Chapter 3
He had not planned this.
Darcy was honest with himself about that much, at least, as he stood before the glass and allowed his valet to settle his coat with the brief, businesslike attention the man always gave to dressing for dinner with company in the house.
He had not planned to find Elizabeth Bennet on his own walk, eleven months and a refused proposal after he had last stood near enough to her to hear her breathe.
He had certainly not planned, in the quarter hour that followed, to invite her aunt and uncle to remain as his guests, on grounds so flimsy that he had heard himself constructing them in real time and had been faintly astonished at his own fluency. He had not planned any of it.
He was aware, nonetheless, of a feeling he had not had in some considerable time, which he was reluctant to name even privately, because naming it seemed likely to invite its disappointment.
It was something in the neighbourhood of hope.
He had not permitted himself hope since Kent.
Hope, in his experience, was an expensive commodity that returned very little on the investment, and he had spent the better part of a year teaching himself to do without it.
That he should find himself, on a Tuesday, in his own dressing room, entertaining it again, struck him as either a very good sign or a very foolish one, and he had not yet decided which.
He went down to see to the arrangements himself, which his housekeeper would have managed perfectly well without him, but which he found he wanted some occupation for his hands and his attention while the house filled itself with people.
There was a particular pleasure in moving through his own house attending to its operation, one he rarely examined, because examining it tended to expose how little of his life outside Pemberley afforded him anything similar.
He was entirely at ease here in a way he was nowhere else: not in London, not in a drawing room full of strangers whose opinion of him he had never learned to disregard as easily as Bingley disregarded everyone's, not even, if he was honest, at Rosings, where his aunt's house was grander than his own but somehow always felt smaller.
Pemberley required things of him, and he understood precisely what those things were, and he could give them.
It was the one place in his life where competence and ease were the same thing.
Bingley and his sister Jane Bennet arrived first, in the early afternoon, Bingley handing her down from the carriage with the particular careful attention of a man who has decided something important and has not yet found the courage to say it aloud.
Darcy watched this with some private satisfaction.
He had encouraged Bingley toward Miss Bennet rather more deliberately than he had once discouraged him from her, which he understood to be a kind of penance, though he did not say so to Bingley, who would only have grown awkward and insisted there was nothing to forgive, which was not entirely true.
"Darcy." Bingley shook his hand with his usual warmth, and then, lowering his voice slightly, though not so much that Miss Bennet could not hear it if she chose: "You did not tell me the Bennets were in the county."
"I did not know it myself until yesterday."
"Convenient," said Bingley, with a look that suggested he found the coincidence considerably more remarkable than Darcy was prepared to discuss, and Darcy did not answer that, and turned instead to greet Miss Bennet, who curtseyed and asked, with the unaffected gentleness that made her so impossible to dislike, whether her sister Elizabeth had arrived safely.
He confirmed that she had, and watched something in Miss Bennet's face ease at the news, and thought, not for the first time, that whatever else he had once misjudged in this family, he had not misjudged the elder Miss Bennet's affection for her sister.
Fitzwilliam arrived an hour later, on horseback, considerably more dust-covered than the occasion strictly required, and greeted Darcy in the hall with the cheerful disregard for ceremony that Darcy had relied upon, in one form or another, for the whole of their acquaintance.
"You look," Fitzwilliam said, handing his hat to a footman and surveying his cousin with an expression Darcy did not entirely trust, "considerably less wretched than when I last saw you. I had expected to find you brooding somewhere in a library. This is a pleasant surprise."
"I am not in the habit of brooding."
"You are entirely in the habit of brooding, Darcy, it is one of your principal occupations, along with riding and looking disapprovingly at people who enjoy themselves more than you think proper. I am merely noting that you appear, today, to have set it aside. Has something happened?"
"A number of guests have arrived. That is what has happened."
"Mm," said Fitzwilliam, in a tone that promised the subject was not closed, merely postponed, and went off to find his room, pausing only to add, over his shoulder, "I shall expect a full account before dinner, Darcy. I have ridden a great distance and I am owed entertainment."
He was as good as his word. He reappeared an hour later, considerably less dust-covered, and found Darcy in the study going over some small matter of accounts with his steward, and waited with poor grace until the steward had gone before dropping into the chair opposite with the air of a man settling in for a long siege.
"Well. Are you going to tell me, or am I to extract it from the servants?"
"There is nothing to extract."
"There is a great deal to extract, and you know it, or you would not look so determined to give me none of it.
I had a letter from my mother not three weeks past, lamenting that you seemed entirely recovered from whatever had ailed you in the spring, and recovered in the worst possible way — that is, by deciding to feel nothing further about anything at all.
I find you now looking like a man who has had news. I should like to know what news."
"You will have to content yourself with curiosity, Fitzwilliam. I have given you no grounds for anything more."
"You have given me a houseful of unexpected guests and a face I have not seen on you since before Kent," said Fitzwilliam, "which is grounds enough for a man of my perception. I shall ask you again at dinner, when you are less prepared for the question."
He did not, in fact, ask again at dinner, which Darcy took as evidence that his cousin had already drawn whatever conclusions he intended to draw, and was simply waiting, with the patience of a man who enjoyed being right and saw no reason to hurry the demonstration of it.
The neighbouring couple, Mr. and Mrs. Sutcliffe, arrived next, pleasant and entirely unremarkable, the sort of guests whose presence asked nothing of a host beyond ordinary civility, and Darcy attended to them with the easy competence of long practice, and found his attention, throughout, returning to the window that overlooked the drive, watching for a carriage that was not, strictly, expected until the following day, and that he had no business watching for at all.
