“There is noher,” Darcy protested.
“Is she in town? Or did you meet in Kent?”
“You speak nonsense.” Darcy did not say any more while he and his cousin settled themselves in their seatsand he began to drive away from the shop. He had no wish to speak of Elizabeth to Saye. He did not wish to speak of her to anyone. What good would it do?
“I cannot help you if you will not confide in me.”
Darcy, his attention on steering the curricle successfully onto the main street, unthinkingly said, “You cannot help me anyhow—it is in every way impossible.”
“Ah! So youarepining over a woman. What did she do? Accept someone else?”
Darcy treated his cousin to another extended silence. “There is no use telling you about it, for it is not likely I should ever see her again.”
“Why not?”
Because she loathes me.“She lives in Hertfordshire,” he said. “And her father is not much inclined to bring her to town.”
“Hertfordshire is a mere skip up the road. Surely geography is not your only impediment?”
“I do not wish to speak of it,” Darcy replied shortly. The roads were rather emptier than he had expected, but he fixed his eyes on them as if they were teeming with carriages and pedestrians run amok. It was no good, for Saye was conspicuously silent, and Darcy could very nearly hear his brain working. His cousin was not likely to cease in his efforts; he knew that. He would poke and prod and eavesdrop and pry… It was exhausting just to think of it.
“She refused me,” he conceded, “and I shall say nothing more of the matter than that.”
“Refusedyou? Is she mad?”
“No, she is not mad…only it seems that she never really liked me very well.”
Saye laughed. “Oh-ho! So there you were, hat in hand, well prepared to play the lover and instead?—”
“Instead nothing. We are nothing to one another and never will be, and I tell you again, that is all I shall say.”
“Why does she dislike you? What did you do to her?”
He repressed a growl of frustration at his cousin’s tenacity. “I behaved badly,” he admitted. “Arrogantly, selfishly… I really do not wish to go into the particulars. She despises me. Enough said.”
“And she told you that she hated you in response to a marriage proposal?”
“A marriage proposal that came hard on the heels of her finding out I had interfered in a romance between Bingley and her sister. A marriage proposal in which I insulted her and her family. Now will you please leave it be?”
“I suppose I should have allowed you to eat your biscuits,” Saye told him soberly. After another brief pause, he added, “Perhaps you will find someone else to catch your eye in Brighton.”
To this Darcy made no reply. Elizabeth was incomparable, and he would never find her equal, not in Brighton, not in London. Not in any place in the world.
Work on the house, under the guidance of Mr Tucker, took on a breakneck pace. Jobs large and small were unfolding everywhere under his watch, from the scaffolding that had been erected at the front and back of the house, to the sweeping of every chimney. He very kindly did not demote Mr Mullens, allowing him toperceive himself as the man in charge. But he quietly hired additional men, including a large group who came each day from Pyecombe in a farm wagon, and divided them all into crews based on room. But no matter how quickly the work proceeded, there was no pretending that it could be ready in a mere month.
Elizabeth was not overly worried about it; Mr Tucker must surely be reporting to Lord Saye and informing him of the difficulties, most of which she understood were of the usual sort—shipments of materials delayed, complications to seemingly simple repairs, excesses in expense, and the like.
“Why is it,” she asked her uncle as they walked to the house one morning, “that despite seeing a multitude of places where the costs have been underestimated, one never seems to see an overestimate? Not once has someone said, ‘Excellent news, Miss Bennet, but we seem to have found a better price on the wood for the floors’.”
Mr Gardiner only chuckled, entering the house behind her. “That, my dear, is always the way of it.”
Elizabeth stopped in the vestibule. “Do you hear that sound—like running water?”
Mr Gardiner met her eye. “I do, unfortunately.”
With dread, Elizabeth remembered the heavy rains the night before, which had tapered into a mere misty drizzle that morning.
“Let us do a search of the upstairs rooms,” Mr Gardiner advised.
