Bingley glanced at him. "You sound as if you mean that."
Darcy said nothing. He was looking at the door through which Miss Elizabeth had vanished. The spot on his boot where the pig had sat was warm.
Caroline materialized at his side. "Well," she said, with a laugh that was meant to be light and was not. "The Bennet pig has caused quite the scene. One wonders what sort of family allows a pig to roam freely. It speaks to a certain... disorder in the household."
"The pig followed the family's carriage," Darcy said. "It is not as if they brought it intentionally."
"Nevertheless. It is irregular. And the girl, running through the assembly like that, in front of everyone. One really does wonder about the upbringing." Caroline smoothed an invisible wrinkle from her glove. "I cannot imagine any family of consequence permitting such a display."
Darcy looked at the muddy smear on his trouser leg. Tiny hoof marks. Precise as punctuation.
"She was retrieving her pig," he said. "I am not certain what alternative you would have preferred."
Caroline opened her mouth, closed it, and changed the subject to the quality of the supper.
He thought about her face as she walked out. The set of her jaw. The way she had not let herself cry, or shout, or show anything beyond that terrible, dignified composure.
He thought about what he had said to Bingley. "Not handsome enough to tempt me." The words sat in his chest like a stone. He had said them carelessly, the way one batted away an insect, without thinking about whether the insect had feelings.
She had heard. He was certain of it now. The laugh that did not reach her eyes. The way she had turned to Miss Lucas and said something that made Miss Lucas look at him with an expression that was half pity and half judgment.
The assembly would talk about this for a month. The Bennet pig and Mr. Darcy. It would be a joke, and she would be the punchline. And he would be the man who had insulted her and then stood there like a stone pillar while her pig made a fool of them both.
He finished his punch. It tasted of nothing.
On the ride back to Netherfield, Bingley talked about Miss Bennet. Caroline talked about the supper. Louisa talked about the gowns. Mr. Hurst said nothing because Mr. Hurst was asleep.
Darcy sat in the dark of the carriage and thought about dark eyes and a lifted chin and a pink pig on his boot, and the terrible, dawning suspicion that he had made a very poor first impression on a woman who deserved a better one.
CHAPTER 5
Elizabeth
The neighbourhood would not stop talking about it.
Elizabeth discovered this on Friday morning, when she walked to Meryton with Jane to return a book to the circulating library and was stopped four times in the space of a single street. Mrs. Phillips seized her arm outside the haberdashery and declared that half the town had already asked her about it. Mrs. Long, who was coming out of the post office, said she had never seen anything so amusing in all her years and that the pig was clearly a creature of superior discernment. The baker's wife leaned over the counter and asked if the pig had escaped again, and a woman Elizabeth did not recognise at all said, from across the street, "Is that the Bennet girl? The one with the pig and Mr. Darcy?"
Elizabeth smiled at everyone. She laughed when it seemed expected. She said things like "yes, very amusing" and "she is quite the escape artist" and "I assure you, the pig's affections are entirely unsolicited."
She wanted to scream.
Jane walked beside her with the serene, untroubled composure of a woman who had not been publicly humiliated at an assembly. Jane had not had to cross a room full of laughing strangers to retrieve a pig from the boot of a man who thought her not handsome enough to dance with. Jane had danced with Mr. Bingley and been admired. Elizabeth had been made a joke.
"You are being very quiet," Jane said, when they had turned off the high street and were walking along the lane toward home.
"I am savouring the silence. It is the first moment in twenty-four hours when no one has mentioned the pig."
Jane was quiet for a moment. "People will forget."
"People will not forget. In fifty years, they will still be telling the story of the pig that fell in love with Mr. Darcy at the Meryton Assembly. I will be ninety years old and they will still ask me about it."
"You will not be ninety. You would be seventy."
"The maths are not the point, Jane."
They walked in silence. The lane was muddy from the night's rain, and the hedgerows dripped. Truffles trotted at Elizabeth's heels, as she always did when Elizabeth walked to Meryton, and Elizabeth had not had the heart to leave her behind. The pig had done nothing wrong. The pig did not understand humiliation or social consequence or the casual cruelty of a room full of people laughing at you. The pig had simply wanted to be near the person she loved.
Elizabeth could not fault her for that. She could fault the person in question, however. She could fault him thoroughly and at length.
