5. Meryton—Wednesday, 6 December 1809
It was Saint Nicholas’s Day, the official start of the Christmas festive season.
The night before, Darcy and Bingley had discussed the various ways landholders enabled their communities to have merrier holidays.
At Pemberley, even when Darcy and his sister were away visiting their relations, supplies were accumulated for Thomasing, for Christmas Box distribution, and for doles.
One special day, the Great House was open for children’s frivolities held in the ballroom, and bags of treats—an orange from the orangery, candies, and a penny—were given out to each child in attendance.
“Honestly, Bingley, I look forward to the day when I am married and starting a family of my own,” Darcy explained. “I will be able to stay at Pemberley and personally organise and give out the boxes, children’s treats, and doles.”
Bingley was thrilled at the idea of being such a benevolent master this Christmas season.
“Whatever you decide to do, it will benefit the community even more if you purchase the things you will need locally,” Darcy informed him. “The merchants will have a more bountiful Christmas.”
Thus, the two men found themselves strolling through the small market town of Meryton, placing orders for various sorts of things that might be given away.
At the grocer’s, Bingley ordered extra flour, sugar, spices, and dried fruits to be used to bake treats for his guests and for distribution to servants and tenants.
At the chandler’s, he ordered scented soaps for his housekeeper and maids, and unscented soaps and beeswax candles to give to tenants.
Next, they went to the haberdashery to order mittens, scarves, and handkerchiefs.
On their return to the place where they had tied off their horses, Darcy discovered a grain merchant where he could buy a small can of groats and another of barley.
His turtledove loved such treats, and he happened to know where many other captive birds might enjoy a special Saint Nicholas’s Day meal.
As he made the purchase, Darcy heard loud clucking and squawking. He wheeled around to see what appeared to be three clouds of black-coloured feathers bursting from a cage.
“Lydia! Just see what you have done!” someone called.
Darcy could see three of the Bennet sisters near the cage from which Crèvecoeur hens had escaped.
This type of heavy French hen rarely attempted to fly, but these birds seemed frantic.
Their long black crests hanging in their eyes apparently made them blind, and thus their thwack-thwacking wings beat against things unseen.
One hen flapped against the milliner’s bow window, another ran into a nearby cart, and the third careened away from a spring-wagon and then proceeded to thwack the flank of the horse harnessed to the wagon.
Miss Kitty emitted a little scream as she chased a hen that took short hopping flights away from her. Miss Lydia just stood next to the cage, her mouth covered by both hands as she looked at the flapping hens in horror.
Miss Elizabeth, however, remained calm. She said in as low a voice as could be heard, “Please, Kitty, stop darting about, and especially stop screaming.” She walked to the side of one of the hens.
Darcy saw that the black feathers shone with green iridescence as the distraught bird turned in the sunlight.
Elizabeth managed to herd the hen in the direction of the cage.
Darcy could not quite contain his smile at the scene, but he hurried to be of use, pressing the can of groats into one of Elizabeth’s hands.
She began to shake the can as she gently drove the hen towards the cage.
He scattered a barley trail to the cage and handed Miss Lydia the can with the remainder of the barley and murmured, “Copy what your sister is doing for that hen.” He pointed to the hen that remained closest.
Striding towards Miss Kitty, Darcy guided her to approach the hen, slowly and calmly, from the side. The bird stopped its short, frenzied flights and began to walk back to where Misses Lydia and Elizabeth were shaking their feed cans.
It was not long before the hens had been safely driven into the cage and the door had been latched securely. Darcy asked where their carriage or wagon was. “I can carry the cage for you,” he offered.
He looked down at Miss Elizabeth for the answer, and he saw that she was flushed from the exertion of the hens’ escape, or perhaps she was embarrassed by the incident. Her reddened cheeks made her look even lovelier.
“It is this way,” she said, leading the way to the light spring-wagon he had noticed earlier.
“Where is your driver?” Darcy asked as he carefully lifted the cage into the wagon.
“I do not know,” Elizabeth said. “I was looking for him to carry the cage when Lydia decided she could carry it herself. Which, by the way, she could not quite manage to do.”
“So I saw,” he responded. He did not even try to curb his smile this time, because he had never before seen such a capable response to a market misadventure as Elizabeth’s. He put the cans of grain Miss Elizabeth held out to him into the pocket of his great coat
Bingley strode up to him, at this point, saying, “Would you introduce me to your fellow poultry-drovers, Darce?”
“Of course. Ladies, may I present to you my good friend Charles Bingley? These neighbours of yours are Miss Elizabeth Bennet, Miss Catherine Bennet, who is also called Miss Kitty, and Miss Lydia Bennet.”
“I am delighted to meet you,” Bingley said, bowing.
“And we, you,” Miss Kitty said, blushing brighter red, even, than Miss Elizabeth. All three girls dipped perfect curtsies.
“We can stay with the wagon while you look for your driver,” Darcy offered.
Miss Elizabeth took another step closer to him and whispered, “Honestly, I am afraid he may be at the inn. His name is Gilberts. Do you suppose you could—”
Darcy was shocked at the notion that someone entrusted to accompany young ladies back and forth to town might be drinking while on duty—that was her implication, he was sure—and he interrupted Elizabeth, saying, “Of course.” Bowing, he walked briskly to the inn, entered, and called out the name Gilberts.
Regarding with disgust a man who staggered when he stood up with a half-empty tankard in his hand, Darcy noted that several empty tankards nearby may or may not have been drained by the useless man.
