“So I wrote, that very night, to Hatchett & Co, telling them I intended to commission a new town coach. I also…”—he drew a deep breath—“I also opened accounts with some of the…the warehouses in town, thinking you might wish to…to redecorate the houses.”
“Redecorate your houses!”
“If we were engaged, they would be our houses,” he said quietly.
Our houses.A glance revealed a tenderness in his eyes that she had not before seen. It was somehow incredibly endearing,the manner in which he said it.He truly wanted me as his wife, she thought, and it was a notion more shocking than it ought to have been.He was imagining our future life together, wishing me to have all the honour of being Mrs Darcy.
She had not before considered how amazing it was that Mr Darcy had wished to share with her all that he had: his houses, his fortune, his name…his future.
“My house in town”—he continued to speak, to explain to her his plans and preparations—“is very dark. My mother did it up in wood panelling and heavy drapery, as was in fashion at the time of her marriage, but I could not imagine you would prefer it thus, though I am clearly the last man to really know your preferences.”
She abandoned any pretence of sewing. “I regret refusing you,” she said quietly.
“I do not,” he said. “For it taught me to be better than I could have been without having experienced that evening in the Hunsford parsonage. I had grown too used to thinking I could have anything I wanted, even people. I had become proud and conceited, but I hope that…I hope that now I am not.
“Iwastoo proud, however, to go back to the carriage makers and tell them of my stupidity. So they have carried on. I had commissioned it with your pleasure in mind, and if Fitzwilliam was the one to have the privilege of giving it to you, then so be it. At least you would have had it.”
“I have been so cruel to you, so harsh in my condemnations even until yesterday” she said, her eyes fixed on the material spread over the table and her lap. “I should have imagined you would like to take the carriage and run me over with it. Or, at the very least, tell the colonel he was welcome to me.”
His hand came towards her, lingering over her arm for a moment before touching her gently. “I would not expect you to fully believe that I had changed on the strength of a few parties,”he said. “And I know it must have been upsetting for you to learn about the wagers. I shall say to you though, in full honesty—a wager might have induced me to come here, but it would not make me pretend to feelings that were not my own. I love you. I did when I declared myself in Kent, and I do now. Wagers have nothing to do with it.”
He hid nothing from her. When she managed to peep up at him again, she saw his feelings, naked and raw, plain in his eyes.
And that was when she heard the faint ‘plunk’ of a latch falling into place.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“I might not be going to Brighton,” Lydia told her sister, “but I am not going to lose all that allowance. If I must tell Papa myself that she kissed him, so I shall.”
“What would Papa do about that?” Kitty asked with a little shake of her head. “Lizzy could tell him how you have kissed almost all of the officers.”
“Have not!” Lydia retorted staunchly.
“Lizzy caught you kissing Denny,” Kitty reminded her. “And I think she knows about that night we all played blind man’s bluff.”
Lydia’s only reply to that was a slight huff of breath. It was a concern though; if Lizzy was made to marry for a mere kiss, then so too would be her sisters. She crossed her arms over her chest. “Very well then. We need more than a kiss in a maze.”
“I do not even see Mr Darcy anywhere,” Kitty said, looking over the room.
“Nor Lizzy. I saw her dance the first with Philips, but I have not the least notion what became of her after that.”
“Oh, I know where she went.”
“What?” Lydia grabbed her sister’s arm. “Where is she?”
“I do not know precisely,” Kitty said, wrenching her arm free. “But she planned to do some sewing below stairs.”
“Sewing below stairs?” Lydia gaped at her. “What? Why?”
“I was listening to them talk this morning in their bedchamber. Jane hates her wedding gown, so she is going to wear Lizzy’s gown and Lizzy will wear the one she hates. But it needed some alteration first. So she is below stairs tonight, taking care of that.”
“Let us go and see if we can find her,” Lydia decided. “And then we shall see what we can do to win this bet.”
The Bennet girls knew Netherfield very well. The family who had once owned it, the Darlingtons, had had children much of an age with the Bennet girls, and many a happy day was spent playing games in its halls and begging cakes from its kitchen. Lydia, therefore, knew exactly where to go, and she and Kitty were there within minutes. They were not quite at the door when they heard the rumble of a male voice from within the small room that had once been a larder. Lydia gasped and grabbed her sister again, making her stop in her tracks.
“They are in there together,” she mouthed to Kitty. Kitty replied by shoving her fist against her mouth as if to suppress giggles.
It took Lydia only seconds to decide what to do. Motioning to Kitty to stay where she was, she tiptoed over to the door and engaged the latch.
