12. The Forfeit #2
Hill opened the door, and Colonel Fitzwilliam’s voice carried cheerfully into the hall—followed almost immediately by an abrupt silence as he registered the presence of two giggling young ladies lurking beneath conspicuously positioned greenery.
“Ah,” the Colonel said, in the tone of a man who had survived French cavalry charges and was not about to be undone by English mistletoe. “I see we have encountered… fortifications.”
“The doorway appears to be guarded,” Darcy observed dryly from behind his cousin. “Perhaps we should attempt the servants’ entrance.”
“Mr. Darcy!” Mrs. Bennet realized her best-laid plans were being thwarted. “Colonel Fitzwilliam! Do come in, do come in. The girls are merely being playful. Jane, move your sisters away from the door this instant!”
Jane gently stood at the side of the door with her arms crossed, and when Lydia balked, Kitty made a run for it and practically dragged Colonel Fitzwilliam beneath the kissing bough, but Lydia pushed Kitty aside, leaving an opening for both men to enter while Kitty and Lydia tussled and Jane stood aside and curtsied with her serene grace.
The Colonel grinned. “Miss Elizabeth! I see you have secured the only defensible position in the room. Well played.”
“I learned from observing superior tacticians,” she replied. “Namely, Mary, who has occupied this corner for the past three Christmases.”
But it was not the Colonel’s gaze that held her attention.
It was Darcy’s. His dark eyes found hers with an intensity that made the air catch in her throat.
He was wearing dark-blue again, the color that made his eyes seem almost black in the candlelight, and his expression was as ardent as it had been the evening when he had promised to ask more of her, to see her as more than the second daughter of an entailed estate.
Elizabeth felt the warmth rise in her cheeks, for Darcy’s gaze was not the ordinary sort. He regarded her as if intent on committing her to memory, and the sensation was as disconcerting as it was impossible to ignore.
It was also, she was forced to admit, deeply flattering.
“The bullet cake must be cut!” Mrs. Bennet announced, clapping her hands with the authority of a mother goose scolding her young. “Mr. Darcy, you must make the first cut since you are our most distinguished guest.”
“I thank you, madam, but I believe the honor should go to your husband, as master of the house.”
“Ahem,” Uncle Philips cleared his throat, passing out the slips of paper. “We will draw lots so neither those who wish to have their faces filled with flour nor those who do not can strategize.”
Within minutes, he distributed the small folded papers, each bearing a number. Elizabeth unfolded hers to find a three. Jane was first, Colonel Fitzwilliam drew second, and Darcy was comfortably in the middle with a five. Mrs. Bennet was fourth, and Kitty, to her vocal dismay, was eighth.
“Eight! That is practically last! There will be nothing left but a tiny column of flour and certain doom!”
“Then you must hope the bullet falls before your turn,” Mary said smugly, clutching her own lot number six.
“But I want the bullet to fall for me,” Lydia complained with her number nine. “So I can win the forfeit. Jane, will you trade with me? I shall cut so carelessly that the entire mound will collapse on the first try.”
“Then what would be the fun of it all?” Mr. Bennet opened his scrap to reveal a ten. “I suppose I am the only truly safe player in this game.”
Mrs. Bennet handed the knife to Jane.
As calmly as she ever was, Jane approached the flour mound smoothly and made a careful, slender cut at the furthest side of the mound, leaving the center with its sixpence undisturbed upon its peak.
With a small smile, she laid down the knife, brushed the flour from her fingertips, and returned to her seat where Uncle Philips handed her a small glass of port.
“Well played, Miss Bennet,” Colonel Fitzwilliam said, taking up the knife for his turn. “Though I confess I expected nothing less from a woman of such steady nerves.”
The Colonel attacked the pudding with the confident demeanor of a military man accustomed to calculated risk.
He carved a wedge twice as large as Jane’s—ambitious, but controlled—and the flour crumbled away from the mound, leaving the sixpence tilted at a faintly alarming angle but still balanced on its diminished peak.
The company held its collective breath. The coin trembled, seemed to lean, and then settled.
“Ha!” The Colonel set down the knife with a flourish. “Not my first siege.”
Elizabeth rose for her turn. The mound was smaller now, the peak narrower, the sixpence sitting at a precarious angle that made every approach feel dangerous.
Flour trickled down to fill in the places that had already been cut away, but Elizabeth was able to consider the architecture, visualize the load-bearing portion of the peak, and make a whisper-thin slice from the side furthest from the coin.
The flour slid away. The sixpence shifted—Elizabeth’s breath stopped, and Lydia groaned in clear disappointment.
But the trickle ebbed, and the coin settled without cascading, and Elizabeth’s face was saved.
She set down the knife with fingers that trembled only slightly and returned to her seat, catching Darcy watching her without comment.
Mrs. Bennet paraded around the diminished structure, peering down and across, and then settled herself next to Mr. Darcy as if she could borrow his steadiness for her nerves.
Her hand quivered, and her cut was slightly too deep, but the mound held, and she presented the knife to Darcy with a flourish that threatened to send the entire pile to the floor.
It was Darcy’s turn, and Elizabeth held her breath as she watched his hands.
They were the steady, precise, and strong ones that had caught her from falling on the ice and unwound wire from the rabbit, who was now recovering in the bootroom.
The same hands that held her fingers, lifting them to his lips.
Expertly, he angled the blade toward the spot Elizabeth would have chosen, a relatively packed section of the mound that would remove excess flour without disturbing the precarious peak.