On the Threshold of Pemberley (Around Jane Austen #1)

Chapter 1

Elizabeth

My mother was talking about lace.

She had been talking about it since breakfast, and four o’clock had just struck.

This day alone had unfurled enough varieties of lace to adorn the petticoats of half of Hertfordshire.

Mrs. Bennet did not care. Mrs. Bennet had two engaged daughters, and two engaged daughters required lace.

The rest of the world could collapse between two samples of Honiton for all she cared.

Jane was embroidering near the window, with that luminous serenity that was her way of inhabiting a room. Kitty was peering over Mary’s shoulder as Mary read a sermon aloud with a fervor no one had requested. My father had disappeared into his library at eleven and had not emerged.

The coward.

I envied him.

Well, I would have envied him if Mr. Darcy were not about to arrive at any moment.

Mr. Darcy. My fiancé. The man I had refused with cruel eloquence, then loved with a slowness that caught me off guard, and whom I would marry in five weeks. Five weeks. Thirty-five days. I was not counting them. I was absolutely counting them.

Gravel crunched beneath a carriage. I looked up from the book I was not reading.

“There he is!” my mother cried, swooping toward the window. “Jane, fix your hair. Lizzy, put down that book—you’ll make him think you’re a bluestocking. Kitty, don’t stand there with your mouth open.”

Jane fixed hair that needed no fixing. Kitty closed her mouth. I put down the book.

A bluestocking. As if this man who possessed one of the finest libraries in England would be put off by a volume of Cowper. As if he had not chosen me precisely for that.

Hill opened the drawing room door, and Mr. Darcy entered.

Dark blue coat, cut with that understated perfection that never asks for admiration yet receives it effortlessly.

Impeccable boots. Immaculate cravat. And on his face, as he crossed the threshold of our small drawing room cluttered with cushions and doilies, the expression I was beginning to know well: that of a man perfectly in command of himself, preparing to endure an ordeal with courage.

The ordeal, in this case, was my mother.

And I found him handsome.

I finally allowed myself to think it in those terms—something that had taken me several months.

At Meryton, I had decreed that he was too tall, too stiff, too pleased with himself, and I had maintained this opinion with a constancy I was no longer proud of.

Yet the evidence was undeniable: this man was handsome.

The straight line of his shoulders, the clean jaw, the way his dark hair refused to stay in place above his left temple despite all his valet’s efforts.

The entire ballroom at Meryton had seen it before me. They had all seen the handsome man and the ten thousand a year, and I alone had seen the pride, because I alone had heard him say I was not pretty enough to tempt him.

We had been mistaken, they and I. They had not looked beyond his fortune. I had not looked beyond my wounded vanity.

Now I knew what that coldness truly was.

A man who does not know how to talk to strangers and is mistaken for proud.

A man who crosses Hertfordshire every week to drink tea he detests.

A man who writes eight pages to justify himself, expecting nothing in return, and who has never used what they contained against me.

The rest of Hertfordshire found him cold. I did not.

“Mr. Darcy! What a delight! Please, sit down. Hill, tea. The good tea, Hill, not the everyday sort. Did you have a pleasant journey from Netherfield? Mr. Bingley is not with you? Jane, Mr. Bingley is not with him.”

Jane blushed imperceptibly. Darcy bowed.

“Bingley will come tomorrow, madam. He had a matter to settle with his steward.”

His voice. Deep, measured, a little stiff. That voice that never gave too much, as if he weighed each syllable before letting it pass his lips. Over the weeks, I had learned to listen to what lay between the words. Mr. Darcy’s silences were more eloquent than most men’s speeches.

Kitty found him frightening. Mary judged him grave, which was, for her, the highest compliment available. My mother considered him the most magnificent and most terrifying son-in-law in England and spoke to him in the tone one reserves for bishops.

None of them had seen him the previous week, in the lane, remove his hat because the wind had disheveled my hair and he worried I might catch cold.

None of them had heard him say, when I mocked his cravat, that he wore a new one each time he came to Longbourn and was beginning to find the expense considerable.

They had a man of marble in their drawing room. I had someone else.

He sat in the armchair my mother indicated.

The armchair was too small. Or rather, Darcy was too tall for our drawing room, too upright, too grave, too everything.

A warship anchored in a fishing port. But he was there.

He came every week, crossed Hertfordshire, endured my mother’s chatter, Kitty’s giggles, Mary’s sermons, the lukewarm tea and the chipped cups.

For me.

The thought swept through me with that sudden warmth that had been seizing me more and more often since the engagement. Not in my face. Lower. Somewhere beneath my ribs, a place I couldn't have named and that propriety forbade me from acknowledging.

My mother served the tea with the gestures of a high priestess officiating at a sacrament. Darcy accepted his cup, took a sip, did not grimace.

The man's self-control borders on heroism. Longbourn's tea has never been its crowning glory.

The conversation turned to the usual subjects: the weather, the roads, Georgiana's health. My mother slipped in three allusions to the wedding in under ten minutes—a record even for her. Darcy responded to each with impenetrable courtesy. Over the teapot, I caught his gaze.

One second. Perhaps two.

His eyes were dark, attentive, and something lodged in them that the words didn't convey. Something that resembled a cry for help wrapped in irreproachable dignity.

I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling.

When he proposed a walk in the garden, my mother accepted on my behalf before I had opened my mouth, and dispatched Mary as chaperone with the eagerness of a woman sending a fortress off to do the shopping.

?

Longbourn's garden bore no comparison to the parks of Derbyshire.

The hedges were crooked, the climbing rose had been threatening to collapse onto the path for three summers, and the stone bench near the kitchen garden leaned to the left with an obstinacy my father found charming and my mother found despairing.

