Chapter 9
Elizabeth
Darcy came to Longbourn four times in twelve days.
Elizabeth counted them the way a woman counts things she has decided not to care about.
Carefully, and more than once. The first visit might have been courtesy.
The second, loyalty to Bingley. The third, habit, if a man like Darcy could be said to form one so quickly.
The fourth admitted no such excuses. His intention was difficult to misunderstand, though Elizabeth, in fairness to herself, tried.
He brought no gifts. He made no speeches.
He sat through Mrs. Bennet's raptures with the patient endurance of a man weathering a squall he had chosen to sail into.
He answered Mary's earnest questions about the duties of an estate as though they mattered — which, to Mary, they did.
And he let Lydia beat him twice at spillikins after she had changed the rules both times to suit herself.
He was easier at Longbourn than he had ever been at Netherfield.
Not easy, precisely. Darcy would probably never be easy, the way some men were never quiet.
But easier. He chose where to stand and whom to answer and which silences were worth keeping.
He listened when the servants spoke to him.
He thanked Hill by name, and meant it, and never once treated ordinary civility as though it cost him something noble.
Small matters, all of them. But then character showed itself in small matters — Elizabeth had begun to suspect that was rather the point of them.
Jane recovered her colour and her strength both.
Bingley recovered no restraint whatsoever.
He arrived whenever propriety allowed him to, and once a full half hour before it did, at which point he was seen walking his horse up and down the lane like a man rehearsing patience he did not possess, until the clock permitted him to knock.
Hill saw him from the kitchen window. All of Longbourn knew of it by breakfast.
"He is very considerate," Jane said.
"He is very visible," Elizabeth said. "The lane has never had so devoted an admirer."
Jane only smiled into her tea, which was answer enough.
The Netherfield ball was fixed for the last Thursday of the month.
Bingley delivered the invitations himself, beaming as though he had invented the very concept of dancing.
Caroline came with him and spent the whole of the visit lamenting the crowding, the provincialism of country dances, and the general burden of entertaining so very many people she did not know and had no wish to.
"They will not remain unknown after the ball," Elizabeth said.
"Some acquaintances improve with distance."
"Then you may station yourself at the far end of the room, Miss Bingley, and admire us from there."
Caroline's smile hardened into something that resembled a smile the way a held breath resembles calm.
Darcy did not come that day. Elizabeth had no claim on his presence. None whatsoever. She told herself so several times, which was itself rather telling. She noticed the absence before she noticed herself noticing it, and then felt irritated on two separate counts.
His third visit, the one that had come in rain, deserved rather more credit than she had given it at the time.
The weather had confined the whole household to the drawing room that day, rain streaking the windows in long silver ropes.
Darcy arrived with Bingley, carrying two books and making no pretence whatsoever that the visit belonged only to his friend.
Lydia proposed charades. Mary objected that imitation encouraged falsehood, a position nobody troubled to argue with.
Kitty sided with whichever sister had spoken most recently, as was her custom.
Mr. Bennet stayed shut up in the library, his door open just enough to suggest supervision and closed just enough to preserve his peace.
It was a compromise Elizabeth suspected he had perfected over twenty years of daughters.
"We might read instead," Darcy said.
"That is not a game," said Lydia.
"It is when two servants have chosen the books," Elizabeth said.
Darcy handed her one volume. "McKeever denies choosing this one."
She opened it. A length of blue thread marked a comedy roughly a third of the way through.
"And Sarah denies recommending the path it was found on. Their denials share a colour, I notice."
"What are you two even talking about?" Lydia asked.
"Household treason."
Lydia approved of this at once and without further question, which struck Elizabeth as rather in keeping with her general approach to treason.
They played charades. Darcy proved terrible at guessing and worse at acting.
A man who held his composure so carefully in every other circumstance apparently had none whatsoever to spare for pantomime.
Bingley represented a shipwreck by flinging himself bodily against a footstool, with such conviction that Mrs. Hurst would have wept to see the furniture endangered.
Jane laughed until Mrs. Bennet warned her, twice, against bringing on another cough.
Elizabeth drew the word pride. She rose, walked to the centre of the room, lifted her chin exactly as high as dignity required and not one inch higher, and looked directly at Darcy. He guessed it before she had finished the pose.
"That was unfair."
"It was swift," he said, not troubling to look sorry about it.
Darcy drew prejudice. He studied Elizabeth slowly, as though the rest of the room had ceased to exist. He refused to guess a single thing. Elizabeth understood the joke before Kitty did, which was not saying a great deal, but she felt the small warm shock of it all the same.
"You are impertinent."
"I have had an excellent instructor."
Mrs. Bennet wanted to know what everyone found so amusing. Nobody supplied an answer that would have satisfied her, and in the end she gave up and complained instead that the fire wanted mending.
After the game, Elizabeth and Darcy found themselves standing near the window together, as if by accident, though Elizabeth was beginning to distrust accidents where he was concerned.
Rain traced long crooked paths down the panes.
The view no longer gave her back only the pavilion and the flood and the fear of it.
It gave her his coat settled heavy and warm around her shoulders, his flat refusal to cross the drowned ground, the badly hidden terror underneath all that careful duty.
"Do storms always improve your conversation?" she asked.
"The first one did not."
"The proposal was poor. The conversation before it was not."
Darcy looked at her properly then. "You remember it kindly."
"I remember it accurately."
"You accused me of wanting to play the hero."
"You offered to fight the whole of Hertfordshire."
"Only its men. Its matrons routed me completely."
"A sensible retreat, all things considered."
