Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
TOO MUCH GINGER
Darcy
A gentleman does not enter kitchens. This is not a written rule so much as an unwritten understanding, the kind that forms the foundation of civilized society alongside the prohibition on discussing money at dinner and the expectation that one does not follow a woman through a servant’s door simply because she has retreated through it.
But with Elizabeth, I had to act. She had endured Caroline’s ridiculous airs and Mrs. Hurst’s cuts. A gentleman did not enter kitchens, but what I had to say to Elizabeth could not wait.
I found her dusted with flour, cutting biscuits with the force of a woman converting her anger into baked goods.
Mrs. Reynolds at Pemberley had once explained to me that the quality of bread was often directly proportional to the baker’s fury, and that the finest loaves in Derbyshire were produced during marital arguments.
Elizabeth’s spirited pair of eyes darted toward me as if she had expected my entrance, and her quick wit made mincemeat of any excuses I might have offered, directing me to the port on the second shelf.
“I didn’t come for the port,” I said.
She turned her back on me, placing the biscuits into the oven. They would be ready in a quarter of an hour. Enough time for what I had to say.
Cinnamon, that loyal feline, wound herself sleekly around my legs. I picked her up, gaining confidence in her warmth, and cleared my throat, hoping to melt the frost.
“You need not have come,” she said without looking at me. “I am perfectly well.”
“I did not suppose you were unwell.”
“Then you came to inspect the biscuits.”
“I came because the word I used in the drawing room was insufficient.” The sentence emerged with more directness than I had planned, which was becoming a pattern in Elizabeth’s proximity.
Her interactions with Georgiana had been more than competent, and yet, when faced with criticism from the Bingley sisters, I had resorted to my cursed reserve—a contrast to Bingley’s effusiveness.
Elizabeth, however, would not make any amends easy. “Do not presume to judge your words, Mr. Darcy, especially if they are accurate.”
“Accuracy is not the hallmark of commendation. I called your work merely competent in the drawing room with Caroline and Mrs. Hurst as audience. The word I used was inadequate to the truth.”
She unfolded her arms. The unfolding was slow, and I noted it the way I noted everything about Elizabeth Bennet’s physical arrangement in space.
“Much like the commendable caraway seeds.”
“Yes, they made the Shrewsbury cake truly… unique.”
“And the drawing room renders them only adequate?”
“I am working on that.” I swallowed, my throat suddenly dry.
“You are working on a word.”
“I am working on several words. The drawing room requires a measured response, and the measure was inadequate.” I heard myself and winced internally, because I was repeating inadequate as though my vocabulary had become insufficient, which, in fairness, it had.
Elizabeth Bennet had been eroding my vocabulary since the first morning she walked into the dining room after I had dismissed her and sat down as though dismissal were a suggestion rather than a directive.
And now, she watched me with an expression bordering on annoyance rather than expectation.
“What you have done with Georgiana,” I said, and the sentence headed somewhere honest, so I let it go, “exceeds any programme I designed. The girl who accused Bingley of feeding seven points to Miss Bennet’s forehand…
the one who threw apples at the sow and climbed stiles…
That girl did not exist before you came to be her companion. ”
The tension in Elizabeth’s shoulders eased, and the easing meant the thing I had said was closer to what she needed to hear than what I had said in the drawing room.
“She is becoming,” I continued, “the person she might have been, if—”
I stopped because the sentence had been heading toward Ramsgate, toward that summer when she had been enticed and almost ruined. Innocent and unassuming, my sister had almost fallen prey to the most vile and conniving fortune hunter, but Elizabeth did not need to know.
“If? Mr. Darcy, are you well?” Elizabeth’s concern drew my thoughts back to the surface.
I shook my head, because how could a loving brother ever be well when he had failed his younger sister, an orphan dependent on him for guidance and protection?
