Chapter Nine #2
Elizabeth looked at her teacup. Her face was composed. Beneath that careful layer of composure, something shifted and settled in a way she did not immediately have language for. She could not have said anything she was feeling.
Georgiana Darcy, at her elbow, said in a voice pitched only for Elizabeth: “My brother does that sometimes. Says the thing no one else will say.”
“I have noticed,” Elizabeth said.
“He does not do it for everyone.” Miss Darcy looked at her brother with a slight tilt to her head, as one might examine some novelty. “I thought you ought to know that.”
Elizabeth considered this. Outside the drawing-room windows the afternoon light was going, the early dark of winter settling over the park.
The fire was warm, and the room was full of ordinary noise.
She thought about what it meant that he had said it, that Georgiana Darcy had thought to bring her attention to it, and filed it carefully away with the other things she was keeping.
“Thank you,” she said to Miss Darcy.
Georgiana Darcy smiled into her teacup, satisfied, and Elizabeth thought that she liked her very much indeed.
∞∞∞
The gathering at Netherfield that evening had included an invitation to supper.
Though Elizabeth could not have relished accepting Miss Bingley’s hospitality, having Jane accept Mr Bingley’s was something else entirely.
Then, too, Elizabeth found herself unexpectedly eager to spend more time with Miss Darcy — and with her brother.
Miss Darcy was placed across from her, between Mr Bingley and one of the Lucas brothers.
Amused and approving, Elizabeth watched her navigate the supper conversation with the careful attention of someone still learning the instrument.
She was better at it than she knew. Georgiana listened well, which was rarer than it ought to be, and when she spoke, she said something worth saying.
Several times, she glanced down the table toward her brother, not seeking rescue, Elizabeth thought, but checking for his approval.
She seemed to find her brother’s familiar face useful for calibration.
Mr Darcy was at the table’s far end. He, too, sought his sister’s gaze with a consistency that Elizabeth found entirely legible, now that Miss Darcy had given her the key to reading him.
He was watching over her. Quietly, without announcement, without making his sister feel watched.
It was a skill to care so visibly and invisibly all at once, Elizabeth thought.
As an older brother, Mr Darcy was most respectable.
Elizabeth ate her soup and spoke brightly about things of little consequence. She talked to Charlotte on her left about the lending library’s new acquisitions, all the while instinctively aware that Mr Darcy sat at the end of the table.
The meal progressed without incident until the second course.
Elizabeth had been half-attending to a conversation between Mrs Hurst, who sat on her right, and Mrs Pearce, who had been placed on the other side of the table from her.
Though she found herself more than a little amused by their passionate discussion of which London milliners were best, as though it were a topic of cardinal importance, it seemed at least a harmless discussion.
Then Mrs Hurst shifted abruptly in her seat, her elbow catching the edge of a tray as the maid walked by.
The wine went across Mrs Hurst’s sleeve in a long arc, drawing a line of red.
The girl left holding the decanter was one of the younger housemaids, brought in to supplement the supper service, and was no more than fifteen.
She turned the colour of the tablecloth and stood frozen, her tray and the decanter clutched to her chest and her eyes wide with horror.
Mrs Hurst looked at her sleeve. Then she looked at the girl.
“You clumsy creature!” she exclaimed. “Have you no eyes?”
The girl’s hands trembled so violently that the decanter rattled against the table.
“I — I am so sorry, madam—”
“Sorry!” Mrs Hurst repeated, her voice sharp with indignation. “Sorry will not restore this gown. It is quite ruined. It is silk. Look what you have done to it!”
Elizabeth felt a tightening in her chest. She had seen the moment clearly: the careless movement, the inevitable consequence.
The maid had been at fault only in being young and inexperienced. The girl’s lower lip moved. She was holding herself very still, trying desperately not to cry. A frozen, uncomfortable silence fell over the table as Mrs Hurst drew in a sharp breath to continue berating the girl.
“I beg your pardon.” Elizabeth’s voice was clear and calm. “It was my fault entirely. I reached for the salt and must have disturbed her tray without realising it. I am sorry, Mrs Hurst — if it cannot be cleaned adequately, please do send a bill to my father.”
