Lydia shook her head. “No, no, not with Mr. Darcy—I can promise to never dance with him. I would be too scared to say a word.”
Elizabeth smiled. “Mr. Darcy is a far more interesting man than Bingley.”
As soon as Elizabeth spoke, the two girls perceived that the gentleman himself had stepped out onto the balcony. He stared at them with that same serious, unreadable expression.
Chapter Two
Mr. Darcy’s time at the Assembly local to Mr. Bingley’s leased estate had been by no means pleasant.
Too many people. Too much noise. A dozen conversations at once. The heat from two score couples leaping about. The sawing of the (if he were to be honest, which he did not wish to be) decent violinists. Hordes of bright candles.
Crowding, crowding, and crowds.
Mr. Darcy had been once forced by politeness to speak to an older woman chattering about her nieces.
Fitzwilliam Darcy did not like balls, and a public assembly was the worst sort of ball.
There were many things he liked.
The lecture halls at Cambridge. The soft sound of someone turning the pages of a book. Eager conversation in a close domestic circle. Fencing. His sister. Mr. Bingley. His confidence in his own capabilities.
Darcy stood resolutely to the side, near a portrait of the king, watching the wavering crowds and feeling slightly sick to his stomach.
The only thing of interest that he’d noted had been an oddly dressed girl, who looked slightly familiar. He’d looked closely at her while he tried to puzzle out where that sense of familiarity came from, but then she’d looked back at him, and he realized that his attention could be misconstrued.
Darcy wished that there was no conversation, and only music. He hated the sound of dozens of conversations. He wanted the tension growing in his gut to relax. Since Georgiana’s near escape, he had been easily irritable. This was the first time he’d been in a large social gathering since then, and his previousways of finding patience when crowded by crowds no longer worked.
He wanted to scream, run, and beat a tree down with his bare hands. Pugilism, a friendly boxing match, would match his mood precisely. Or fencing. Or shooting. Or foxhunting.
That almost familiar girl sat near him, and at first, he thought that she perhaps hoped to inspire him to a dance. However, there was something about her manner. He did not think she had any scheme of that sort. He would certainly not have danced with her in any case. She dressed in a manner that combined cheapness with slovenliness, but when he briefly met her eyes there was intelligence to them.
He found himself confused. But Darcy knew better than to give any particular attention to a poor girl.
Darcy put all his attention on the music, but it seemed every time he started to forget the rest of this miserable event while letting his mind leap with joy of a pretty Irish reel, someone would bump into him as they walked past, there would be a loud coughing sound, and the one inferior member of the musical troupe, the cellist on the left, would make a mistake.
Each time he felt that flash of anger, mostly directed at himself, jerk its way through his chest.
He should have dueled Wickham.
He should never have let Georgiana go to Ramsgate. He should have gone to Ramsgate with Georgiana. How had he been so stupid as to hire Mrs. Younge? Many of the sheep in the north meadows had gotten sheep rot this year, twice as many as any time in the last several years. He should have foreseen the danger of the wet conditions. Would Georgiana’s deepened antipathy to society ever dissipate?
At last, Darcy found a brief peace. A lovely piece of music, and his mind thinking about the astronomical observations he intended to make tomorrow. There was a fine hill next toBingley’s estate. He had been lately observing each night the way the moons of Jupiter appeared and disappeared around the great planet, and looking at the odd, strange rings about Saturn. What did he wish to study tomorrow with his telescope?
“Darcy, you had much better dance.” Bingley’s cheerful voice broke through Darcy’s reverie. “I hate to see you standing about in this stupid manner.”
That frustration with being distracted, with being made to pay attention to another human, even if it was someone who he usually liked, flashed through Darcy.
With a force of will Darcy brought up that part of himself which he used to manage himself in society. It was the part that had been trained by his mother’s cheerful instructions in social behavior.
The cost of having such a friend as Bingley, a man to whom his advice was helpful, and who brought him to regularly feel more cheeriness than was his usual wont, was to be subjected to unwished for suggestions. “I assure you, there is no one in this room for whom it would not be a pain to me to stand up with.”
Bingley suggested that he dance with the girls sitting behind him.
In his abstraction he had not noticed that the interesting girl had been joined by another, a fashionably dressed young Miss who looked very young indeed, and who had a tipsy air.
He barely glanced at her though, looking again at the half-familiar girl.
Their eyes caught. There was a curious flash in her dark eyes. And then she looked down and away, with a slight smile.
