Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
MIDNIGHT SCHEMES
Darcy
I ought to be grateful that Elizabeth kept the handkerchief, yet I found myself regretting its loss.
The thought of her discarding it troubled me more than I cared to admit.
The stitching, though haphazard, seemed a perfect representation of her character—a woman of such quick intelligence surely found little satisfaction in the monotonous journey of needle through fabric.
Indeed, I could never have imagined Miss Elizabeth to be an accomplished embroiderer, nor do I comprehend why such a tedious pursuit is lauded as one of the ‘womanly arts’ meant to entice a gentleman into matrimony.
Mrs. Hurst was a fine embroiderer, and so was Miss Bingley, while Georgiana was precise, enduring the chore and never quite completing her work.
If anything, a woman’s patience for such dull work could reflect on her conversational style, insipid and without opinion. I hence decided that Elizabeth’s wit and liveliness were far more captivating than any needlework could ever be.
My pockets already contained her dark-green ribbon, and adding a handkerchief would have added to my growing list of improprieties involving Miss Elizabeth Bennet.
While up on the summit of Oakham Mount, I had thought to drop it there, but when Elizabeth pointed toward the stone house nestled in its valley of gardens and said, that is my home, I completely fumbled my innocent ribbon drop.
Because I had looked at it, and instead of seeing a modest estate in a county I had no intention of remaining, I had seen a house with candlelight in its windows and smoke from its kitchen, and I had thought—unbidden, irrational, and entirely without strategic merit—that it looked warm.
And now, having lost the opportunity to toss the ribbon for Cinnamon to retrieve, I was sitting in my dressing gown at the edge of my bed, turning the green silk between my fingers, contemplating the smoothness and the fact that it had caressed her cheek.
I could not keep this, especially when I had said to her, it will turn up.
That had been a mistake because my sister, more insightful than I had expected, had said that my pocket was a safer place for a crooked hem.
The observation had been presented as wit.
It was, in fact, intelligence, and my sister had developed an alarming facility for intelligence since Elizabeth Bennet’s arrival.
The solution was obvious. Plant the ribbon in a location that could be innocently explained and yet found only by Elizabeth—not the household staff or Miss Bingley or her married sister, and definitely not the inquisitive cat who would only bring it back to me as her gift—it would have to be the library, naturally.
Which was why I found myself at midnight, standing in the Netherfield library holding a copy of Maria Edgeworth’s novel, Belinda, that I had located amongst the hidden collection of romantic literature.
The novel spoke about a young woman of principle navigating the expectations of a society. The spine was cracked at the third chapter; it would be the sort of book Elizabeth would discover and devour.
And it was also the sort of book Caroline would never touch.
I laid the ribbon between the pages and then set it on the bottom shelf, right between a series of agricultural pamphlets that would not interest Georgiana.
I was under no illusion that Elizabeth would suppose she had left it inside the book, but she could not know that I was the one who had found her ribbon and kept it in my pocket near my heart for days.
Picking up my candlestick, I made my way from the back shelves toward the doorway when soft slippered footsteps alerted me.
I froze, ducking down beside the bottom shelf, quickly snuffing out my candle.
The footsteps stopped at the threshold, and I cursed the thin curl of smoke rising from the extinguished wick.
By the light of the banked fire and her own candle, I saw Elizabeth enter on tiptoe.
She was wearing a rose-colored cotton wrapper, tied at the waist over a nightgown, and her hair was down, lustrous in the light of the candle.
It fell past her shoulders in dark waves, slightly longer on one side, as if she had trimmed it herself.
I had spent days studying her face framed by bonnets and pins and the rigid architecture of propriety, and without it she was indescribably extraordinary, or as Bingley would say, like an angel, an especially dark and mischievous one.
She had not seen me. I was below her sightline, and for a fraction of a second, I had the option to announce myself, to say, Miss Bennet, the library is occupied, in the calm, measured tones of a gentleman who happened to be reading agricultural pamphlets at midnight.
I should have done so, and I opened my mouth to do so, and instead I watched her cross to the armchair.
She was carrying something white and folded, clutched against her chest with the tension of a woman transporting contraband.
My cravat.
The one that had vanished from my dressing room. She could not have taken it, but a certain creature most certainly could have.
Elizabeth was in the same predicament. She had an intimate item of mine, and she had kept it and was looking for a place to drop it innocently.
I saw her hold it up, almost caressing it, the cravat that had been wrapped around my neck, and I swallowed.
She studied the armchair and moved to drape it over the arm, but something stopped her, and she glanced at the partially open door before closing it, lest anyone happened to intrude.
I held my breath as she appeared to change her mind, the internal debate playing out in the tilt of her head—a fifteen-degree angle.
Her lips were pressed together, and she twirled her loose hair around a finger, a nervous gesture I had never seen before when her hair was pinned.
This belonged to the private nighttime Elizabeth, and I…
should not be watching, but my eyes refused to blink.
And then, because Providence could not leave well alone, she wheeled around and turned toward my bookshelf so fast I could not reasonably move. And then her slippered foot caught on my boot, and she made a sound that wasn’t quite a scream, her arms flailing for balance.
I caught her, and her eyes widened. Her mouth opened to scream, but by some acrobatics that only her vocal cords could perform, she swallowed it. Still clutching my cravat, she dropped the candlestick, which guttered and went out, leaving only the dim light of the banked fire.
“Miss Bennet,” I said in the darkness.
The fact that I was holding her, clad only in a rosy wrapper and nightgown with her hair down, most certainly qualified as a compromise—but not if she hadn’t identified me.
