Chapter 29 #2
As if checking with me, his gaze found mine, and whatever he found on my face must have emboldened him because he turned to face my father.
“Mr. Bennet. I owe you an explanation and an apology.”
Papa lowered his spectacles. “An apology. How refreshing. I receive so few.” He did not sit, nor did he offer Darcy a chair. The standing was intentional—two men, vertical, measuring. “For what offense, specifically? I understand there are several from which to choose.”
“For telling your daughter to manage her own family while I managed mine. For dismissing her intelligence, and for failing to see what she saw.” Darcy did not look at me, keeping his attention on Papa.
He was not performing for my benefit but submitting to my father’s authority.
“Elizabeth warned me that Miss Bingley posed a threat to my sister. I dismissed her concern because accepting it would have required me to examine my failure to protect Georgiana, and I chose my pride over her perception. The result is the scene in the library that I understand the neighborhood has already been informed of.”
“My daughter’s intelligence,” Papa said. “I recall you had a public opinion on that subject. At the Meryton Assembly. You said, I believe, that sharp tongues were a common trait in country society. That her mind was—what was the word?—ordinary.”
The room held its breath. Mama’s needle paused. Jane and Bingley, still holding hands by the settee, went very still.
“I was wrong.” Darcy’s voice carried no qualification.
“Her intelligence is the least ordinary quality I have ever encountered. I said otherwise because I was frightened of it. I classified what I could not control, and it is the sin I have committed against your daughter from the first evening I met her.”
Papa studied him, and then he simply nodded.
Not a grand gesture. Not approval spoken aloud or permission granted with ceremony. A nod—the small, grave acknowledgment of one flawed man recognizing another flawed man’s attempt to be less so. It was the most my father had to give, and Darcy received it without asking for more.
He turned to me and crossed the drawing room, and I did not move, because he had to come to me. I wasn’t Cinnamon always crossing to him, and in fact, I neglected to note that she had been at his feet, shedding orange hairs on his damp trousers and sitting on his boots.
He stopped in front of me. His coat was still dripping, and his hair was absurd—dark and wet and falling across his forehead in a way that made him look younger, less assembled, more like the man who had chased a pig through a muddy lane for a woman he had not yet admitted he loved.
From the pocket of his coat, he drew a book.
Belinda. The cover was water-spotted now, the edges softened by weather, and from between the pages, a green velvet ribbon trailed like a confession.
“I believe this belongs to you,” he said.
“It belongs to the Netherfield library,” I said, because precision was my defense and I was defending.
“I meant the ribbon.” His eyes held mine with the raw, unguarded attention of a man who was looking at me, seeing me as he had in the kitchen, behind the shelves, underneath an apple tree—without barriers and boundaries, and now, in a room with my family, his gaze took me in, honest and open, the look of a man who regarded me, not as an employee, but a woman worth knowing.
I took the book. The ribbon was soft between my fingers, familiar as a secret I had been keeping from myself.
“Elizabeth.” He said my name. Not Miss Bennet. Not a whisper, corrected afterward. My Christian name, spoken at full volume in a crowded drawing room. “I wish you to have it, because you left off reading, and you haven’t been reading since you left.”
“Thank you, Mr. Darcy.” I pressed the book against my chest. “I left off at Lady Delacour—the part where Belinda finally sees past the wit and the performance to the woman dying underneath. I confess I found it difficult to read. One does not enjoy discovering that the mask was never indifference but pain.”
He said nothing. He did not need to.
“I believe,” Georgiana said, drawing the attention of the room, “we have had sufficient seriousness for one evening. Mary? Shall we?”
Mary looked back at her from the pianoforte where she had been seated.
She struck a chord, and it was not the opening of a hymn or Haydn.
I recognized it immediately—the first bright bar of the country jig, the laughing D-major thing I taught Georgiana.
And Mary’s fingers danced as fast and lightly on the keys as if she had known the jig her entire life—which she did.
Bingley rose and extended his hand. “Miss Bennet, Jane, will you?”
Jane’s smile brightened her face to light four chandeliers. They moved to the small cleared space near the fire while Mama asked the footmen to move furniture, clearly expecting an impromptu family assembly to form.
Georgiana watched them for one full turn of the jig. Then she collected the borrowed nightdress around her ankles, crossed to her brother, and took his hand.
“Dance with me.”
“Georgiana, I do not—“
“You do. Elizabeth taught me, and I am teaching you, and you are going to dance a jig in Mrs. Bennet’s drawing room in a wet coat, and it is going to be the least dignified thing you have done in your entire life, and you are going to survive it.”
He looked at her, and he laughed. It was the same laugh I had heard in the lane when we stood holding a ruined bonnet between us after the business with the pig, and the hearing of it now, in this room, made me start smiling again
Brother and sister turned around the room, freely and naturally. He let her lead, a man releasing something he had been gripping for years, and the drawing room contracted around them as they turned.
She danced him around me, turning and skipping and then, when I found myself bouncing to the jaunty tune, she placed her brother’s hand in the air between us and stepped back, her eyes glinting with mischief, as if to say, I brought him here. The rest is yours.
And Darcy stood, wet coat and ruined cravat, hair in his eyes, and he bowed. “Miss Elizabeth. May I have this dance?” as if requesting a dance at the finest ball in London.
I curtsied in my wrinkled dress, my hair loose, flowing down my back, and my sleeves still wet from assisting Georgiana’s bath.
“You may, Mr. Darcy.”
And this—was the yes I had saved for him. And so we danced, and I did not say anything clever. I laughed, and I spun, we held hands and hooked arms, and this was the way life should be.
Fun.