Chapter 18
Mr. Darcy
Darcy heard the news at breakfast.
He was sitting at the Netherfield dining table with a plate of toast he had not touched and a cup of tea that had gone cold, staring at the morning newspaper without reading it.
Caroline was across the table, eating her breakfast slowly, buttering her toast as if it were the only task in the world.
Bingley was absent. He had gone to Meryton early on some errand Elizabeth would have called unnecessary and Jane would have called thoughtful.
The footman appeared. He spoke to the butler. The butler came to Darcy's chair.
"Forgive the intrusion, sir. One of our servants has had word from Longbourn. The Bennet family's pig is missing. She has been missing since yesterday afternoon. The household is in some distress."
Darcy set down his toast.
"Miss Elizabeth has been searching all night," the butler continued. "She walked until dawn. She is still out looking, I believe."
All night. She had walked all night in the November cold, searching for a pig, calling a name into the dark. She had not slept. She had not stopped. Because the pig was hers and she loved the pig with the fierce, uncomplicated devotion of a woman who did not do anything by halves.
He looked across the table. Caroline was buttering her toast. Her hand was steady. Her face was composed. She did not look up.
She did not look up, and that was what told him.
A person who had nothing to hide would look up when they heard that a neighbour's pet was missing.
A person with a clear conscience would express concern, or surprise, or at least the polite curiosity that society required.
Caroline's face was a blank wall, and blank walls were built to hide what was behind them.
He said nothing. He stood up. He left the breakfast room without excusing himself, which was a breach of manners he would normally have avoided, and he went to the servants' hall.
The Netherfield servants knew something.
He could see it in the way the footmen avoided his eye and the housemaids found sudden urgent business in other rooms. He was not a man who inspired easy confidences from staff.
He was too formal, too distant, too much the master.
But he was also a man who paid fair wages and did not raise his voice, and the servants, who talked among themselves with the dispatch of a mail-coach, had their own opinions about what had happened.
He spoke to the butler first. The butler knew nothing, or said he knew nothing, but his expression was the careful expression of a senior servant who did not wish to inform on a member of the family.
He spoke to the cook. The cook had heard a cart in the yard yesterday afternoon. She had thought it was a delivery.
He spoke to Jenkins, his valet. Jenkins, who had been with him for eight years and whose loyalty was to Darcy and not to the household at large, was more forthcoming.
"I overheard something, sir. Yesterday morning. Miss Bingley was speaking with a man at the servants' entrance. A farmer, I believe. From somewhere beyond Meryton. I did not hear the whole of it, but I heard the word 'pig,' and I heard Miss Bingley say that the matter should be handled quietly."
Darcy's hands went still at his sides.
"You are certain."
"I am, sir. I thought it odd at the time. Miss Bingley does not generally converse with farmers."
He left the house. He went to the stable and saddled Caesar himself, because waiting for the groom would have taken minutes he did not have, and minutes mattered because Elizabeth was out there somewhere, exhausted and frightened, and her pig was gone because a woman under this roof had arranged it.
He rode to Longbourn first. The morning was cold and bright, the frost still white on the grass, the sky the hard, clear blue of late November. He rode fast. Caesar was fresh and willing and covered the three miles in twelve minutes.
Hill answered the door. Her face was tight and her eyes were red, and she showed him in without the usual formalities.
Jane appeared in the hall a moment later.
She was in a morning dress with her hair loosely pinned, and her face was drawn with worry, and she looked at Darcy with a directness that surprised him.
Jane Bennet was the gentlest woman in England, but the look she gave him now was sharp with something that went beyond gentleness.
"She has not slept, Mr. Darcy. She has not eaten. She has been walking since yesterday afternoon. She went out again at dawn."
"Where?"
"The roads toward Meryton. The fields to the south. She is checking every farm within three miles."
"I will find the pig," he said, and he meant it with a certainty that came from somewhere deep and immovable, somewhere beneath the reserve and the formality and the years of careful self-control. He meant it the way he meant nothing else he had ever said in his life.
Jane looked at him. Her expression shifted. Some calculation occurred behind her gentle eyes, some assessment of the man standing on her doorstep at half past eight in the morning, unannounced and undone and making promises about a pig.
"Thank you, Mr. Darcy," she said.
He began asking questions around the Longbourn estate. He was methodical and patient and thorough, the way he was when managing the Pemberley accounts or investigating a problem on the estate.
He spoke to the farm workers on the Longbourn estate. He spoke to the boy who delivered milk, who had seen a cart on the Haye Park road yesterday afternoon. He spoke to the woman who brought eggs, who had seen the same cart return empty.
At the house, Hill was tight-lipped and guilty.
She had latched the kitchen door herself.
When she came back from the pantry, the door was open and the pig was gone and the turnip was untouched.
Someone had unlatched the door from inside.
Her eyes darted toward the parlour. She said nothing further. She did not need to.
The stable boy had seen more. He had been mucking out the stalls when a cart pulled into the Longbourn yard.
A man had gone into the kitchen. He had come out carrying something wrapped in a thick sack.
