CHAPTER FOUR
Rosings Park announced itself before Elizabeth had gone half a mile up the lane, its chimneys visible above the trees like a fact one could not argue with. She arrived at the Parsonage tired, travel-dusted, and braced for a fortnight of Mr. Collins reciting the price of the drawing room curtains.
She was not braced for Mr. Darcy.
"He is come," Charlotte said, three days into the visit, not looking up from her mending. "Colonel Fitzwilliam with him. Mr. Collins has already walked the lane twice hoping to catch the carriage."
Elizabeth set down her book. "Come to Rosings, or come to torment me specifically? I confess I cannot always tell with that man where his notice ends and his accounting begins."
"Come to visit his aunt, Eliza. Not everything is arithmetic."
"With him it generally is."
She met him again two days later at the great house itself, summoned to dine by Lady Catherine's unanswerable invitations, and found him standing near the fire with a look she could not read, formal and watchful at once, as though he had rehearsed several greetings and discarded all of them.
"Miss Bennet." A bow, precise to the inch.
"Mr. Darcy." She matched it. "I had not thought to find you so far from Derbyshire."
"I visit my aunt every spring."
"How dutiful."
"I did not say it was pleasant." Something flickered at the corner of his mouth, gone as quickly as it came. "Only dutiful."
Lady Catherine, from across the room, was already interrogating Elizabeth's family as though drawing up an inventory.
Do you play. Do you draw. Were you all out at once.
Elizabeth answered each question with a flatness that made Charlotte wince and Colonel Fitzwilliam smother a laugh into his wine, and she was aware, the entire time, of Darcy watching her field the questions the way one watches a horse take a difficult fence, not with amusement exactly, but with something close to it.
"Your aunt catalogues people the way a curator catalogues paintings," Elizabeth said to him afterward, when the card tables had claimed the older members of the party and left the two of them, briefly and unaccountably, standing together near the window.
"I begin to see where you learned the habit. "
His jaw tightened. "You have decided, then, that it is a family failing."
"I have decided it is a habit that runs in certain families the way a weak chin runs in others. I did not say it was incurable."
"Did you not." He looked at her directly, and for once there was no ledger in it, only something rawer and less composed. "I had thought, after Hertfordshire, you had decided a good many things about me already, and none of them curable."
She should have had a retort ready. She always had a retort ready. It did not come, and the silence stretched a beat too long, and Colonel Fitzwilliam's laugh from the card table broke it before either of them could decide what to do with what had nearly been said.
It became, without either of them naming it, a habit.
Darcy called at the Parsonage more often than any dutiful nephew required, and more often than his own comfort seemed to want, arriving with Colonel Fitzwilliam and, increasingly, arriving without him.
He would sit for a quarter hour, say almost nothing, and leave looking as though the visit had cost him something he could not calculate the value of.
"He watches you the way a man watches weather he cannot predict," Charlotte observed, one afternoon, after Darcy had taken his leave without managing more than three full sentences.
"He watches everyone that way. It is how he keeps his accounts current."
"Eliza." Charlotte set down her needlework entirely, which was, for Charlotte, a significant gesture. "I have known you since we were girls, and I have never once seen you spend this much breath insisting a man does not interest you."
"He does not interest me. He occupies me, which is a different thing entirely, the way a debt occupies a man who has not yet decided whether to pay it or dispute it."
Charlotte only looked at her, and said nothing further, which was, as ever, the more damning response.
The rain came without warning on the fourth day, the sky closing over so quickly that Elizabeth, walking the lane toward her favorite grove, was caught a quarter mile from any shelter with the first drops already soaking through her shawl.
She ran, half laughing at her own carelessness, and rounded the last bend to find Darcy standing under the narrow overhang of the Parsonage porch roof, evidently caught in the same downpour on his way to call, his greatcoat already dark at the shoulders.
"Miss Bennet." He stepped back to give her room under the eave, close enough that she could feel the damp warmth coming off his coat.
"Mr. Darcy." She was breathing hard, her bonnet ruined, a strand of hair plastered to her cheek. "You might have gone in."
"I did not think of it."
"You think of everything. It is rather your defining feature."
"Apparently not everything." His voice had gone low, and she realized, with a small jolt, how little space remained between them under the narrow overhang, his shoulder inches from hers, the rain hammering the roof above them loud enough that anything said here would be said for no one but the two of them.
He was looking at the wet strand of hair against her cheek with an attention that had nothing whatever to do with ledgers.
Neither of them moved.
"You are staring, sir."
"I am aware." He did not stop.
The rain thinned, then stopped almost as abruptly as it had begun, the way spring storms did, and the moment broke with it.
He stepped back first, clearing his throat, resuming the careful distance he generally kept, and offered to see her the remaining steps to the door, which she accepted only because refusing would have required more composure than she currently possessed.
At the door she turned back once. He had not moved from the path, still watching her, rain dripping from the brim of his hat, and for once he did not look like a man calculating a sum. He looked like a man who had lost count somewhere and had not yet decided whether he minded.
She went inside without saying anything further, because she did not trust what she might have said instead, and spent the remainder of the evening unable to attend to a single word of Mr. Collins's account of Lady Catherine's chimney-piece.