The words left his mouth and entered the air and he felt, immediately, the slight recoil of having said something uglier than he intended.
Bingley sighed and went back to the dancing. Darcy remained where he was. Caroline had drifted away to examine someone's gown. The punch was warm in his hand.
Across the room, Miss Elizabeth Bennet turned her head. She was very still for a moment. Then she turned back to Miss Lucas and said something. Miss Lucas glanced at Darcy. Miss Elizabeth laughed.
The laugh was different this time. It was bright and sharp and carried perfectly, and it did not reach her eyes.
He had the sudden, unpleasant certainty that she had heard him.
The evening dragged. Darcy stood and watched the dancing without seeing it. He accepted an introduction to a Mr.Robinson, who farmed something. He nodded at a Mrs. Phillips, who was Mrs. Bennet's sister and equally excitable. He spoke briefly with Sir William Lucas, who described the history of the assembly rooms at a length that suggested he was being paid by the word. He was calculating the earliest possible moment he could suggest to Bingley that they leave when he heard, from the direction of the entrance hall, a sound that had become, against his will, immediately recognizable.
Squealing.
High, determined, joyful squealing. The kind that could only be produced by a very small animal with very large feelings. It was followed by the rapid clatter of small hooves on a wooden floor, a sound he had heard exactly twice before in his life and which he now recognised with the helpless certainty of a man who hears the huntsman's horn and knows the chase has found him.
No. Not here. Not now.
A gasp near the door. A woman's shriek, high and theatrical. Someone dropped a glass, and it shattered on the floor with a bright crack that silenced the conversations nearby. The music stuttered, one instrument at a time, and the dancers nearest the entrance stumbled and separated as something small and pink and astonishingly fast shot between their feet.
Truffles had arrived at the Meryton Assembly. She had not followed the carriage. A pig could not keep pace with horses, and even Truffles had limits. What she had done, as Elizabeth would later reconstruct from Hill's guilty account and the evidence of a forced latch, was simpler and more determined: she had escaped the kitchen twenty minutes after the family left, trotted down the lane to Meryton on the same route she walked with Elizabeth three mornings a week — Longbourn sat close to the edge of the village, barely half a mile from the assembly rooms — and let herself into the building through the kitchen entrance, where thestaff were too busy with the supper trays to notice one small pig among the bustle. Half a mile, in the dark, on a route she knew by smell. It should not have been easy, even for a determined pig. And yet here she was, pink and determined and utterly unconcerned by the chaos she was causing.
The pig moved through the room with the fearless purpose of a creature on a mission. She dodged a dancing couple. She skirted a cluster of matrons. She skidded on the polished floor near the punch table, her hooves splaying briefly before she recovered and pressed on. She threaded through a forest of legs with the low, determined trot of an animal that knew exactly where it was going and had no intention of being stopped by waxed oak. A woman in blue lifted her skirts and screamed. A man stumbled sideways. A footman made a grab for her and missed. The last of the music died away.
The pig reached Darcy.
She sat on his right foot, pressed her flank against his calf, and looked up at him with the absolute contentment of an animal that had been searching for something and found it.
The room went quiet. Then it erupted.
Laughter. Gasps. Whispers that became exclamations. Sir William Lucas, who was somewhere near the punch bowl, let out a bellow of delight. Mrs. Long clutched Mrs. Goulding's arm. The young officers near the door were grinning. Every head in the assembly turned toward Darcy, and on every face he saw some variation of the same expression: amusement, fascination, and the undisguised glee of people witnessing something they would talk about for weeks.
He looked down at the pig. The pig looked up at him. Her tail was wagging, which he had not known pigs could do, and her snout was pressed against his trouser leg, leaving a faint smear of mud.
His mouth twitched. He could feel it happening and he could not stop it. Something in the animal's face, the sheer unreasonable devotion of it, pulled at a muscle he had not used in public for as long as he could remember. He set his jaw. He stared straight ahead. He was in a room full of people, and every one of them was looking at him, and he could not afford to be charmed by a pig.
But the pig was warm on his foot, and its eyes were half-closed with contentment, and its small body rose and fell with each breath in a rhythm that was, against all reason, calming. He had not asked for this. He had not invited it. And yet here he was, with a pig on his foot, in the middle of an assembly, and the muscle in his jaw would not quite hold.
Miss Elizabeth was crossing the room.
She walked with the controlled composure of a woman who was aware that every person in the assembly was watching her and who intended to give them absolutely nothing. Her chin was up. Her back was straight. Her eyes were fixed on the pig. He could see the effort it cost her. The tightness in her shoulders. The careful steadiness of her step. She was holding herself together in the way a person held a cracked cup, gently and with great attention.
She did not look at him. She did not speak to him. She knelt, scooped Truffles into her arms, and stood in one fluid motion. The pig squealed and twisted, straining back toward Darcy's boot.
For one moment, their eyes met. Hers were bright and hard and furious. Not the playful anger of their previous encounters. Real anger. The kind that came from being laughed at, in public, by an entire room, after being insulted by the man her pig had just publicly chosen over her.
She said nothing. She turned and walked out of the assembly hall with the pig squirming in her arms, and she did not look back.
The door closed behind her. The music started again, haltingly, as if the musicians themselves needed a moment to recover. The dancing resumed with the self-conscious bustle of people pretending to be occupied while actually listening to the whispers that ran through the room like water through a broken dam.
Bingley appeared at his side, looking concerned.
"Was that the pig again?"
"Yes."
"Poor Miss Elizabeth. She looked rather upset."
"She had every reason to be."
