Chapter Three
Darcy had not meant to look at her so long.
He was aware of it even as he did it, aware that Bingley's sisters would notice, aware that noticing itself was a kind of admission he had no intention of making.
But she had walked in with her hair coming down and mud to her knees and an expression that dared the entire room to comment on it, and something in him that had been perfectly settled for three weeks came slightly, irritatingly loose.
He set down the coffee cup only once she had left the room.
"Did you ever see such a thing," Miss Bingley said, returning some minutes later and sinking into the chair opposite with the particular relish of a woman who has been handed fresh material. "Three miles, alone, through all that mud. I could hardly credit it."
"It shows an affection for her sister that does her credit," Bingley said, mildly, not looking up from his letter.
"It shows a want of propriety, surely." Miss Bingley glanced toward Darcy, clearly expecting agreement, the way she always expected agreement from him, as though his silence were a bank she could draw against indefinitely.
"You must have thought it, Mr. Darcy. Her petticoat was six inches deep in mud. "
"I thought," Darcy said, "that her eyes were remarkably bright from the exercise."
The room went quiet in a different way than it had for Elizabeth's entrance. Miss Bingley's smile fixed itself in place. Mrs. Hurst looked from her sister to Darcy and back with an expression of dawning, unwelcome comprehension.
"Her eyes," Miss Bingley repeated, faintly.
"Yes." Darcy returned to his own letter, aware he had said more than he intended, and unwilling, now, to retreat from it. "I have always thought a fine pair of eyes in the face of a pretty woman gives a man a great deal to consider."
He did not look up to see Miss Bingley's face at that. He did not need to.
He spent the rest of the morning in the library, ostensibly reading, in truth doing something closer to arguing with himself.
He had said, at the assembly, that Elizabeth Bennet was not handsome enough to tempt him.
He had said it carelessly, tired of Bingley's pushing and irritated by a room full of strangers he had no wish to know, and he had not thought of it again, not truly, not until this morning, when she had walked into the breakfast parlour looking nothing at all like a woman who had been called plain and everything like a woman who had simply not cared to hear it.
He told himself the two things were unrelated.
That his attention this morning was mere observation, the natural response of any man to a face that improved on scrutiny.
He was, by nature, a careful examiner of things, and it was only reasonable that repeated examination should yield new information.
He did not entirely believe himself, and this, more than anything, unsettled him.
Elizabeth found her sister feverish but not alarmingly so, and settled in for what she suspected would be several days of nursing.
She wrote home for a change of clothes and resigned herself to Netherfield's company, which she had expected to endure and found, against her own inclination, that she could not entirely dismiss.
Mr. Bingley's kindness was uncomplicated and genuine.
His sisters' civility toward Elizabeth was a thin varnish over something colder, and she was not fooled by it for a moment.
And Mr. Darcy said very little to her directly, but she caught him, more than once over the following days, watching her with an expression she could not decode and did not trust herself to try.
On the third evening, she sat near the fire with a book she was not truly reading, half listening to Miss Bingley's determined efforts to secure Mr. Darcy's attention over his correspondence.
"How delighted Miss Darcy will be to receive such a long letter," Miss Bingley said.
"I write rather slowly," Darcy replied, without looking up.
Elizabeth watched this exchange over the top of her book, entertained despite herself by the flatness of his answers, the way Miss Bingley's compliments landed against him like water against stone.
She had decided, somewhere in the last three days, that whatever else Mr. Darcy was, he was at least consistent.
He did not perform civility he did not feel.
It was, she thought, almost a point in his favor, that he had insulted her honestly rather than flattered her falsely.
Almost.
"Do you never dance, Mr. Darcy?" she found herself asking, before she had fully decided to speak.
He looked up from his letter. Something crossed his face, quick and gone, that she thought, for one unguarded second, might have been discomfort.
"Rarely," he said. "Unless I am well acquainted with my partner."
"That is a very small circle to dance within."
"It is the circle I prefer."
"And yet," she said, setting her book down entirely now, some old, unspent grievance rising in her before she could stop it, "I understand a stranger's face may sometimes be judged perfectly well acquainted enough for other purposes. Its handsomeness, for instance. Or its want of it."
The room did not go silent, exactly, but something in its quality shifted. Miss Bingley's head turned sharply. Mrs. Hurst's needlework paused mid-stitch.
Darcy's expression did not change, but his eyes held hers a moment longer than was comfortable, and something in them she could not name.
"I believe," he said, carefully, "that a man may speak carelessly in a crowded room, and regret it more than the hearer supposes."
It was not quite an apology. It was not nothing, either. Elizabeth felt the old wound turn over once, painfully, at being addressed directly at last, after weeks of carrying it in silence and hearing it repeated by every gossip in Meryton in a voice that was never her own.
"I am sure I do not know what you mean," she said, and picked her book back up, and did not read a single word of it for the rest of the evening.
Across the room, Darcy returned to his letter, and found he could not finish a single sentence of it either.