6. A Breakfast of Questions #2
“The customs are exactly the same, and you know it perfectly well,” his sister replied archly.
“You lectured me for half an hour last autumn on the significance of a second dance, and you were very firm that a gentleman does not stand up twice with a lady he does not mean to distinguish.” Miss Darcy sat back with the satisfied air of a barrister who has produced the decisive document.
“And so, when I am out, I shall expect the same liberty. If any gentleman asks me twice, I shall accept and cite my brother’s excellent example. ”
“You will do nothing of the kind.”
“But you have set the precedent.”
“I have set no precedent. Mrs. Darcy has described a sequence of unrelated events in Hertfordshire, and you have built a cathedral upon it.”
Elizabeth, who had just recounted an evening that bore only the faintest resemblance to the truth—the real Darcy having stood against the wall and, when pressed by Bingley, delivered that infamous slight about her not being handsome enough to tempt him—found the irony delicious.
That this same man had chosen to marry a woman he once found barely tolerable was a twist she savored, as she idly turned her butter knife.
Darcy could hardly contradict her invented courtship, and Georgiana’s curiosity rendered her first Pemberley breakfast far more diverting, especially as the footman seemed intent on memorizing the texture of his shoes.
“And dear, sister Elizabeth,” Georgiana asked, perking her nose with a measure of sisterly impudence, “did you fall in love before the two dances were finished?”
“I am not that quick, dear sister Georgiana.” Elizabeth returned her informality. “This was how we began. The falling came later, and as most falls, one does not quite know the moment one’s footing went.”
This, Elizabeth reflected, was rather more poetic than the truth deserved, and she felt a faint prick of conscience. Yet Georgiana leaned forward, toast forgotten, eyes alight, and Darcy had grown so still that the moment seemed to crystallize, and Elizabeth could not bring herself to disturb it.
“He came to Netherfield—Mr. Bingley’s estate, near Longbourn, and was often in company with my family. My sister Jane was ill and stayed there for a week, nursing a cold. I went to tend her, and your brother and I found ourselves thrown together a good deal more than either of us had planned.”
“And what happened?”
“We argued.”
“You argued?”
“Incessantly. About books, about character, and whether a man may take pride in reserve or whether reserve is merely pride dressed in better clothes. Your brother held one position, and hence, I held the other. Neither of us won.”
“That does not sound like a love story.”
“On the contrary, Miss Darcy. It is the best kind. The worst love stories are the ones where everyone agrees from the start, and there is nothing left to discover.” Elizabeth turned the question with the lightness of a woman redirecting a dance.
“But I have spoken enough. You must ask your brother when he first knew. I have always wondered, and he has never told me, and you are far braver than I am.”
She delivered this with the purest, most innocent encouragement—a bride appealing to her sister-in-law for information she herself was too modest to request—and watched the trap close.
Georgiana turned to her brother with the implacable expectancy of a girl who has been given permission by the highest authority in the room. “Fitzwilliam. When did you first know?”
Darcy looked at Elizabeth. She held his gaze with a serenity she did not feel, and offered him no escape whatsoever.
“I do not know that I can name the moment,” he said, after a pause in which Elizabeth could hear the clock and a particularly tardy rooster crowing with great effort, and perhaps the entire house listening, or so it seemed, for its master to say the thing he never said.
“I recall… there was an evening. She was at Netherfield, attending her sister, and the company had been talking, and she said something, I cannot recall the exact words, that made me think I had been wrong about a great many things I had been certain of.” He cleared his throat. “I believe it began there.”
Elizabeth had not expected him to answer at all, let alone with something that sounded, against every probability, true.
She remembered the exact evening when she had been sparring with him over the nature of defects, of character, and whether a resentful temper was a defect or a feature, and he had looked at her with that expression she had not been able to read, believing it to be contempt.
“I remember that evening very well,” she said, and watched him go still.
“Your brother informed the company that he could not call above half a dozen women of his acquaintance truly accomplished, and that most ladies so described by society fell very far short of the word. He then produced a list of requirements so exacting that I told him he had described a creature no reasonable woman could aspire to and no actual woman would wish to be.”
“What were the requirements?” Georgiana asked, folding her hands in front of her.
“Oh, the usual modest expectations. She must paint, play an instrument, and possess—what was it, Mr. Darcy?—a certain air in her manner of walking and tone of voice. And to all this, she must add the improvement of her mind by extensive reading. I believe the assembled company was very impressed, though I cannot speak for Miss Bingley, who agreed with everything your brother said and then asked me to take a turn about the room.”
“That does sound like Fitzwilliam.” Georgiana gleamed, her eyes darting between them. “Mrs. Darcy, you must be one of the very few women in England who meet my brother’s extraordinary requirements. I long to view your paintings and emulate you in your manner of walking—in all that you do, in fact.”
Elizabeth, who neither painted nor played the pianoforte with any distinction—her mother had said as much—and whose walk Miss Bingley had once likened to a country trudge, felt a laugh rising that she could not quite contain.
“I fear your brother’s list and my actual accomplishments have never been properly introduced.
I do read a great deal, I confess. But I play poorly, I do not draw, and my French is just sufficient to procure a meal in Paris, but not a second invitation. ”
“Then Fitzwilliam has either revised his standards or abandoned them entirely, which in either case is the most romantic thing he has ever done.”
Darcy, intent upon his plate as though hoping it might swallow him, remained silent. Elizabeth glanced at him and saw not embarrassment, but the look of a man measuring his former certainties against his present choices, and finding the sum unequal, yet caring less than he ought.
Georgiana, evidently satisfied with the confession, turned her artillery toward the future with a pivot so swift and artless that Elizabeth was caught entirely flat-footed.
“And when shall I expect a new niece or a nephew? Because Hannah says that once people are married, babies come quite soon, and Thomas is not properly a Darcy baby, and I should so love a real one. I could teach her the pianoforte if it is a girl, or take him riding if it is a boy, and there are the most darling christening gowns in the attic that were Fitzwilliam’s, and—”
“Georgiana.” Darcy’s voice carried a note Elizabeth had not heard from him before—not anger, not even reproach, but something startled and almost stricken, as though his sister had put her hand through a wall he had thought solid.
“What? It is a perfectly natural question. Married people have babies. Everyone knows that.”
“It is not a question one puts to a bride at breakfast.”
“But when else am I to ask? You never speak of anything important unless one ambushes you, and Elizabeth does not seem the sort of woman who minds a direct question.”
Elizabeth froze, and Darcy noticed, but not for any reason he could have guessed.
The sum total of her apparent accomplishment of having a reading mind had devolved into that shameful thing she carried out of a Cheapside evening—the recklessness of having kissed a man after an evening of literary debates.
Her fingers tightened around the chocolate cup.
“Miss Darcy, you are very good at planning so far ahead,” she said, and her voice held steady because it had to. “But I am afraid your brother and I must first learn to share a breakfast table without startling the footman. Babies are rather advanced.”