Chapter 18 #3
He served. I returned. He sent it back at an angle that required me to cross the entire width of our court, and I reached it, barely, with a backhand that floated high, too high, an invitation for a smash.
Darcy did not smash it. He tapped it gently, just over the rope, so that it dropped at my feet like a feather surrendering to gravity. It was the sporting equivalent of mercy, and I found it infuriating because I missed it.
“Five-two. Do not patronize me, Mr. Darcy.”
“I would not dare, Miss Bennet.”
“That drop shot was patronizing.”
“It was tactical.”
“It was condescension. You had the angle for a smash and chose to be gentle. I do not require gentleness.”
“Very well,” he said. “You still missed.”
His next serve came at me with a velocity that implied he had taken my request to heart. I returned it. He slammed it back. I lunged, saved it, drove it toward Caroline, who shrieked and ducked, and the shuttlecock sailed past her head.
“Six-two!” I said. “Mrs. Hurst, we are winning.”
“I am aware. I have contributed almost nothing to the effort, and I find the experience most agreeable.”
Caroline raised her battledore. “I require a breather. Refreshment. Lemonade.”
From the far court, the sounds of Bingley’s match carried across the lawn—cheerful and increasingly lopsided.
Jane was playing with the quiet, devastating competence she applied to everything, and Mary had discovered that the optimal angle of return was forty-three degrees from the perpendicular, which she announced after every successful shot.
“Forty-three degrees, Jane. I am increasingly confident in the mathematics.”
“You are increasingly confident in everything, Mary, and we are winning, which I suspect is related.”
Bingley, meanwhile, hit every shot to Jane’s side, as if the shuttlecock were a love letter he kept sending to the wrong address. Georgiana compensated with fierce returns and increasing exasperation.
“Mr. Bingley, you are hitting it to Miss Bennet again.”
“Am I? Terribly sorry. The angle just naturally—”
“The angle naturally goes to the other side, Mr. Bingley. Miss Mary is unguarded, and you keep serving to Jane.”
The use of Jane’s Christian name, in Georgiana’s mouth, landed oddly—too familiar for a girl she had met twice, and carrying an echo of Caroline’s voice that made my skin prickle.
Had Caroline been coaching Georgiana to think of Jane as an intimate rather than a formal acquaintance?
Was the familiarity organic, or had it been planted?
Meanwhile, our game had stood still. Following Caroline’s pronounced limp toward Mrs. Nicholl’s lemonade table, Mrs. Hurst, too, declared herself winded.
“Shall we call the set?” she asked. “I believe we are so far ahead that they have no opportunity to win.”
Darcy grimaced, his gaze meeting mine with a silent challenge, but he was too gentlemanly to insist we continue. He retrieved Caroline’s abandoned battledore and the shuttlecock and stood aside to allow me to pass to the side of the far court. It was all I could do not to gloat.
The game wasn’t going well for Bingley and Georgiana.
“You’re letting Jane win!” Georgiana shrieked.
“I am not. Miss Bennet is tall. Nothing gets by her.”
“So am I,” Georgiana said. “Her height is not why you are sending every shot directly to her so that she can return it at your feet, where you swing and miss. You are feeding her points, Mr. Bingley.”
“I am doing no such thing!”
“You are. I counted. Seven points you have directed to Jane’s side when Mary was open. Seven.”
Jane hid her face behind her battledore, while Mary looked thoughtful. Bingley’s ears turned a shade of red that his complexion had no capacity to conceal.
“Miss Darcy, I assure you, I am playing to the best of my—the sun was in my—it is a very small court—”
“The sun is behind you,” Georgiana said, with the same flat delivery Darcy used when correcting Bingley’s biscuit counting, and the resemblance was so precise that I very nearly dropped my battledore.
“What is the score?” I asked.
“Eleven to four,” Mary announced with the satisfaction of a mathematician whose theorem had been proven. “The decisive factor was Mr. Bingley’s persistent inability to serve anywhere other than Miss Bennet’s forehand.”
“I deny that categorically,” Bingley said. “I served to Miss Mary at least twice.”
“Once,” Mary corrected. “I counted.”
“Mr. Bingley was on your team, ladies,” Georgiana accused. “He did not even try to win. I was running everywhere, and he was just smiling at her!”
The lawn went quiet. Bingley’s grin faltered, not into shame but into the bewildered innocence of a man who has been caught doing something he did not know he was doing.
“I was not—that is, I certainly tried to—the angle was difficult, and Miss Bennet has a very strong return—”
“Jane’s return is excellent,” I confirmed, which did not help Bingley’s case at all.
“You see?” Georgiana threw her hands up. “Even Miss Elizabeth agrees. You were not playing to win. You were playing to watch Miss Bennet hit things, and I was doing all the work.”
Jane, who had been listening to this assessment of Bingley’s priorities with a composure that would have done credit to a portrait by Gainsborough, allowed herself one small, private smile directed at the grass rather than at any particular person, but luminous nonetheless.
Bingley caught it. The bewildered innocence softened into something quieter, specific, and for the second time that morning, I watched Charles Bingley look at my sister as though everything else in the garden—the battledores, the lemonade, the assembled company, and Hertfordshire itself—had become scenery arranged for the purpose of framing her.
“I shall do better in the second set,” he promised Georgiana. “You have my word as a gentleman and a sportsman.”
“Your word as a sportsman is presently valued at four points out of a possible eleven, Mr. Bingley, which is not a strong negotiating position.”
Darcy made a sound. It might have been a cough or something else entirely, and if he was laughing at his sister’s decimation of his best friend’s sporting honor, he concealed it behind a very timely sip of lemonade.
Georgiana, in a rare fit of display, threw the shuttlecock at Bingley, flung the battledore racquet beneath a bench, and stalked off in a huff.
“Mr. Bingley,” Caroline called across the lawn, “would you be a dear and fetch Miss Darcy a glass of lemonade? She is quite flushed. And while you are at it, you might retrieve her battledore from beneath the bench—she dropped it when you startled her, poor lamb.”
Bingley went, because Bingley went wherever he was directed with the cheerful obedience of a man who saw no reason not to be helpful.
He brought the lemonade, presented it with a bow, retrieved the battledore, and returned it to Georgiana with a smile that was kind and general and exactly the sort of attention that, if observed from a distance, might be mistaken for courtship by anyone inclined to mistake it.
I watched Caroline watch Bingley serve Georgiana, and the satisfaction on her face was the satisfaction of a woman watching her chess pieces advance.
Darcy, meanwhile, watched me, and his brow contracted in a way that suggested he was entirely unaware that something was being arranged.
The owl, I realized, was not as watchful as I thought.