clearly and precisely and with the full awareness that it was true and that she did not know what to do about it.
"Jane is feeling much better," she said, because she needed to say something and this was the safest thing available. "We should be able to return to Longbourn tomorrow."
"Ah." He paused. "That is good news."
"Yes."
"For Miss Bennet's health."
"Yes."
"And you will take the pig."
"Obviously I will take the pig. She is my pig."
"Of course." He looked at Truffles, who was still on the rug, still on her back, still waiting for the belly scratching to resume. "Of course she is."
Something passed between them. Not a word, not a look, but something. A thread. Thin and new and already taut.
Elizabeth turned and walked away before she could examine what it was.
She walked to the morning room, each step deliberate, each step carrying her farther from the library and the man in it and the pig between them.
She sat in the chair beside Jane's sofa and pressed her hands against her face and breathed.
"Are you all right?" Jane asked, stirring beneath her blanket.
"I am fine. Mr. Darcy was talking to the pig."
"Is that unusual?"
Elizabeth thought about his voice. The way it had softened. The way he had said you are exactly like your mistress.
"Yes," she said. "It is very unusual."
She looked out the window. The rain had stopped. The grounds of Netherfield stretched green and wet into the afternoon, and somewhere below, in the library, a man she had been so certain she understood was talking to her pig in a voice full of a tenderness he would never show to people.
The pig had been right. Elizabeth was beginning to suspect the pig had been right from the very first moment in Meryton, when Darcy had scooped her up without thinking, held her against his chest, and let her press her muddy hooves against his cravat.
The pig had seen his hands. Elizabeth had only seen his words.
She was not ready to forgive the words. She was not sure she would ever be ready. But she could no longer pretend, sitting in this house where he fed pigs bread crusts and told his friend to be gentler with her sister, that the words were the whole of who he was.
Tomorrow they would leave. She would take Truffles home.
She would return to Longbourn, where the pig would sleep at the foot of her bed and escape from kitchens and root up her mother's roses.
Things would return to normal. She would not see Mr. Darcy every day.
She would not hear his voice through library doors.
This should have been a relief. It did not feel like a relief.
"Jane," she said. "When we return home, please remind me that I do not like Mr. Darcy."
Jane, who was half-asleep, murmured, "Of course, Lizzy."
"He is proud. He is rude. He insulted me at a public assembly."
"Mmm."
"And his ears turn pink when he is embarrassed, which is not endearing. It is merely a physiological response."
Jane smiled without opening her eyes. "As you say."