Chapter 14 #2
“It is best cooked,” Georgiana said. “Miss Bennet says it makes an excellent sauce for mutton.”
Darcy watched his sister—the plait, the basket, the animation in her voice as she lectured Bingley on garlic—and when he turned back, something in his expression had rearranged.
“Georgiana does not need soft,” he said. “She has been surrounded by softness all her life. Simpering tutors and companions. Friends who see her position as a Darcy and whisper to her—compliments and assurances that she is accomplished and admired. She doesn’t know if they are true or…”
“Or sincere.” I placed my gloved hand over my mouth as I hadn’t meant to interrupt.
“There is a lack of honesty and sincerity in our circles, and my sister, who was orphaned too young, had not yet learned to trust her instincts.”
“I see, so you thought I might challenge her.”
“Yes. She finds it easier to agree with everyone on everything. Caroline declares a bonnet charming, and Georgiana declares it charming. Mrs. Hurst pronounces a sonata tedious, and Georgiana sets it aside. Her agreement is so constant it has become meaningless.” He glanced ahead to where Georgiana was nodding and smiling at some observation of Bingley’s. “She is doing it now.”
“She is being polite, Mr. Darcy.”
“She is being invisible.”
The word landed oddly—too precise for a man who had not, until this moment, demonstrated any insight into his sister’s interior life. I looked at him, and his expression told me he had surprised himself.
But he was right. I had seen it—the way Georgiana could empty herself of all expression when a conversation turned dangerous, as though she had practiced vanishing while remaining in the room.
She had done it at the pianoforte when Caroline mentioned seaside towns.
Not a flinch or a glance at her brother for rescue.
Just—nothing. I recognized the technique because I had worn the same blank composure at the assembly while Darcy pronounced my intelligence merely serviceable.
“So you engaged me to argue with her, and your programme of improvement, which includes the traditional pianoforte, Italian, French, needlework, watercolors, and deportment, requires, as its final ingredient, a companion who will vex her.”
“I did not say that, Miss Bennet.” A corner of his mouth moved in a way that was not quite a smile but in the same neighborhood. I noted it with the attention of a woman who was compiling an unauthorized inventory of a man’s expressions and was running out of excuses for why.
“But you meant it just the same.” I allowed myself a full smile. “And so, she threw flour at me and raced me across the field. Did you know she impishly bumped Caroline’s hip into the sheep dung while making a show of shaking out her riding habit?”
At that, Darcy let out a dry chuckle, quickly suppressed into a fit of coughs, startling Cinnamon, who flicked her tail at me, as if I had disturbed her palanquin, which I suppose I had.
We resumed walking while I kicked acorns along the path, satisfied in a way I could not describe. I had meant to vex Mr. Darcy, and his unexpected amusement was quite disconcerting.
“I see that I have chosen wisely.” He said it with the dryness of a man who could have meant it as triumph or self-mockery, and whose face gave nothing away—except that he kicked another acorn, and it sailed past mine by a good ten feet, which rather undermined the ambiguity.
“Mr. Darcy, that is either the finest compliment I have ever received or the most backhanded. I genuinely cannot determine which.”
“Consider it both.” His eyes caught the late amber light as he turned, and I was struck—quite without preparation—by the fact that they were not merely dark, but the brown shade of autumn chestnuts, warm beneath the severity of his brow, and that when they carried this unfamiliar glint of amusement, they changed his entire face from forbidding to something I had no safe word for.
I was staring. He knew I was staring. And I had no bonnet ribbon to fiddle with, no sprig of rosemary to retrieve, and no excuse whatsoever for the heat climbing my neck.
“Your sister is clever,” I said, shifting ground before we strayed into territory that required a chaperone more effective than a horse.
“She is observant and reads music the way some people read faces. She hears what is underneath the notes, but she does not trust any of it. She defers to the nearest voice of authority and borrows its opinions without making her own decisions.”
“She is still too young to make decisions,” Darcy stated.
“And yet, Mr. Darcy, should she be allowed to make small decisions, like whether to climb a tree or preserve her dignity? I’ll have you know she did not climb the tree, but she did choose to jump over the stile.
She also decided to visit me at Longbourn, crossing the boundary stream over the stepping stones. ”
Darcy was quiet long enough that I worried I had gone too far, and I was surprised when he started speaking, almost to himself.
“She trusted someone once, using her own judgment. The consequences were…” He searched for the word. “Significant.”
Significant. Not disappointing or embarrassing. The weight of this revelation sat between us like a locked room.
“I am not asking,” I said.
“I know.”
“But I will say that a girl who is never permitted a wrong turn will never believe herself capable of finding the right road. And the world is full of people who will happily do her navigating for her, provided she does not ask where they are steering.”
