Mrs Hill glanced up. “Not that I saw, Miss Elizabeth. He did not ring.”
“Did he breakfast?”
“No, miss.”
Elizabeth nodded, thanked her, and moved on. In the passage by the pantry, she encountered one of the kitchen maids, then the other. Each shook her head. Alice suggested, cheerfully, that Mr Bennet might be enjoying a quiet morning walk. Sarah supposed he was having a long lie-in after so much merrymaking the night before.
Elizabeth did not answer either conjecture. She passed through the back door instead. The yard was damp from last night’s rain. The stable boy was sweeping near the threshold, his boots leaving dark marks on the stone.
“Tom,” she said. “I do not suppose you have seen my father this morning?”
He looked up at once. “Yes, miss. Early.”
“Early? Where?”
He touched his cap. “I saddled the horse, miss. Just as he asked. But he didn’t say where he was bound.”
Elizabeth stared at him. “Thehorse?Did he… Well, did he take his fowling piece?”
“No, miss.”
“A book, perhaps?”
Tom shook his head. “No.”
She thanked him and turned away before he could ask why she looked as she did.
Her father did not go out early. He did not ride without remark. He did not leave without a word when the house was in such a state of expectation and strain. He avoided mornings altogether when he could.
Elizabeth crossed the yard again, then climbed the stairs to her room and closed the door behind her—not to sleep, not to think, but to gather herself into a space private enough to block out the clutter of people.
She began to pace—threesteps from the bed to the window, three back again. She pressed her palms together, then dragged them through her hair and abandoned the effort. Nothing would settle. Nothing would line up.
Last night refused to stay where it belonged.
After the supper table—after that instant when he had stared at her like he had seen a ghost—there had been no… no ease or gaiety for her. No return to civility disguised as comfort. Darcy had placed himself elsewhere, then farther still. When the room shifted, he shifted with it, until the distance between them felt arranged rather than accidental. Once—only once—he had paused near her, then altered course so abruptly that she had wondered whether she had imagined the moment at all.
What the devil had she done to offend him? He did not speak to her. He did not even look at her again.
Instead, he had stationed himself where Mr Collins was thickest in his attentions, as though proximity itself might be used as cover. Elizabeth had noticed because the relief she expected never came. She had waited for it—waited with the patience of habit—and found only the same tightening, the same internal recoil, sharpened now by the absence of something she had not known she relied upon.
She stopped short, turning back toward the bed.
Mr Wickham.
Thathadbeen her certainty. It still wanted to be. Shehadfelt easier near him—lighter, almost—and she had accepted the feeling without question. But memory, once disturbed, would not lie still. Darcy had been nearby then, too. Always somewhere at the edge of the room, never quite out of reach. She had not noticed because she had not been looking for him.
She pressed her hand to her middle and turned again.
It had grown worse this morning. That was the part she could not reason away. She knew—knew—precisely where Mr Collins was in the house. Not by sound, not by sight. By a faint, sour wave that moved through her without warning, leaving her oddly queasy and alert. When he crossed the passage outside her door, she felt it behind her eyes. When he lingered below the stairs, it reached her even there.
Elizabeth stopped pacing and leaned her forehead against the window. The glass was cold, and she welcomed it. It brought some relief to the insistent throbbing that had become a part of her existence of late.
Outside, the garden lay stripped and damp, the lawn darkened by recent rain. Beyond it, the rose hedge climbed the side of the house in its usual disorder—bare stems, thorns exposed, leaves long since fallen.
Except…
She squinted.