Mrs. Reynolds found him there, between greetings, and informed him with the particular satisfaction of a housekeeper reporting a battle well conducted that the east wing rooms had been made up exactly as he liked them done for guests of consequence, and that she had taken the liberty, knowing his preference, of placing Mrs. Gardiner nearest the morning room, where the light was kindest, and Miss Bennet in the chamber that looked out over the water.
Darcy thanked her and said nothing further, though he was aware, as he said it, that Mrs. Reynolds was watching him with an expression of mild and entirely unconcealed satisfaction of her own, the satisfaction of a woman who had known him from the cradle and had drawn certain private conclusions that she was far too well-bred to voice aloud, and far too pleased with to fully disguise.
It was Georgiana who undid the whole carefully managed surface of his afternoon.
She came down from her room, having been resting, Mrs. Annesley said, after the journey from London the day before, dressed simply, her hair done plainly, and stood for a moment in the doorway of the drawing room with the particular stillness she had not fully shed since Ramsgate, the stillness of a girl deciding whether a room was safe before she entered it.
Darcy crossed to her at once, as he always did, and made the introductions himself rather than leaving them to anyone else, because he had learned, this past year, exactly how much it mattered to her that the first moments of any new acquaintance be managed by someone she trusted.
She greeted the Sutcliffes with creditable composure.
She greeted Bingley, whom she had met before, with real warmth.
And then Darcy turned to present her to Miss Bennet, to Jane Bennet, whom Georgiana had not met, and found that Elizabeth had come down as well, and was standing a little apart, near the window, in a gown of pale blue that he was fairly certain he had seen before, at Hertfordshire, in a room full of people he had spent the whole evening pretending not to watch her across.
"Georgiana, may I present Miss Elizabeth Bennet."
He watched his sister's face as she turned, and he watched something happen there that he had not anticipated and could not, in the moment, entirely account for.
Georgiana went very still — not the old stillness, not the wariness of a girl bracing for a stranger's judgment, but something else: a quiet, arrested attention, as though she had been told to expect one thing and had been given, instead, something she recognized without being able to say from where.
"Miss Bennet," Georgiana said, and curtseyed, and Darcy saw Elizabeth's eyes move, briefly, to him — a flicker of something assessing, curious, not unkind — before returning to his sister with the easy, unforced warmth she seemed to extend to everyone she had not been given particular reason to doubt.
"Miss Darcy. Your brother has told me so little about you that I find I have been entirely unprepared, and must now form my own opinion without the smallest assistance from him."
It was the sort of remark that might have landed as impertinence from anyone else, and from Elizabeth Bennet landed, instead, as an invitation — Darcy saw Georgiana understand this almost before she had finished hearing it, saw the corner of her mouth move in something that was nearly a smile, nearly but not quite suppressed.
"I hope your own opinion will be more generous than his account would suggest, Miss Bennet, whatever it was."
"He has given no account at all, which I begin to think is its own sort of testimony."
Georgiana laughed, actually laughed, a small surprised sound that Darcy had heard perhaps a dozen times in the past year and had learned to treasure each instance of separately, and said something in return that Darcy did not entirely attend to, because he was occupied, just then, in absorbing the fact that his sister, who had not spoken easily to a stranger in nearly two years, had produced a laugh inside of ninety seconds in the company of a woman she had known for less time than that.
He thought: *she does this to everyone.* He thought it almost defensively, as though the thought were armor against some larger and more dangerous one waiting just behind it.
Elizabeth Bennet made everyone she spoke to feel, briefly, like the most interesting person in the room — Bingley had said as much himself, once, admiringly, before he had any particular reason to be careful of admiring her in front of Darcy.
It was not a singular effect. It was not evidence of anything beyond her own considerable gifts.
He did not, watching his sister's unguarded face across the drawing room, entirely believe himself.
Dinner that evening was a comfortable, unremarkable affair, conducted at a table not yet at its full complement — Miss Beaumont was not expected until the day after tomorrow — and Darcy, more than once, lost the thread of a conversation with Mr. Sutcliffe in order to attend to one occurring two seats down, between Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam, who had discovered in each other, within the space of a single course, a shared appetite for argument conducted entirely for pleasure rather than conviction.
He heard Elizabeth say something about the unreliability of first impressions, and heard Fitzwilliam say, with evident delight, that he could not agree, his own first impressions being invariably correct, and heard her ask, with a lightness that did not entirely disguise the precision of the question, whether his cousin shared that confidence.
He did not hear what Fitzwilliam answered. He found he did not especially want to.
Later, when the house had settled and the last of the guests had gone up, Darcy stood for some time at the window of his own room, looking out at grounds he had known his entire life and finding them, tonight, somehow unfamiliar — not changed, precisely, but inhabited differently, as though the addition of a single person to a house of forty rooms had altered the proportion of every space in it.
He thought of Georgiana's laugh. He thought of Elizabeth's eyes finding his, briefly, across the drawing room, in the instant before she turned her attention fully to his sister.
He did not know what he was permitted to hope for.
He knew only that he had not, until this week, expected to be permitted anything at all, and that the distance between those two states was larger than he had any right to feel about it, this soon, with so little said between them that could be relied upon.
He went to bed without resolving the question, and did not sleep a great deal better for having raised it.