Chapter 13 #2
“A lost cat provides grounds for our intrusion without the benefit of calling cards,” I explained the manner of gentry to a boy with coal dust still smudged on his cheeks.
Bingley, and especially Caroline and Mrs. Hurst, had expressed the wish of their father for them to enter the gentry, or at least buy their way out from their trade background, and so, I provided whatever improvement programme I could.
The ride to Longbourn took twenty minutes, during which Bingley talked without pause about the fineness of the day, the beauty of the countryside, the kindness of Mrs. Bennet, the excellence of Hertfordshire generally and one Hertfordshire household specifically, and I sat on my horse with a cat in the crook of my arm and a green ribbon in my pocket and a speech forming in my mind that I would deliver to Elizabeth Bennet about the proper protocol for removing my sister from a house without her guardian’s knowledge.
As we approached, the strains of Haydn’s F major sonata, Number 23, floated in the air, and I recognized Georgiana’s playing as surely as a man knows his own handwriting.
But this was not the Haydn I knew, technical and vacant.
This Haydn possessed a warmth and a life I had never before heard in her playing—wilder with feeling occupying the space between the notes.
We dismounted, and a boy took charge of our horses, regarding Cinnamon with the ease of having witnessed this cat arrive from multiple directions on numerous occasions.
“She’ll want her dish,” the boy said, nodding at the cat. “Kitchen door’s round the side.”
Cinnamon did not wait for me to find the kitchen door.
She leaped from my arms and trotted around the corner of the house because she knew exactly where she was going.
I followed the cat, which meant that Fitzwilliam Darcy, master of Pemberley and grandson of an earl, entered Longbourn for the first time through the kitchen, in the wake of a cat.
The kitchen was warm and smelled of baking and something savory—rabbit, if I was not mistaken, and I was rarely mistaken about food, having employed one of the finest cooks in Derbyshire.
Cinnamon crossed the flagstones and settled before a dish near the hearth.
It was earthenware, glazed in a blue-brown that spoke of local craft rather than London manufacture, and scratched into the glaze in careful, deliberate letters was a single word: Cinnamon.
The letters were uneven, pressed into wet clay by a hand more accustomed to holding a pen than a potter’s tool, and the care visible in each stroke suggested that the person who had made it considered the cat worthy of a permanent place at this hearth.
Bingley, possessing the social instincts I lacked, had found the front door.
I could hear his voice in the hallway—cheerful, loud, already being welcomed by a woman whose voice carried the brisk warmth of a competent hostess.
I straightened my coat, brushed the cat hair from my waistcoat, and stepped from the kitchen into the corridor.
The drawing room contained more Bennets than I had believed the room could accommodate.
Georgiana sat at a pianoforte that was old and scarred and half a tone flat, beside one of Elizabeth’s sisters, Mary, if I remembered correctly.
My sister’s hair was in a country plait, loose and unsophisticated, the sort of thing a milkmaid might wear.
There were biscuit crumbs on her bodice and a flush in her cheeks that I had not seen since she was fourteen years old and happy.
She did not see me at first. She was counting the other girl in, “One, two, and—” and the other girl attacked the keys with the determination of a student who believed that if she played the passage often enough, the notes would eventually surrender.
Elizabeth stood at the doorway with a pensive expression, completely relaxed and at home as our gazes met—charged with a tension I was ill-equipped to analyze.
Then Georgiana looked up, and everything I had ridden here to say—every reprimand, every reminder about programmes and permissions and the protocols governing a young woman’s movements, collided with the sight of my sister’s face, which was open and bright and alive, which Elizabeth Bennet had apparently accomplished with her unusual programme.
“Fitzwilliam!” Georgiana stood, and the plait swung. “You have found us.”
Elizabeth’s gaze was neither hostile nor apologetic, but steady, measuring, the look of a woman who had calculated the risk of bringing my sister here and had decided the benefit outweighed whatever I was about to say.
I held her gaze long enough to communicate that we would discuss this later, and she held mine long enough to communicate that she would win that discussion, and between us passed the sort of understanding that required no words.
“So I see.” I surveyed my sister’s glowing face and moderated my tone. “You might have left word.”
“We were walking, and the path—”
“Paths do not make decisions, Georgiana.”
“No,” she said firmly, “I do.” And the words were so simple and so unexpected that I had no immediate reply.
