“May I inquire,” he said, more softly now, “what occupies your time when you are not enduring the attentions of half the county?”
She blinked, then smiled. “Reading, mostly. Walking, when I can escape supervision. Observing people when neither is possible.”
“Reading,” he repeated, pleased despite himself. “What sort?”
“Varied,” she said. “Though lately I have been quite taken with something unexpected.”
“Oh? Anything worth reciting? I daresay it would make more agreeable fodder than most of the other conversation we might overhear tonight.”
She hesitated—only a fraction—then shrugged. “It is a collection of old ballads and fragments my father procured while I was unwell. Nothing fashionable. Odd, really. But strangely compelling.”
Darcy’s fingers stilled against the stem of his glass.
“Ballads,” he said carefully. The word itself seemed to settle wrong in his mouth. “Of what sort?”
She pursed her lips, thinking. “Legends, mostly. Folk tales. Inconvenient places. Unwise promises. The sort of thing sensible people pretend not to believe in.”
A faint pressure gathered behind his eyes. He shifted in his chair, the movement precise, controlled, and found his gaze drawn—of all people—toward Mr Collins before he could stop it.
“Have you a favourite?”
“I do. Though I doubt it would suit you.”
“Try me.”
“Well. I only recall the first two stanzas.” She smiled, then recited—softly, with a thoughtfulness that stripped the verse of any pretension:
“WhenAvalon in mist was bound,
And noble steel undone,
The thorn abid upon that ground
Till reckoning were begun.
She bore no sword, nor carried shield,
Nor rode in silver mail
Her voice alone the grove did bind,
Her oath the thornwood vale.”
“There,” she finished with a faint lift of her shoulder. “That is all I remember at the moment.”
Darcy remembered.
His lips parted without his consent, the next words pressing forward—not as recollection, but as something that had never loosened its hold on him. He had learned them young. He had been instructed, just as firmly, never to give them voice.
A sharp, visceral awareness went through him—like misplacing one’s footing and discovering there is no ground beneath. This was not a fragment. Not a curiosity. This was the ballad as his father had kept it, intact and unromantic, meant to be endured and dismissed, not spoken aloud by anyone who had no right to it.
And she had spoken it.
Elizabeth Bennet’s eyes were still upon him—bright, attentive, waiting.
She could have no notion of what she had just touched. Darcy forced his attention back into himself, into the room, into the harmlessness of the moment. Some recognitions, once admitted, could not be lived with. They altered the terms of everything that followed.
“That,” he said, managing a faint, dismissive smile, “is a remarkably earnest choice for light reading. Were there dragons and faeries as well? A black sorcerer, no doubt. I hope the volume offers something that does not hinge quite so heavily upon doom.”
