“He is devoted to it,” she agreed. “Particularly when it can be borrowed from someone he envies.” Then, because the thought would not let her alone, she added, lightly but not casually, “He spoke as though your family were burdened with some antique charge—something weighty, venerable, and entirely inconvenient.”
Darcy’s jaw set. He did not look as if he meant to answer her.
Elizabeth waited. She did not look at him. She busied herself instead with Brutus, who had resumed a thorough examination of her gown as though convinced a secret might be stitched into the hem.
“I have heard it called many things,” Darcy said at last. “Most of them imaginative.”
“So, it is not true?”
“It is old superstition,” he replied. “Which allows people to treat it as important, regardless of its substance.”
She glanced up at him then. “Well, if it is nothing but a folk tale fit for children and old women, perhaps you may indulge me. I have a fondness for silly things.”
Darcy’s jaw fairly rippled with reluctance, as if the words were simmering forth and he was still trying to clench his teeth against them. “I remember being told,” he said carefully, “that there was once a story attached to my family. The sort that acquires embellishment simply by surviving long enough to be repeated.”
“A legend?”
Mr Darcy made a face of distaste. “If one insists upon the word. The kind of tale that encourages people to speak of duty as though it were an inheritance one might accept without question.”
“Indeed, what a horror! Why, it sounds perfectly scandalous, sir. A ruinous tale, to be sure.”
“It was never presented to me as truth,” he corrected her, his tone controlled, dry as toast. “Only as something one was meant to admire politely when dusting the library shelves. To acknowledge, and then put aside.”
“Put aside?” she echoed. “And yet it seems determined not to stay there.”
His mouth tightened. “Others have always found it more engaging than I ever did.”
“Because the old… tales, if you will… are false?” she asked.
“Because they invite interpretation.”
She smiled, but it did not soften the inquiry. “Interpretation is hardly a crime.”
“No,” he said. “But it does tend to produce expectations. Particularly in those who interpret with an eye toward self-interest.”
“Ah.” She nodded, as though that explained everything—and nothing. “Then it is expectation, not facts themselves, that troubles you. You, Mr Darcy, do not appreciate being fodder for the gossip of those who presume to know you better than you wish to be known.”
He only frowned.
Brutus chose that moment to wedge his head firmly beneath her knees, insistent, irrepressible. Elizabeth laughed under her breath and pushed him back, then obliged him with a good scratching as her fingers found the silky softness of his ears.
“You see,” she said, glancing at Darcy, “even he resists being told what he must be.”
“He seems to resist being toldanythingthese days,” grumbled the gentleman.
She straightened, pushing the dog back at last. “I shall ask no more, since it is clearly a subject you do not enjoy. But you must forgive me if I find it difficult to ignore a mystery that everyone else insists upon parading.”
“I would expect nothing less.”
That answer surprised her. Enough that she laughed. “Well,” she said at last, “Good day, Mr Darcy. I do hope your handsome dog will remember me fondly if I should have the good fortune to encounter him again.”
Darcy inclined his head. “I suspect he will make that determination for himself.”
As she turned back toward the path, Brutus glanced after her, then looked up at his master with unmistakable reproach.
Darcy exhaled. “Come along,” he said, his tone dropping in command. “No more nonsense from you today.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