Bingley crossed the room from Jane Bennet’s side to the pianoforte. “Miss Darcy, I must hear everything. Caroline tells me you have been climbing trees, assaulting ducks, and digging garlic with your bare hands—is it true? All of it?”
“Most of it.” The corners of Georgiana’s mouth lifted. “The ducks were not so much assaulted as fed.”
“And the climbing? Actual trees? With branches?”
“A Bramley. Miss Bennet climbed, and I caught the apples.”
“Magnificent.” Bingley’s expression brightened like a boy who discovered that the world is more entertaining than he had supposed. “Darcy, your sister has been having adventures while we supervised dirt. We have chosen poorly.”
Georgiana’s flush deepened at his praise, and she reached for his arm with the easy affection of a girl who had known him since childhood—the way one touches a favorite uncle, warm and unselfconscious and innocent of how the gesture might appear to a young woman sitting very still by the fire.
I glanced at Jane Bennet. Her smile was precisely where it had been, but her expression had dimmed. She had seen Georgiana’s enthusiastic response to a man she was comfortable with, but instead of seeing a younger sister’s affections, she saw a young woman of seventeen.
Bingley continued his interest. “And you can simply eat wild garlic? Without ceremony? Straight from the ground?” And then my sister launched into an uncharacteristic explanation of the differences between thyme and sage with an animation I had not heard from her since the flour incident, and watching them together, I felt a discomfort I could not immediately place.
Could Bingley, no doubt due to Caroline’s encouragement, have turned his attention to my sister, with her Darcy pedigree and access to the finest circles of society?
I dismissed the thought as uncharitable. Bingley was my closest friend. His character was sound, his intentions honorable, and his interest in Jane Bennet was clear to everyone in the room except, apparently, Jane herself.
And yet the arithmetic persisted, unwelcome and unbidden: thirty thousand pounds against no dowry at all. A man might smile at an angel and still marry the fortune.
I was disgusted with myself for thinking it and unable to stop.
“Brother.” Georgiana watched me with the careful attention of a girl reading the weather. “Mrs. Bennet has invited us to stay for luncheon. The cook has prepared rabbit pie.”
“Rabbit pie!” Bingley, who had never met a meal he did not greet with enthusiasm, was already looking toward the kitchen with the expression of a man who had received news of an inheritance. “Darcy, we cannot possibly refuse rabbit pie. It would be an insult to the household.”
“We have imposed sufficiently—”
“Nonsense,” said Mrs. Bennet from the doorway, arriving with the precise timing I was beginning to associate with this household. “Mr. Darcy, we have rabbit pie enough for the regiment, and your sister has been promised a portion. I do not break promises to guests, however unexpected.”
“Please, Fitzwilliam.” Georgiana’s voice was soft, but the want in it was not. This was not a request sanctioned by the programme. This was a girl who had spent a morning being fed and fussed over and taught to climb trees, and who was asking to keep it for one more hour.
I looked at Elizabeth. Naturally, she was watching me decide. Her expression carried neither plea nor challenge—only a certainty that I would choose correctly, which was more unsettling than either, because it assumed I was capable of the choice she would have made.
“We would be honored,” I said, and Georgiana’s smile, the real one, the one that belonged to the girl with the plait and not the one manufactured for drawing rooms, broke across her face so swiftly that I felt it in my chest.
Bingley settled beside Jane near the fire, and they fell into conversation with the gentle, unhurried quality of two people who had a great deal to say.
Jane’s earlier stillness softened by degrees—not fully, not recklessly, but enough that I could see the warmth returning to her face in careful increments, like a woman testing the ice before committing her weight.
Georgiana returned to the bench with Mary, and the Haydn resumed.
And across the room, Elizabeth sat with Cinnamon, who had returned from the kitchen with damp whiskers and the satisfied air of a cat who had visited her dish, and who now climbed into her mistress’s lap and turned twice before settling with her face toward me—which I refused to interpret as meaningful, because interpreting the facial orientation of a cat was not the activity of a rational man.
Elizabeth scratched behind Cinnamon’s ear and looked at me, and I looked at her, and neither of us looked away.
In my pocket, my fingers found the green silk ribbon, the frayed edge catching against my thumb—a lady’s private thing, muddied and soft, that a gentleman had no business keeping and no intention of returning.