“I had entrusted Georgiana to the care of a companion…”
Elizabeth waited. She did not prod or push—she never pushed, that was the infuriating and extraordinary thing, she opened a door and stood beside it, and the standing-beside was an invitation so gentle that declining it felt like cowardice.
“It was two years ago.” I pressed my lips tight, and Cinnamon, sensing my tension, squirmed, so I let her down. “There had been a flood in Pemberley. The dam broke, and the mill house washed away.”
Those fine eyebrows of hers lifted, but she did not inquire or comment, giving me the space I needed.
“I sent Georgiana to Ramsgate, to our usual beachside stay without me. She was only fifteen…” I trailed off.
“Mr. Darcy, you need not expose your wound.” Her touch on my arm was light. “You hinted as much—that Georgiana required the confidence of her decisions and the discernment and ability to form her opinions and judgments.”
“Yes…” I took comfort in that brief touch, too quickly removed. “That is the scope of it. She needs the strength you possess.”
“I understand my role. To skirmish in the drawing room, thrust and parry with words, to defend and argue, because a woman with her dowry has to be equipped, and you believed I was the right person to prepare her for battle.”
“Exactly, I hired you to challenge her. The arguments were a bonus.” The involuntary chuckle surprised me.
“And today, when she informed Bingley that his word as a sportsman was worth four points out of eleven and was not a strong negotiating position—that was the finest piece of oratory I have heard thus far.”
“She was rather magnificent. I did not know whether you approved of the battledore incident or whether you were composing a letter of termination.”
“I would compose a letter begging you to stay on through the next season, but that would be unfair to you. Miss Elizabeth, you have always been a guest, not in my employ, and perhaps I had spoken too hastily, and your mother had engineered this arrangement to remind me not to speak hastily.”
“To vex you, I’m sure.” Elizabeth’s lips quirked. “As I, too, agreed to the contract for that very purpose. Make no mistake, we did not need the payment.”
I closed my eyes, nodding. Of course, that had been her motive, and that of her mother. To teach me a lesson against categorizing people.
“Then I accept your vexing, Miss Elizabeth, because you are exactly the person Georgiana needs to teach her to trust her own judgment.”
“By throwing apples at pigs and skipping across boundary streams?”
“Yes.” My gaze locked with hers, involuntarily, unable to look away.
“I cannot guard her forever. She turns eighteen in the spring, and she will enter society. She will meet men who smile.” My voice dropped, and I let it, because the kitchen could hold what the drawing room could not.
“And she must be able to read the smiles that mean something from the smiles that are designed to extract something. You are teaching her that. Not through instruction but through apple-throwing and battledore accusations and the radical practice of asking a girl what she wants and then listening when she answers.”
“The word you used for that in the drawing room was competent,” Elizabeth said, and the corner of her mouth moved, and the movement was the most welcome sight in the kitchen because it meant the wall between us—the professional, contractual one—had come down by a brick, and the brick was lying on the floor between us, and neither of us was picking it up.
“I acknowledged the insufficiency of that word.”
“You did, and you are forgiven, but only because the biscuits require my attention more than your vocabulary.”
I watched her move to the oven, and the watching was the kind that I had stopped pretending was professional.
She opened the iron door, and the heat bloomed into the kitchen, carrying ginger and butter.
With the grace of experience, she pulled the tray with her hands wrapped in a cloth, bare forearms turned toward the light, and set it on the table.
Examining the golden circles with the critical eye of a woman assessing her own work, she picked one up, turned it over, blew on it, and held it out to me.
“Has the master of Pemberley ever eaten a biscuit in a kitchen?”
“I have eaten biscuits in many rooms.”
“That is not what I asked.”
“The answer is no.” I took the biscuit. It was hot on my palm, but nothing like the heat of standing so close to such a remarkable woman.
I blew on the biscuit and tried the words. “Quite adequate…” blew again, “remarkable…” blew more steam from the biscuit, “magnificent, that was your word, wasn’t it?”
She nodded, eyes intent as if her entire measure lay in my tasting of her biscuit.