But it was my garden. I had read there, dreamed there, laughed with Jane.

Wept too, sometimes, when no one was looking.

We walked side by side along the gravel path, Mr. Darcy and I, and Mary followed ten paces behind, her nose buried in a volume of Fordyce's Reflections that she must have reread at least four times.

The ideal chaperone. Mary only raised her eyes from her reading to point out others' moral insufficiency; as we were doing nothing morally reprehensible, she paid us no attention.

Nothing morally reprehensible. Except that I walked so close to him that the warmth of his arm seeped through the fabric of my spencer. Except that with every uneven patch of gravel our shoulders brushed, and neither he nor I moved away.

“Georgiana asked me to give you this,” he said, drawing a volume from the inner pocket of his coat. “She thinks it might please you.”

A collection of poetry. Bound in brown leather, with discreet gilding on the spine. I reached out my hand. He reached out his. The book passed from his fingers to mine.

But not immediately.

There was an instant—a fraction of a second that lasted an eternity—when our fingers met on the cover. His hand was warm. Dry. Firm. Mine was bare, for I had removed my glove to pick a sprig of lavender on our way out, and I had not put it back on. Negligence or premeditation, I couldn't have said.

The contact lasted a few seconds. Perhaps four.

Three seconds of skin against skin, of warmth that traveled from his fingers along my wrist, my arm, to that place beneath my ribs that decidedly bore no name.

The gravel, the song of the blackbirds, Mary's distant murmuring—everything faded, reduced to that infinitesimal surface where our hands met.

Then he withdrew his. I took the book. And we resumed our walk as if nothing had happened.

Nothing had happened. A transfer of a book. A banal brush of fingers. Banal. Then why did my fingers still burn where his had rested? Why did the leather seem warm from the heat of his pocket, warm from him, and why did this thought make me lose the thread of the sentence I was about to speak?

Pull yourself together, Lizzy. You're twenty years old. You've read Wollstonecraft. You're not going to swoon over a brush of fingers.

But I wasn't swooning. What was happening to me was far worse. An acute, pitiless awareness of every inch between us and every inch that wasn't. The word came to me with brutal clarity, and I nearly stopped walking.

Desire.

Not a word a well-bred young woman of Hertfordshire was supposed to know, much less apply to the man she was going to marry.

Well-bred young women felt affection, tenderness, esteem.

Not this thing that pulsed beneath my ribs and made me want to touch his hand again, his wrist, the skin above his collar, the line of his jaw.

I pressed the book against my chest.

“Are you well, Miss Elizabeth?”

His voice. Neutral. Perfectly composed. But when I raised my eyes, his were darker than usual, and a muscle worked in his jaw, as if he were clenching his teeth.

“Perfectly, Mr. Darcy. Your sister has excellent taste in poetry.”

“I shall tell her so.”

We looked at each other. The silence filled with everything the words didn't say. Behind us, Mary turned a page.

“The weather is clouding over,” I observed with a composure that surprised even me. “Perhaps we should go back inside.”

“Indeed.”

Indeed. Two syllables. But the deliberate slowness with which he pronounced them, that gaze holding mine captive, transformed them into something that looked an awful lot like a promise.

We went back inside. Mary never looked up from Fordyce.

?

The visit ended as all Mr. Darcy's visits to Longbourn ended: too soon.

He took his leave of my mother with that courteous patience that made me love him a little more each time. He bowed to Jane, greeted Mary and Kitty, and turned to me last. Always last. As if saving the best for the end, or delaying the moment he must leave me. Both, perhaps.

“Miss Elizabeth.”

“Mr. Darcy.”

He bowed. I curtsied. Our gazes met across the polite void that separated us, and in that gaze was everything we could neither say nor do, not yet: the hands we did not take, the lips we did not touch, the words we did not whisper into an ear.

All of it, compressed into an inclination of the head and an exchange of names, before my mother already counting the days on her fingers and my sister reading the psalms.

He left. The door closed. His boots on the doorstep, then the gravel, then the carriage step.

My mother immediately launched into detailed praise of Mr. Darcy's carriage, his horses, and his coachman's livery—the finest livery ever seen in Hertfordshire, according to her.

I was not listening.

Standing on the threshold, Georgiana's book pressed against me, I watched the carriage recede down the drive. Evening was falling. The air smelled of cut grass and damp earth, that scent of late English summer like nothing else in the world. The first stars were piercing the sky above the roof.

Five weeks. Thirty-five days.

In five weeks, I would be Elizabeth Darcy. I would bear his name. I would live in his house. I would sleep in his bed.

The thought went through me like a hot blade, and I closed my eyes for a second, there on the threshold, between the world I was leaving and the one I had yet to know.

The book was still warm from his pocket. I opened it to the first page. Georgiana's handwriting, round and careful, inscribed a dedication: For my future sister. With all my affection.

And below, in another hand, firmer, tighter, a line added in black ink:

Sonnet 29. F.D.

I knew that sonnet. The one about the man in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, alone, weeping his outcast state, who need only think of his beloved to recover all his wealth, all his happiness, all his pride.

F.D. Fitzwilliam Darcy. This man who did not know how to say what he felt let Shakespeare say it for him.

I closed the book. I went inside. I climbed to my room, closed the door, sat on the bed, and pressed the volume against my mouth. The leather smelled of sandalwood and something else, warmer, more intimate—the scent of his pocket, his coat, of him.

Five weeks, Lizzy. Five weeks and you will no longer have to watch him leave.

The clock struck six in the vestibule. Below, my mother called Hill for dinner. The ordinary world reasserted itself, with its schedules, its cutlery, and its pressed linen tablecloths.

I placed the book on the pillow, next to mine.

Five weeks.

An eternity.