The ease between them felt, if anything, more intimate than the pavilion had.
Nothing forced it this time. No flood, no fear, no coat pressed round her shoulders out of necessity.
Only two people who, it turned out, liked one another's company.
Elizabeth could no longer pretend that pleasure was too slight a thing to matter.
I like him. I have liked him for weeks and called it something smaller because the truth felt too large to carry.
When the rain eased, Darcy did not linger past what propriety allowed.
He left with Bingley and the unmarked book.
The comedy with the blue thread in it stayed behind with Elizabeth.
Inside its cover, beneath Sarah's careful blue knot, McKeever had added one line in his neat, upright hand: A serious household may still require laughter.
Elizabeth read it twice, and found she agreed with him.
The following morning a parcel arrived from Netherfield. It held the Cowper volume Elizabeth had sent back by way of Bingley, along with a note from Mrs. Nicholls thanking Jane for her kindness in writing. Inside the cover, the servants' little reading list had grown by one more line.
Burney remains a warning, McKeever had written. Miss Elizabeth may judge for herself whether the company improves it.
Beneath that, in Sarah's rounder hand: The south path has been repaired. No recommendation is implied.
Elizabeth carried the book to Jane's room and handed it over without a word.
Jane read the additions, smiled despite herself, and passed it back. "Are you unhappy about it?"
Elizabeth sat down at the dressing table. The blue shawl lay draped over the chair beside her, its mended fringe catching the morning light in a way that made it impossible to ignore.
"No. That is the problem."
"Why must it be a problem?"
"Because Sarah and McKeever have decided upon an ending, Jane, before the two people most concerned have even agreed upon a beginning."
"They saw affection."
"They saw interest. Those are not the same thing, whatever a housemaid's blue thread might imply."
"Is there affection now?"
Jane asked it plainly, without a trace of teasing, and Elizabeth found she could not answer with a joke the way she wanted to.
Darcy's apology had mattered to her. His warning about Wickham had mattered more, because he had limited it so carefully.
He had protected Georgiana's confidence while still giving her father a choice worth making.
And at Longbourn he had done nothing grand at all. He had simply kept coming back.
"There may be," Elizabeth admitted.
Jane reached over and touched her hand. "Then let it become what it becomes, Lizzy. Servants cannot decide it for you."
"Nor storms?"
"Nor mothers."
They both glanced towards the door as Mrs. Bennet's voice rose through the house, calling for Hill and complaining about something before poor Hill had even had the chance to answer.
"Especially not mothers," Jane said, and this time they both laughed.
Darcy came again that afternoon.
He found Elizabeth in the shrubbery with Mary, who was reading aloud from a moral essay and objecting, with some heat, whenever the wind turned two pages at once and forced her to backtrack. Darcy listened for several minutes with an attention so grave that Elizabeth nearly laughed outright.
Mary paused for breath. "The author confuses discomfort with virtue," Elizabeth said.
"Self-denial may strengthen character," said Mary, wounded.
"So may good sense. And good sense has the advantage of being warmer."
Darcy looked away. Not quickly enough to hide the amusement from Elizabeth, who had grown rather good at catching it.
Mary shut the book with a small, offended snap. "I shall ask Papa what he thinks."
She marched off towards the house, quite certain she had the last word.
"You have corrupted my sister's certainty," Elizabeth said.
"I spoke not one word."
"You agreed silently. I am told your silence carries rank."
They walked on together, the house still visible through the bare, leafless branches overhead.
"Bingley tells me you received the Cowper."
"With annotations. McKeever denies any romantic purpose whatsoever, and Sarah denies ever recommending the repaired path. Their innocence, between the two of them, is remarkably elaborate."
"I could forbid further correspondence through my library, if you like."
Elizabeth considered this with more seriousness than it deserved. "Do you wish to?"
"No."
"Neither do I."
The admission sat between them, small and unmistakable, the way a single dropped stitch can unravel an entire sleeve if you look at it too long.
Darcy stopped beside the laurel hedge, and something in the way he stopped told Elizabeth this was not an idle halt. "Miss Elizabeth. I have kept my promise. I have not repeated my offer."
"You have not."
"May I go on calling here, after the ball?"
Her pulse moved at her throat, quick and traitorous. She disliked that he might see it, and disliked still more that some part of her hoped he would.
"Yes."
"May I ask you for the first two dances?"
"The first two are promised to Mr. Collins."
Darcy's face changed. It was stripped so thoroughly of its usual composure that she relented before he could recover it.
"We have no Mr. Collins at Longbourn, sir. He has not yet visited."
"You find this amusing."
"Enormously."
"Then I will ask for the next two."
"You may have the first two."
He bowed. Whatever satisfaction was in his eyes made the small formal gesture feel far more intimate than any bow had a right to.
From the house, Mrs. Bennet's voice carried out to them, announcing that tea was ready and had been ready for some minutes, thank you very much. Darcy offered his arm. Elizabeth took it, and did not examine too closely how naturally her hand settled there.
At the door a gust caught the loose end of her shawl and lifted it towards the wet stone. Darcy caught the fabric before it struck the wall, his fingers closing around the repaired fringe.
"Blue silk."
"Sarah's work."
"McKeever tells me her knots are stronger than his."
"They discuss rather more than books, those two."
"So do we," Darcy said, and released the shawl.
Elizabeth carried the warmth of that brief, accidental touch into the house with her, tucked somewhere just under her ribs. No servant had arranged that moment. No storm had forced it.
Choice, she was discovering, made for a far more dangerous pleasure than either.