Saying nothing at all to the Longbourn servant, Darcy simply turned on his heel and marched back out to Elizabeth. “I believe he is incapable of driving the wagon safely. I will drive your chickens home, if I have your permission.”
Elizabeth’s eyes widened. “Of course,” she said. “We would be most grateful.”
Darcy mounted into the driver’s seat, but then he had a thought: “Will you ladies ride or walk?”
“We walked here, but I would like to ride home,” Lydia said. She climbed up next to Darcy and gave him a flirtatious smile and a wink as she added, “After all, with such a handsome new driver….”
Darcy spoke very, very softly. “You may sit up here with me, Miss Lydia, if you remember that you are a young girl—thirteen years old, I was told? You are years from being out, but you may sit here as long as you act properly.”
Unlike her sisters, Lydia was not prone to blushing, but she did look embarrassed and immediately dropped her coquettish manner.
“If Lydia is riding, I suppose it would be more proper if we all rode, then,” Miss Elizabeth said.
Bingley stepped up to help the two remaining sisters into the back of the wagon. They sat together on the bench, and Elizabeth held onto the cage.
Darcy drove slowly towards Longbourn, and Bingley followed on his gelding, leading Darcy’s steed.
At Longbourn, a groom met the wagon, looking shocked at the gentleman driving. He thanked Darcy rather than enquired about the substitution. The groom called for a boy to attend to the guest’s horses and a footman to take the chickens to the kitchen.
“You gentlemen should come in for tea,” Elizabeth said with a smile. “I do not think my mother and the rest of my sisters have met you, Mr Bingley.”
“We would be very happy to join you, I thank you,” Bingley said.
During the visit, Darcy tried to keep his mind blank and his gaze politely aimed at Mrs Bennet, who spoke on and on about the weather, the gentlemen, Christmastide, the gentlemen, her own childhood memories of Christmas, the gentlemen, the parties she wished to hold during the festive season, and her hopes that the gentlemen would attend.
The number of times Darcy found his eyes locked onto Miss Elizabeth proved that he was not extremely proficient at meeting his goal of not displaying his interest—although he had to admit that Miss Elizabeth seemed to shoot quite a few glances his way, as well.
He hoped her attention to him indicated attraction, but it certainly could, instead, suggest that she was wondering why he stared at her.
Mrs Bennet, of course, flirted with Bingley as well as with Darcy, which was perhaps even more awkward than her flirtation two days before, since this time Mr Bennet was taking tea with them.
Bingley met each over-the-top compliment with a wide smile, but Darcy noticed that he was uncharacteristically quiet.
Bingley, seeming immediately enamoured, spent the entire hour sitting near the eldest Miss Bennet, smiling at her between sips of tea and nibbles of cake.
His behaviour would have been humorous if Darcy had not been as besotted by his own favoured Bennet sister.
Eventually, Miss Elizabeth found a momentary pause in her mother’s constant stream of chatter, and she spoke up, leading with an extraordinary sentence so that she would not be immediately interrupted and drowned out. She said, “Mama, Papa, Mr Darcy saved our Saint Nicholas Day’s dinner.”
Mr Bennet’s eyes narrowed. “Did he?”
Mrs Bennet said almost the same words, but in a louder, shriller voice. “He did?”
Darcy attempted to enter the conversation: “No, not at all. I attempted to help the ladies, of course, as any gentleman would, but my own help was minor when it was your daughter Miss Elizabeth who knew what to do.”
Miss Elizabeth told the entire tale, leaving out Miss Lydia’s mistake in thinking that she could carry the heavy chicken-filled cage.
The other detail that Miss Elizabeth glided over was the inebriated state of the servant who ought to have driven the wagon home—she said, instead, that he had seemingly disappeared, so Darcy had driven the wagon back.
In Miss Elizabeth’s telling, the anecdote became an epic tale of tragedy and redemption.
She spun out details about the Crèvecoeur hens’ short, inept flights away from the cage, and their ridiculous crest-in-their-eyes blindness as they flew and staggered into things.
She exaggerated the other shoppers’ responses, to humorous effect, and she told of Darcy’s sacrifice of much of the grain he had purchased for his own bird on behalf of luring the hens back into the cage.
The way she told the tale, it was Darcy’s expertise on birds that led the ladies to stop chasing the hens.
Miss Elizabeth paused to describe how the hens looked like devil birds with their black plumage, extravagant black crests and “beards,” and especially the V-shaped red combs that looked exactly like little red horns.
Darcy let stand the misapprehension about whose knowledge saved the day—after all, he had already mentioned Miss Elizabeth’s competence, and she had directed her family’s attention away from herself and towards him.
From what Mrs Bennet said in her endless monologues, he understood her to wish her daughters to only be interested in what she considered ladylike pursuits, and she decried her daughters to work in any way.
The family chuckled over Miss Elizabeth’s tale, and several family members thanked Darcy for his help.
Mrs Bennet insisted that they stay for dinner, pointing out that the meat from Crèvecoeur chickens was particularly flavourful and tender.
But Bingley firmly stated that they were expected at home and that he had directed the Netherfield cook to make their own fine Saint Nicholas’s Day meal.
Thus ended yet another surprising and delightful encounter with Miss Elizabeth.
Darcy began to feel as if Fate herself was throwing them together.
If it was inevitable that he would end up wedded to Miss Elizabeth…
well, he was happy enough to let go of his earlier ideas of what sort of lady he ought to court and marry.