Chapter Four
She did not sleep well that night, and blamed the strange bed, and knew it was a lie.
By morning Jane was better, well enough to sit up and take a little broth, and Elizabeth found herself with an unwelcome quantity of free time and no good use for it.
She avoided the drawing room until noon.
She avoided Mr. Darcy specifically, which required more effort than she liked to admit, in a house not nearly large enough to make avoidance convincing.
She found him anyway, in the library, standing at the window with his hands clasped behind his back in that particular posture of his, as though he were perpetually reviewing a ledger only he could see.
"I did not know anyone else read in this house," she said, before she could think better of it.
He turned. "Miss Bingley reads whatever I am reading. I do not think it counts."
"That is unkind."
"It is accurate."
She almost smiled. She caught it before it reached her mouth, and busied herself instead with the shelf nearest the door, running a finger along spines she had no intention of pulling out.
"You are still angry with me," he said.
The bluntness of it startled her more than the words themselves. She turned. "I am not in the habit of being angry with strangers, Mr. Darcy. It requires more investment than I generally care to make."
"And yet." He did not move from the window. "Last night, you were."
"Last night I was tired, and you said something that gave me an opening, and I took it. That is not anger. That is opportunity."
"It sounded like anger."
"Then your ear deceived you." She pulled a book from the shelf at random, more for something to hold than any interest in its contents. "Though I confess I am curious what you imagine I have to be angry about."
It was a dare, and she knew it the moment she'd said it, and did not take it back.
He was quiet long enough that she thought he might simply let it pass, the way he let most things pass, with silence standing in for whatever he would not say aloud. But he crossed the room instead, slowly, and stopped close enough that she had to tip her chin slightly to keep looking at him.
"I have thought," he said, "more than once, about the assembly."
"Have you." Her heart was doing something unhelpful and quick. "I confess I have not."
"That is not true."
"You cannot possibly know that."
"No," he agreed. "But I suspect it."
The book was still in her hand, forgotten.
She was aware of the fire behind her, the particular quality of the afternoon light through the library windows, the fact that he stood near enough now that she could see the exact shade of his eyes, darker than she had thought them across a crowded assembly room.
She was aware, too, of an old, careful defense in her chest deciding whether to hold or give.
"You should not stand so close," she said, "if you mean to keep insulting my honesty."
"I do not mean to insult it. I mean to correct it." His voice had dropped, low enough that it did something to the air between them. "You have not forgotten it. I have watched you not forget it, all week."
She stepped back, deliberately, and put the book down on the nearest table with more force than it deserved. "You flatter yourself, sir, if you think a single careless remark occupies so much of my attention."
"Then why," he said, "do you know it word for word?"
She had not told him that. She had not told anyone that. And yet here it was, laid bare between them, and she could not think of a single reply that did not confirm it.
"Miss Bennet requires me," she said instead, and left the room before he could answer, and did not look back to see his face, though she felt his eyes on her the whole length of the corridor.
Jane was well enough by the following afternoon that they could return to Longbourn, and Elizabeth was, on the whole, relieved.
Netherfield had begun to feel like a room she could not properly breathe in, every corner of it charged with a man she had decided, weeks ago, was beneath her notice, and who had somehow, in the space of four days, made that decision considerably harder to maintain.
Mr. Bingley handed them into the carriage himself, full of concern for Jane's health and promises of calling soon.
Miss Bingley's farewell to Elizabeth was civil in the particular way that suggested relief dressed as politeness.
Mr. Darcy said very little, only bowed, but his eyes found hers once, briefly, before the carriage door closed, and she carried that look the whole three miles home, turning it over the way she had once turned over his words, except this time she could not decide if it wounded or warmed her, and the not knowing was its own kind of trouble.