Every guest at the table looked at her. Mrs Hurst blinked in surprise, her anger suddenly interrupted. The housemaid stared at her, looking as much terrified as grateful.
“It was —” Mrs Hurst began.
“Entirely my fault,” Elizabeth repeated, pleasantly and with absolute finality, and picked up her fork.
There was a tenuous beat of silence to see if anything further would transpire from the incident. When Mrs Hurst turned her attention away from the girl and to the tending of her stained sleeve, the conversation resumed, filling the space left by the incident with smooth efficiency.
The housemaid withdrew from the room with her tray, and supper continued.
∞∞∞
Darcy had seen it all.
He had seen Mrs Hurst’s sleeve catch the glass, had seen the wine spill, and watched the girl’s face crumple in distress.
From his position down the table, he had observed the entire sequence, from Mrs Hurst’s quiet viciousness to Elizabeth’s intervention, with a degree of intensity he was glad no one else had noticed.
He set down his own fork and picked it up again, and said nothing. There was nothing he could usefully say, and because anything he said would draw attention to Elizabeth’s fiction and undo the thing she had done.
But he thought about it.
He thought about it during the remainder of the fish course and throughout the meat. Though Darcy noted absently that it had been cooked as flawlessly as his own cook at Pemberley could have done, he hardly tasted it.
Other things were of greater importance — of consuming importance.
Elizabeth had not hesitated. A few words, an assumption of blame for something that was not her fault, a bill that would probably never be sent, and the incident was soon forgotten.
But there had been no calculation visible in it, no pause for assessment.
She had seen the thing happening and had simply stopped it in the most efficient way available to her and had returned to her supper.
Darcy knew he was cataloguing her virtues with a thoroughness that was not entirely consistent with the careful distance he had been maintaining. He was not sure when he had begun to do it. Even aware of it as he was now, he did not stop.
After supper, the party moved to the drawing room. Georgiana was persuaded to play, which required very little persuasion. She went to the instrument with the relief of someone who has been making conversation for three hours and is ready to let music do it instead. As always, she played well.
Elizabeth was standing near the window when Darcy came to stand beside her.
“Your sister plays beautifully,” she said lightly, entirely free from calculation or flattery.
He swept his gaze to his sister. “She does,” he said. “She has worked very hard at it.”
“It does not sound like work.”
“No,” he said, returning his attention to Elizabeth. “That is how you know how hard the work has been.”
She glanced at him with a quizzical expression, a slight crease between her brows, as if she were assessing him anew. It ought to have made him uncomfortable, her scrutiny, yet it did not.
Elizabeth gestured to Georgiana, who positively glowed as she played. “She seems happy this evening.”
“She is.” Darcy paused, weighing briefly the risk of sharing more. “As am I. She was nervous about meeting you.”
Elizabeth looked at him expectantly.
“She need not have been,” he said, hoping and believing that Elizabeth would understand what he had left unsaid.
She smiled and turned back to the music. Georgiana’s playing filled the room, soaring and beautiful.
“I was also nervous about meeting her,” Elizabeth admitted after a moment.
“That is a compliment,” he said. “That you would place importance on the meeting.”
“Of course,” she said, sounding a little surprised. “How could I not place importance on meeting your sister? Even if present events are reversed, and she does not become my sister, how could I pass up such an opportunity to make out your character?”
Darcy laughed at that, as she had obviously wished. “And now that you have met Georgiana, what does the meeting tell you about my character?”
“Only good things,” she told him. “Your sister is a very fine young woman. It speaks well of you that you have raised her.”
“Thank you,” Darcy said, more moved by the compliment than he could say. “I hope that you and Georgiana will be good friends.”
A soft smile curved on Elizabeth’s mouth.
It was not a remarkable thing to say, yet Darcy was keenly aware that it was the first thing he had said to her all week that was not careful, in the stiff, artificial way of their recent conversations. It was, instead, simply true, offered without management.
“I hope so as well,” Elizabeth said softly, and fell silent. They stood together in companionable quiet while Georgiana played, and the fire settled, and outside the Hertfordshire dark pressed close against the glass.
∞∞∞