I blew again. “How about extraordinary? What you did with Georgiana…” one more puff, “or perhaps simply sisterly. Like an elder sister she has never had.”
Her cheeks bloomed, pinking, and a smile brightened her face. “I have always had Jane. She is the one constant in my life, more so than my parents.”
“Yes, she is.” I bit into the biscuit.
The ginger hit first. Not the polite, measured ginger of a biscuit baked by a cook who follows recipes, but a fierce, deliberate, slightly combative ginger that tasted like the evening had felt—intense and unapologetic, like the woman who had been told her methods were inadequate and her presence constituted an infestation, who had gone to the kitchen and put it all somewhere useful.
“There is rather a lot of ginger,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Was that intentional?”
“Everything was intentional, Mr. Darcy.”
I took another bite, the ginger was excellent, and the biscuit was the first honest thing offered to me since the drawing room. The burn in the roof of my mouth was still better than any polished confections Caroline Bingley served as conversation.
And then Elizabeth’s gaze fell to my mouth, a movement she didn’t seem to register until after it happened.
I caught it because I was already observing her every detail.
That observation sent a jolt through my chest, unrelated to ginger.
I attributed it entirely to the firelight on her cheekbone, the flour dusting her jaw, and the fact that she stood mere inches away, in a warm kitchen, holding a tray of biscuits she’d baked with an angry spirit. And I wanted—
I wanted to brush the flour from her cheek, and I wanted to… But I did not touch her. My hand moved, the kind of movement that was converted into reaching for a second biscuit… from a plate held in front of her chest.
“You already have quite a lot of sisters,” I said, which was not the sentence I had been constructing.
“We Bennets are known for our sisterhood.” She held out another biscuit from her own hand, and her fingers were warm from the tray. “We can always absorb another one.”
“Georgiana would be pleased.” I took the third biscuit, and she did not immediately release it, and the interval lasted exactly long enough for us both to be fully aware of it. “As am I.”
I held her gaze, and I could not look away. And yet, this arrangement between us could not last. I had purchased my sister a companion, as an object lesson from her mother, a contract, and a six-month term. And because she was my sister’s companion, I could not…
Heat flushed my face, and I blew the steam of the third biscuit from my lips.
I took a fourth biscuit.
The ginger was still not a sufficient distraction.
“You have gone very quiet, Mr. Darcy,” Elizabeth said, watching me with the attention she gave to things she intended to understand, whether they wished to be understood or not. “That is either the ginger or a thought you do not intend to share.”
“I find myself wishing,” I began, and stopped, because the sentence had three possible endings, and two of them would have altered the course of the evening in ways I was not prepared to manage.
I chose the third, the safest, the one that revealed the shape of the thought without exposing its interior.
“I find myself wishing that the circumstances of our acquaintance were different. That you were here as Georgiana’s friend rather than by arrangement.
You deserve to be here by choice, not by contract. ”
The words landed in the kitchen with a weight that surprised me, because I had intended them as a minor observation and they had arrived as something closer to a confession.
“I am here by choice, Mr. Darcy,” she said, and her voice was steady. “The contract is the mechanism. The choice is mine. I chose to come, and I chose to stay. Neither of those decisions was made under duress, whatever Miss Bingley may imply about my tenacity.”
She held my gaze, and in the holding was a courage I could not match, because Elizabeth had just told me, in the clearest language the kitchen would permit, that she was not here for the wages.
And, being the dunce that I was, I had no idea what to do about it.
I had devised a plan to keep my sister safe, and it had led this woman to my home.
She, in turn, brought warmth, fury, ginger biscuits, and a cat that showed no respect for boundaries.
Now, the very mechanism I had created to protect Georgiana had become the obstacle between myself and the only person I—
I took a fifth biscuit.
If I were ever to have a son, I should drill into him the necessity of choosing his words with care, especially around a remarkable woman possessing a pair of very fine eyes.