Chapter Five #2
“I’m so sorry.” Elizabeth touched a hand to her warming cheek, mortified. “He’s not usually this . . . well, he is usually this bad, as you know. I’m just sorry.”
“It’s all right,” Darcy assured her, but Elizabeth could see him glancing over at Athena, who was now sitting in the corner like a furry statue.
“Dinner!” her mother announced with a forced cheer that suggested she’d been listening to the entire exchange. “Everyone to the table. And Elizabeth, put that dog somewhere he can’t cause any more trouble.”
Elizabeth grabbed Waffles by the collar and steered him toward the laundry room, where she shut him in with his dinner, his dog bed, his favourite toy, and a stern warning.
When she returned to the dining room, she found her family arranged around the table like they were auditioning for a comedy programme.
Her father sat at the head, enjoying himself immensely.
Her mother bustled around laying out an herbed roast chicken, honeyed carrots, roasted Brussels sprouts, and little potatoes, all of which smelt marvellous—her mother might be nosy and pushy, but she was a very good cook.
Lydia had positioned herself directly across from Darcy and was asking him rapid-fire questions about his car, his job, and whether he had any single friends.
Mary had appeared and was explaining to anyone who would listen why Christmas was essentially a capitalist conspiracy designed to exploit the working classes.
Kitty was taking photos of her dinner and had must have decided that Darcy was Instagram-worthy, because she kept trying to catch him in the background.
And Darcy sat in the middle of it all, looking like he’d been dropped into an alien civilization and was trying to work out the local customs through careful observation.
She had warned him.
“So, William,” her mother said, settling into her seat with the satisfied air of a woman who’d successfully got everyone fed. “Elizabeth tells us you work in finance?”
“I do,” Darcy replied. “Investment management, primarily.”
“Ooh, fancy.” Lydia speared a roast potato with enthusiasm. “Do you make loads of money?”
“Lydia!” Elizabeth exclaimed.
“What? It’s a reasonable question. I mean, look at his car. That’s not a poor person’s car.”
Elizabeth felt her cheeks burning. This was what she’d been afraid of, her family treating Darcy like an exotic specimen to be studied and dissected.
“I do well enough,” Darcy said.
“I’m sure you do.” Her father had that twinkle in his eye, the one that made Elizabeth nervous. “Our Elizabeth’s always been attracted to the finer things in life. Remember when she was seven and insisted we buy the expensive cereal because the box was prettier?”
“Dad,” Elizabeth warned.
“Or when she was sixteen and convinced that boy with the BMW was the love of her life?”
“He had a very nice car,” Elizabeth said. “And I was sixteen. We all make questionable decisions at sixteen.”
“Some of us still do,” Mary muttered, which made Lydia throw a piece of carrot at her.
Elizabeth watched Darcy take in this exchange. She could see him cataloguing every detail: the casual disorder, the way her family interrupted one another, the complete absence of the formal dinner conversation he was likely used to.
“So, what do your parents do, William?” her mother asked, determined to gather as much information as possible.
Oh no. She’d forgotten to tell her mother about his parents.
“My father passed away about five years ago,” Darcy replied. “He was a barrister, but spent much of his time managing Pemberley, our family’s estate. My mother died when I was quite young—she was a musician.”
The table went quiet for a moment, the respectful silence that her family, for all their unruliness, always managed when it mattered.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” her father said gently. “That must have been difficult.”
“It was,” Darcy replied. “But I have my sister, Georgiana. She’s just completed university.”
Her mother nodded. “That’s wonderful. Family’s important, isn’t it? Elizabeth adores her sisters, even when they drive her mad.”
“Especially when we drive her mad,” Lydia added. “It’s more fun that way.”
Elizabeth spent the rest of dinner in a state of low-level panic, watching Darcy navigate her family’s particular brand of misrule.
He answered Lydia’s inappropriate questions with dry humour, listened with patience to Mary’s lecture about cognitive dissonance, and even managed to look interested when Kitty showed him photos of her university friends.
But Elizabeth could see the way he sat just a little apart from it all, polite and engaged but somehow separate. Like he was attending a performance rather than taking part in a family meal.
When her father started telling the story about Elizabeth’s disastrous decision to dye her hair purple when she was fifteen, she wanted to sink through the floor and disappear.
“She looked like a bruised aubergine for weeks.” Her father was too delighted by his own storytelling to consider not embarrassing her. “Refused to come out of her room except for meals.”
“It was supposed to be subtle highlights,” Elizabeth muttered.
“Nothing about you has ever been subtle, love." Her mother's voice was touched with both fondness and exasperation. “Even as a baby, you did everything at full volume.”
Darcy smiled at that, the first genuine smile Elizabeth had seen from him all evening. “I can imagine,” he said, and there was something warm in his voice that made Elizabeth’s heart flutter.
As the evening wore on though, Elizabeth found herself watching Darcy more and more anxiously.
He was polite, answered every question, laughed at her father’s jokes, and even complimented her mother on the dessert.
But there was something careful about it all, something that suggested he was working quite hard to be charming.
When it came time to leave, her family clustered around the front door like they were seeing off visiting dignitaries.
“You must come again soon,” her mother insisted, pressing a container of leftover dessert into Darcy’s hands.
“I’d be delighted.” Elizabeth couldn’t tell if he was being polite or if he truly meant it.
Lydia hugged him goodbye again, despite his obvious discomfort with the unexpected physical contact. Mary gave him a pamphlet about economic theory “for light reading.” Kitty made him pose for a selfie with her and Athena.
Her father shook his hand and said, “Take care of our girl.”
They drove the first ten minutes in comfortable silence while Elizabeth tried to work out how to ask the question that was eating at her.
“Well,” she said. “That was a lot.”
“They’re lovely,” Darcy told her. “Your family is wonderful.”
But Elizabeth could hear something in his voice, some careful politeness that alarmed her. “You don’t have to be kind. I know they’re a bit much.”
“Elizabeth.” Darcy glanced over at her, his expression serious. “I meant what I said. They’re lovely. Your father is witty, your mother is warm, and your sisters are spirited. Did you say Lydia wants to be an actress?”
“Yes, you can see that she’s definitely got the larger-than-life bit down.”
Elizabeth thought about meeting Georgiana, how easy and elegant that had been. How natural it had felt to sit in that expensive café and have a civilised conversation about books and music and travel.
Then she remembered Waffles performing chair gymnastics while slobbering all over Athena, Lydia asking Darcy if he had any single friends before the starter was even served, her mother interrogating him like he was applying for a security clearance, and her father gleefully recounting the purple hair disaster as though it were peak comedy.
The two of them came from different worlds. Not just different—completely, fundamentally, utterly different.
And not for the first time since she’d fallen for William Darcy, Elizabeth wondered if that might be a problem.
“I like your family, Elizabeth,” Darcy insisted. “They’re genuine. There’s no pretence there.”
“No,” Elizabeth agreed. That was certainly the truth. “No pretence at all. What you see is very much what you get.”
She kissed him goodnight on her doorstep, watching through her front window as he and Athena drove away into the London evening.