Chapter 38 #3
He stepped aside without thinking, the movement instinctive, as though the room had always been meant to receive her. It was only once she crossed the threshold that he became aware of himself standing there, hands empty, heart misbehaving, the fire neglected, and the desk in disarray.
Elizabeth paused just inside, her gaze flicking briefly around the room.
“I thought I might find you occupied here,” she said.
“But I could not sleep a moment longer—I have spent too much time abed lately. There was no one in the breakfast room, and I recall Mr Bingley back at Netherfield saying you would already be at work before the sun had properly risen. He spoke with great admiration, I need hardly add.”
Darcy managed something that might pass for a smile. “Bingley’s admiration is generous to a fault and entirely misplaced.”
She turned back to him then, studying him more closely. “I hope our arrival last night did not—”
“It did not,” he blurted without thinking. The denial came sharp, decisive, and he tempered it only afterward. “On the contrary. I was glad of it.”
Her brows lifted, just a little. Not in disbelief—rather in acknowledgment, as though the admission had confirmed something she had already suspected.
“I wished to thank you,” she said. “For your kindness. For your patience with such an unceremonious invasion of your household. I assure you, had I been fully myself—”
“You are fully yourself,” Darcy said, and stopped.
The words had not been intended for utterance. They had simply escaped, carried on the same impulse that had opened the door too swiftly, that had stepped aside too readily to make space for her. He felt the heat rise at once and was dimly aware of wishing he could call them back.
Elizabeth, however, only smiled. Not playfully—something quieter, more considering. “Then I am doubly obliged to you,” she said. “For indulging me even so.”
She took a step farther into the room, her attention drawn to the desk. “I hope I have not entirely disrupted your work. There must be a reason you rose so early.”
“No,” he said again, more carefully this time. “I was not making much progress.”
“Ah.” She laughed easily. “Then I shall rather presumptuously consider my arrival an improvement on an otherwise dull room.”
The ease of the remark, the familiar turn of wit, struck him more deeply than he expected. It had been this—this liveliness, this unforced animation—that he had found himself missing after he left Hertfordshire, though he had refused to name the absence as such.
“You are… truly feeling better, then?” he asked.
“Remarkably so,” she replied. “Which is a source of no small embarrassment, I assure you. Miss Bingley has already suggested—quite delicately—that I have chosen a most artful moment to revive.”
Darcy’s jaw tightened despite himself. “No one could think you motivated by arts and allurements, Miss Elizabeth.”
“I am glad to hear it. I should hate to think myself the object of suspicion.” She hesitated, then added, more softly, “But my father will be relieved when he hears of it.”
Something in her tone—quiet, unguarded—made Darcy’s throat constrict. He gestured toward one of the chairs before he quite knew why. “Will you sit?”
She did, framing her skirt about the chair and casting a glance about his study as if she knew it already, and was merely reacquainting herself with it. She rested her hands lightly in her lap.
“I see,” she said, “that your papers are all in precise rows. My father’s desk resembles a battlefield after the troops have fled.”
Darcy’s mouth twitched despite himself. “Your father conducts his affairs by stratagem,” he replied. “I prefer to know where the enemy lies.”
She laughed—softly, but with real amusement—and the sound struck him with more force than it had any right to do. He felt it at once: that faint, draining pull, like a tide withdrawing beneath his feet. But he endured it gladly.
“I had thought,” she chuckled, “that gentlemen who keep such order must be frightfully dull.”
“I have been accused of many faults. Dullness is not one I often hear.”
Her brows lifted. “Perhaps because everyone wishes for your good opinion?”
He leaned back slightly in his chair, pursing his lips. “Is that what you think of me, Miss Elizabeth? I am wounded.”
“Wounded by a little tease, sir? I should think not. No, I think you rather fancy a bit of irreverence, though everything in your looks attempts to suggest otherwise.”
Darcy inclined his head with a smile. “I shall never confess.”
Elizabeth’s smile came quick and unmistakably pleased, as though she had landed her point and meant to enjoy it. Darcy kept his gaze where it was, though each moment demanded more of him than the last. To see her thus—to hear it in her voice—was worth every fraction it took.
Her gaze drifted once more to the desk. “I imagine you must have been very busy these past weeks,” she said. “It was quite a loss to the neighbourhood that you were called away so suddenly. Miss Bingley, in particular, felt your absence most keenly.”
The familiar evasion rose—ready, reflexive. He had employed it all his life. But when he opened his mouth, it failed him. “I have been occupied,” he said instead. “On… family business.”
It was true. After a fashion.
Elizabeth studied him for a moment, then nodded, as though that answer—paltry as it was—had satisfied some private accounting of her own. “One cannot count you remiss in attending to your duties, sir.”
The words were gentle. The meaning was not.
Darcy shifted, then said, too quickly, “You must permit me to offer my congratulations to your sister on her engagement to Mr Collins.”
The smile she gave him this time was thin. Dutiful. “I hope she will be happy.”
“You have your doubts?”
Elizabeth frowned, and for the first time, her eyes fell. “I… I am not sorry my family decided not to require my attendance.”
He looked at her keenly. “You disapprove of her choice?”
She grimaced, just a little. “I disapprove of very few things absolutely. But I confess I should find it difficult to rejoice at a union founded entirely on obligation.”
Darcy leaned forward with a question he could not hold back. “And if obligation were joined by something more?”
Elizabeth hesitated. It was no more than a breath’s delay, but it was enough. Enough that he thought, for one reckless instant, that she might answer him honestly.
“Oh, there you are! I thought I should find you here, Mr Darcy.”
Darcy blinked back to awareness to discover that Miss Bingley now stood in the doorway, her back arched to display the silhouette of her figure to best advantage. Her gaze flicked—once—to Elizabeth, then back again.
“How very comfortable the rooms are,” she continued. “So tastefully arranged. I daresay you have done the most admirable job of redecorating them since I last saw them.”
“They are precisely as my mother left them,” Darcy replied, with a civility that held no warmth. “I may consider altering them one day, but I have not done so yet.”
“Oh.” Miss Bingley did not smile at all. She adjusted the fall of her skirt, smoothing one fold and then another, though they required no attention.
Elizabeth regarded the display with open amusement, her smile deepening rather than retreating.
The moment had begun to tilt in directions best left unexplored before coffee. Darcy rose and gestured toward the door. “Well, the morning appears to be advancing. Shall we go in to breakfast?”
“Oh, I am quite eager to see the breakfast room,” Elizabeth said. “If it has been so comfortably established for years, I expect it will be perfection by now.”