CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The music room at Pemberley was the kind of room that made a person feel their own inadequacies with particular clarity, not because it was ostentatious, though the pianoforte was the finest Elizabeth had ever sat before, but because it was arranged with such evident love for the thing itself, the shelves of carefully ordered scores, the candles placed at precise angles to illuminate both instrument and page, the chair positioned for a listener rather than an audience, that to play poorly in it felt almost like a small moral failing.
She had been playing poorly in it for the better part of an hour, and she was doing it deliberately, which she told herself was a character flaw she was prepared to live with.
It had begun as genuine practice, or the nearest approximation of it she could manage, having neglected her playing considerably since arriving at Pemberley in favor of ledgers, correspondence, and the increasingly complex social arithmetic of a household that contained both Georgiana Darcy and Caroline Bingley in uneasy proximity.
But it was a Wednesday evening and Georgiana was upstairs with a cold she insisted was not serious, and Miss Bingley had retired early in pointed disapproval of some minor slight Elizabeth had not intended but had also not gone out of her way to avoid, and Mr. Darcy had settled himself in the listener's chair at the room's far end with a book he had not opened in twenty minutes, and Elizabeth had found herself, quite suddenly, in the specific mood that occasionally overtook her when she wanted very much to provoke a reaction from someone and could not immediately think of a respectable excuse to do so directly.
She played the first movement of a Clementi sonata she knew perfectly well, and then allowed the second to go slightly wrong, a fumbled passage here, a missed fingering there, nothing egregious, only enough to be noticeable to anyone who knew what he was listening to.
She could feel him listening, that careful, intent attention he brought to everything, the kind that did not require him to look directly at a person and yet communicated, without any ambiguity at all, that he was aware of every note she played, including the ones she played incorrectly.
"You are doing that on purpose," he said, from behind her, after the third failed repetition of a phrase she had played without error on three separate occasions the previous fortnight.
"I cannot imagine what you mean."
"You played that passage perfectly at Tuesday's music hour.
You have now missed it three times in a row, always at the same bar, always in a manner that suggests intention rather than ineptitude.
" She could hear, beneath the evenness of his voice, something she was beginning to recognize as the specific restraint of a man suppressing amusement, the particular containment of someone who found her considerably funnier than he was prepared to admit.
"May I ask what I have done to deserve the performance. "
"I am practicing."
"You are practicing making mistakes."
"Sometimes," Elizabeth said, with great dignity, "mistakes require just as much practice as correctness, Mr. Darcy. Not everyone can be naturally proficient in them, as I believe I have several times suggested regarding your own social manner."
He was quiet for a moment. Then she heard the creak of his chair and the soft fall of his footsteps across the carpet, and then he was standing beside the bench, close enough that she was acutely aware of him in a way that had nothing to do with music or conversation, and she kept her eyes very firmly on the keys.
"May I," he said.
"I beg your pardon."
"The passage you keep missing. It is a matter of the left hand position, not the fingering. If you will permit me to show you."
She should have said no, or at least something lightly deflecting, the kind of remark that would have kept the mood at the particular temperature of their usual sparring and no warmer. She said nothing at all, which was its own kind of answer.
He sat beside her on the bench, not crowding her, maintaining the precise and careful distance of a man very conscious of every inch between them, and reached across to adjust the position of her left hand on the keys, his fingers light and brief against hers, correcting the angle of her wrist with a touch so restrained it might have been impersonal, except that it was not, not remotely, and they both knew it.
"There," he said, and his voice was somewhat lower than it had been a moment ago. "Try it again from the beginning of the bar."
She played it. Perfectly, obviously, because it was a simple passage and her left hand had been perfectly positioned all along, and she felt rather than heard the quiet breath he released beside her, and understood that he had known this, and had come to sit beside her anyway, and that neither of them was pretending any longer, even slightly, that this was about the music.
She turned to look at him, because she could not not, and found him already looking at her, closer than she had realized, the candlelight doing something to his face that made it look less guarded than she had ever seen it, the careful composure entirely gone, replaced by something naked and direct that she had no previous experience of receiving from him and no idea, at all, what to do with now that it was here.
"Elizabeth," he said, very quietly, for the second time, and her given name in his voice was still, she found, capable of stopping her breath.
The door opened.
"Darcy! I hoped you had not yet gone up, I saw the light and thought I might chance it.
" Mr. Bingley came in with his characteristic good cheer, already talking before he had properly entered the room, and arrested himself at the scene before him with an expression of comical, transparent alarm.
"Oh. I. That is to say. The housekeeper said the music room was in use and I assumed it would be Georgiana, but I see, that is, I did not mean to, perhaps I should. "
Mr. Darcy had moved. Not far, and not in a rush, but the precise extra inches had reappeared between himself and Elizabeth with the smooth, unhurried precision of a man who had spent a great deal of his life maintaining appearances under pressure, and Elizabeth was grateful for the composure she did not herself entirely possess at that moment.
"Bingley." His voice was entirely level. "I was not expecting you until Thursday."
"Arrived early. Roads were better than expected.
" Bingley's eyes moved between them with an expression of almost painful delicacy, the look of a man who had seen something he was very deliberately deciding not to have seen.
"Forgive me. I can come back in the morning, I did not realize you were, that is, I should. "
"Stay," Elizabeth said, because the alternative was to sit in silence and allow Bingley's awkward kindness to give the moment more significance than she yet knew how to carry, and because some instinct for self preservation told her that she needed, very urgently, for the temperature of the room to come down before she did something she could not take back.
"Please. I was just finishing, and I believe Mr. Darcy and I have exhausted all useful conversation about Clementi for one evening. "
She rose from the bench without looking at Mr. Darcy again, said her goodnights to both gentlemen with a composure she was rather proud of, and walked to her rooms, where she sat for a very long time on the edge of her bed in the dark, not reading, not thinking in any organized way, simply existing in the strange, altered atmosphere of a world that had, in the space of one evening, shifted on its axis and not yet settled into its new position.
She pressed her left hand against her own knee, where he had adjusted her fingers, and felt the ghost of that touch, which had been so brief and so careful and so entirely not about the music, and thought, with the particular helpless clarity of someone who has run out of argument, that she was in a great deal of trouble, and that it was entirely, entirely her own fault for having started it.