“You are speaking of Caroline.”
I had not expected him to name it. “I am speaking generally.”
“You believe Miss Bingley is influencing my sister.”
“I believe your sister sometimes uses words that taste of someone else’s vocabulary. But that is an observation, Mr. Darcy, not an accusation, and I would not presume—”
Bingley’s horse shied hard to the left, and a grunt of profound territorial displeasure erupted from the hedgerow. Darcy’s horse snorted and stomped his hooves, and we encountered a Berkshire sow blocking the lane.
She was enormous, caked in dried mud, and fixed us with the expression of a creature who had escaped her enclosure and intended to make the most of it.
“Good Lord,” Bingley said. “That is a remarkably large pig.”
“Do not approach her,” I said. “She wants food, not conversation.”
Bingley reached out his hand. “Come now, old girl. We need to pass. Surely we can reach an accommodation.”
The pig was unimpressed by his diplomacy.
“Mr. Bingley, pigs do not negotiate,” Georgiana said, clutching her basket.
Cinnamon sensing trouble, scrambled out of Darcy’s hands and disappeared into the hedgerows. The pig charged not at Bingley or Georgiana, but turned her attention to my basket with my mother’s walnut biscuits, the raw garlic bulbs, and a portion of rabbit pie.
I had no idea pigs could move so quickly, but Darcy was by my side in an instant, pulling me and my basket behind him.
The jolt sent the garlic bulbs scattering across the lane.
I clutched the rabbit pie. The pig, unimpressed by Darcy’s intervention, seized the hem of his trouser leg to move him aside, but Darcy stood as a firm barrier between me and the sow.
“Throw the apples!” Georgiana shouted. She drew back her arm and threw the first one. It sailed wide and bounced off a fence post. The pig pivoted surprisingly fast for so large a mass and consumed the apple in one gulp.
Georgiana threw another. This one hit the pig squarely on the rump. The sow, not the least bit offended, snatched up the apple.
“Excellent aim, Miss Darcy,” Bingley called, now standing on the verge while calming two horses. “Direct hit. You have a future in artillery.”
“I was aiming for its head,” Georgiana said, reaching for another apple. It bounced into the field beyond, and the pig, registering food in a more promising location, swung her massive head toward the opening.
Bingley caught the strategy. “Brilliant! More apples—over the fence, quick!”
By now, Darcy joined Bingley in tossing the rest of the apples through the fence gap, and the pig trotted after the trail of apples with a satisfied grunt.
“The garlic, biscuits, and pie are saved,” Georgiana announced, gathering the scattered bulbs with the composure of a girl who had defeated a pig through superior tactics and was not going to be modest about it.
And then, the wind took my ribbonless bonnet. It caught the brim and lifted it cleanly from my hair, sending it directly toward the pig, who had paused in the fence gap to consider whether the field truly offered better prospects than the road.
The bonnet landed at the sow’s feet. The pig snuffed it, nosed the straw brim, and then clamped her teeth around it and trotted into the field.
Darcy looked at the pig. He looked at the bonnet, receding into the stubble, and he looked at me.
And he vaulted the fence.
No deliberation, no weighing of consequences, no consideration of what a Derbyshire gentleman looked like pursuing a pig across a Hertfordshire field in his good riding coat.
He simply went, with the athletic ease of a man who had been vaulting fences since boyhood and had decided, in the time it takes to draw a breath, that the bonnet required retrieving.
Bingley’s mouth fell open.
Georgiana pressed both hands over her mouth, her eyes wide above her fingers.
“My brother is chasing a pig,” she said, between gasps. “For your bonnet.”
I stood in the lane with loose hair and scattered herbs and watched Fitzwilliam Darcy chase a pig across a stubble field, and the thought that arrived—unasked, unwanted, and completely without my permission—was that no man chases a bonnet unless the woman who wore it matters more to him than the spectacle he is making of himself.
Darcy returned with his coat dusty and boots unspeakable, carrying a bonnet that bore the unmistakable imprint of pig teeth and a fresh deposit of mud. He held it out with both hands.
“Your bonnet, Miss Bennet.”
“Thank you, Mr. Darcy. Though I fear the pig has won.”
He looked at the bonnet and at me. And then he laughed.
Not the dry, controlled sound that occasionally escaped him in libraries and drawing rooms, but a real laugh, helpless and warm and utterly unguarded.
I was so startled that I laughed too, and there we were, standing in the lane holding a ruined bonnet between us and laughing at nothing and everything and the absurdity of a life in which the grandson of an earl chased a pig for a woman he once called ordinary.