It had been making noises. He had put it in his cart and driven away toward the Haye Park road.
The boy had thought it odd but had not been asked, and so he had not said.
The trail pointed south. The cart had come from the direction of Haye Park. The farmer's name was Talbot. He had been seen in Meryton three days ago, speaking with a woman in a fashionable pelisse.
Darcy did not need to ask who the woman was.
He returned to Netherfield. The pieces came together. Caroline had arranged the theft from Netherfield. She had spoken to the farmer here, given instructions here, and ensured silence here. The execution had been at Longbourn, but the hand behind it sat across from him at breakfast every morning.
"You did the right thing," he told Jenkins. "If Miss Bingley questions any of the staff about what they have told me, you may refer them to me."
Jenkins nodded. He straightened his cuffs and disappeared into the servants' hall.
Darcy went back to the stable.
The anger had arrived now. Not the cold, controlled displeasure he displayed in society, the aristocratic frost that people mistook for temperament.
This was different. This was hot and raw and it burned behind his ribs with an intensity that frightened him, because he was not a man who lost control, and he was losing it.
Caroline had taken Elizabeth's pig. She had paid a stranger to remove the animal from its home. She had done it coolly and deliberately, with servants and carts and money, because the pig was in her way.
She had taken the creature that Elizabeth loved.
The creature that Darcy had held in his arms and fed bread crusts and talked to in the library when nobody was watching.
She had taken the small, warm, trusting thing that had loved him from the moment he picked her up in a Meryton street, and she had paid someone to make it disappear.
He rode to Haye Park. It took forty minutes.
The farm was small and muddy, tucked into a fold of ground behind a stand of beech trees.
The farmyard smelled of cattle and wet straw.
A dog barked from a chain. The farmer appeared in the doorway of the barn, a weathered man with suspicious eyes and hands that were too still.
"I was told the pig was a stray," the farmer said, before Darcy had finished his first sentence.
"The pig has a name. She belongs to Miss Elizabeth Bennet of Longbourn. She was taken from the house without permission."
"I was paid to keep it. The lady said it was unwanted."
"The lady lied. The pig was stolen. You were an instrument in a theft. Return the animal or I will have the magistrate here within the hour, and you can explain to him how a pig from a gentleman's household ended up in your pen."
The farmer's jaw worked. He looked at Darcy's horse, at Darcy's coat, at the set of Darcy's expression, and he made the calculation that men made when confronted with authority and found it unfavourable.
He led Darcy to a pen behind the barn. It was small and dirty and backed up against a stone wall. The floor was cold mud. There was no bedding. No food. No water.
Truffles was inside. She was pressed into the far corner, as small as she could make herself, her body tight against the stone wall.
Her ears were flat. Her eyes were wide. She was making sounds that Darcy had never heard from her before: small, thin, desperate squeals, the keening of an animal that had been taken from everything it knew and left in a cold place with no one who loved her.
Darcy opened the pen gate. He stepped inside.
Truffles saw him. For a moment she did not move.
Her eyes found his face and stayed there, and he could see the recognition happen, the slow, trembling realisation that the person standing in front of her was not a stranger but the man whose boot she had sat on, whose bread crusts she had eaten, whose voice she had followed through the corridors of Netherfield.
Then she squealed. A high, breaking sound of recognition and relief that split the air of the quiet farmyard.
She launched herself at his boots with such force that he staggered backward.
She hit his shins and scrambled upward, her hooves scrabbling at his coat, her whole body shaking, her snout seeking his chest with the blind urgency of an animal reaching for safety.
He bent down. He picked her up.
She pressed against him and shook. Her whole body trembled against his chest. Her snout buried itself in his coat, in the crease between his coat and his waistcoat, seeking warmth. Her hooves clutched at the fabric. She was cold. She was filthy. She was terrified.
He held her. He held her the way he had held her in Meryton, the way he had held her at the ball, but this time there was no one watching and he did not need to be careful or measured or correct.
He held the pig against his chest and he said, in the voice he used only when he believed himself alone, "You are safe now. I have you."
The pig made a sound. Not a squeal. Not a grunt. Something softer and smaller and more broken than either of those, a sound so raw and small that Darcy, who had never been sentimental about animals, felt his throat close. She pressed closer and closed her eyes.
He opened his coat and put her inside, against his shirt, where she was warm and close and where she could feel his heartbeat.
She fit against his chest the way she always had, as though the space had been made for her.
She stopped trembling. Her breathing slowed.
Her body went heavy and trusting against his.
The farmer watched from the barn door. He said nothing. He had the expression of a man who was watching something he did not understand and knew better than to interrupt.
Darcy mounted Caesar. The pig was inside his coat, warm against his chest, her snout resting against his collarbone. He settled the reins in one hand and pressed his other hand against the pig through the coat, holding her steady for the ride.
He rode back toward Longbourn with a piglet against his heart, and the anger burned steady and clean, and he knew what he had to do. Not just about Caroline. Not just about the pig. About everything. About Elizabeth and the dinner and the things he should have said and the man he should have been.
The pig had been right about him from the beginning. It was time to prove her right.