“Mr. Darcy,” she said, removing any deniability on my part. “What are you—why are you in here?”
“I was reading.”
“In the dark?” Her gaze, no doubt now adjusted to the low light, dropped to my dressing gown and the open collar before returning to my face with the velocity of a woman who had seen enough to form an impression and was determined not to revisit it. “You are not dressed.”
“I am dressed for a private context that did not anticipate company, although I was placed in a position to prevent your fall.” The catching was automatic, but the holding on was not, and I still had not let her go. “Are you quite steady?”
“Perfectly.” She was breathing rather harder as I raised her and stood to my full height.
I can attest that the letting go was not automatic, but I stepped back stiffly and produced the book I had hidden. “I have located a book you might be interested in.”
“In the middle of the night? In the dark?” She raised a skeptical eyebrow when I shoved the Belinda novel at her. “I believe you might have found something of mine?”
“I can explain,” she said, exchanging the cravat for the book, where the green ribbon protruded like a tattler. “Cinnamon brought it to my room. I could not have put it in the laundry—the maid, or Mrs. Nicholls, would have—”
“Drawn conclusions.”
“Devastating conclusions.”
Comprehension dawned on her. She pulled her ribbon from between the pages. “You had it in the orchard when I searched?”
“Yes, I cannot hide anything from you, it seems. Cinnamon found it yesterday.”
“And that is why you said it will turn up—you had it in your pocket?”
“Yes, but I could not return it. One does not produce a lady’s ribbon from one’s waistcoat and say, I believe this is yours. I have been carrying it against my chest since yesterday, without inviting questions I had no strategy for answering.”
She pressed her lips together, and the pressing was not quite suppression and not quite a smile. It was the expression of a woman who had discovered that the man standing before her in his dressing gown was exactly as absurd as she was.
“So your scheme,” she said, with the slow deliberation of a woman who is going to say the thing and intends to enjoy the saying of it, “was to hide my ribbon inside a novel. At midnight.”
“It was a sound plan.”
“And my scheme was to drape your cravat over an armchair at midnight, except I had changed my mind and decided to stuff it in the rathole that Cinnamon had used behind the bottom shelves when I had stumbled across you crouching at the selfsame location.”
“Not quite as sound.”
“And we have both crept through a dark house in our nightclothes to execute these unsound plans, and have instead collided with each other, which rather defeats the purpose of secrecy.” She looked at the cravat in my hand, then at the ribbon in hers, and then she giggled, and I coughed back a laugh, because it was still dark, and the corridors were silent, but for our suppressed laughter.
“We are a pair of fools,” she said, catching her breath.
“Exceedingly careful fools. The planning was meticulous.” I picked up her dropped candle and lit it in the fire, handing it back to her.
“Better than leaving it on the breakfast table.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “In front of Miss Bingley.”
“Definitely.”
The laughter settled, but the warmth of it remained—an ember in the space between us that neither of us moved to extinguish.
She stood in the low light, the ribbon threaded through her fingers, her hair curling against the collar of her wrapper in ways that candlelight should not have been permitted to illuminate, and I felt the full weight of the evening’s absurdity tilt toward something that was not absurd at all.
“We must never speak of this,” I said.
“Agreed. The cravat was on the chair.”
“And the ribbon was in the book.”
“We were never in this library.”
“Certainly not simultaneously.”
“And certainly not in our—” She gestured at our respective states of attire, declining to complete the sentence.
A soft, decisive burp from behind the bottom shelf broke the silence, and Cinnamon emerged from the rat passage, her private thoroughfare. She looked first at me and then at Elizabeth, her cat eyes glowing in the dark.
“Our midnight courier,” Elizabeth said. “A cat with questionable boundaries.” She straightened, and the movement brought her closer than the previous arrangement, and neither of us corrected the distance.
“I should go now. You are still my employer, Mr. Darcy, and I am still your sister’s companion, and this,” she waved her hand, “whatever this is would be a scandal of such magnificent proportions that even Mama could not spin it into an advantage.”
“I rather beg to differ, your mother is resourceful.”
She chuckled, shaking her head, but no doubt admitting that her mother could call it a compromise, and we would be well on our way to the altar, a notion I found quite interesting.
She turned toward the door, but Cinnamon did not follow, watching us both as though waiting for a scene that had not yet played.
“Miss Bennet.” The words arrived before the thought, and the thought arrived only in time to observe that I had already begun speaking. “Before you go. At the assembly next week. Might I request the honor of a dance?”
She turned back, and the firelight caught the edge of her jaw, the line of her throat, and the expression on her face—not surprise or coyness, but the steady, open regard of a woman hearing a question she had not expected and choosing not to hide behind wit.
“Yes.”
One word, unadorned, without a barb, turning a simple affirmative into the most dangerous thing Elizabeth Bennet had ever said to me, precisely because it carried nothing but itself.
“Good night, Mr. Darcy.”
“Good night, Elizabeth.”
The name escaped. I heard it leave, and the hearing was like watching a horse bolt from a stable—too late to stop, too sudden to deny, and the consequences were galloping toward an uncertain horizon.
She paused, one step past me, one hand on Belinda, the other on the doorframe.
“Elizabeth,” she repeated, very softly. “That is the first time you have used my name.”
“It was a lapse, and I apologize.”
“Do not,” she said, and left, Cinnamon following her silently.
I stood in the library holding a cravat that smelled faintly of lavender, listening to her footsteps retreating, and then, because it would have been unseemly had I followed her from the library, especially at this late hour, I lit my candlestick and sat down in the wing chair, picking up a treatise on crop rotation or turnip yields, I wasn’t sure because I did not read a single word.