Elizabeth straightened her dress but did not go inside. She was not ready to sit in a parlour with Mr. Darcy and make conversation while her pulse did things she could not account for. She would let Jane and her mother receive the visitors. She would stay in the garden and pretend to be occupied with the flower bed.
She was kneeling by the roses, pulling a weed she had already pulled twice, when she heard the squealing.
It came from inside the house. A crash. A scraping sound. The unmistakable crack of a broom handle hitting a stone floor. Then the squealing, high and joyful and unmistakable.
Elizabeth was on her feet and running before the sound had finished.
She reached the parlour doorway and stopped. The scene was already complete. Truffles was on Mr. Darcy's left boot. Mrs. Bennet was white-faced. Mr. Bennet had emerged from his library and was regarding the pig with evident satisfaction. AndDarcy — Darcy was looking down at the pig with an expression she could not read, his hand half-raised as though he had been about to touch the pig's ear and had caught himself.
"Determined creature," Mr. Bennet said. "I admire her persistence, if not her judgment."
Elizabeth crossed the room. She knelt in front of Mr. Darcy, as she had done at Lucas Lodge, as she had done at the assembly, and reached for Truffles.
The pig clung to the boot.
Elizabeth looked up at Darcy. He looked down at her. His face was composed, carefully blank, betraying nothing.
But his ears were pink again.
"Mr. Darcy," she said, very quietly, so that only he could hear. "I am running out of ways to apologise."
His expression cracked. The blankness split, just barely, and underneath it was something she had not expected. Not irritation. Not contempt.
Something that looked, for a fraction of a second, like warmth.
"The pig has nothing to apologise for," he said. His voice was low, and there was something in it she had not heard before. "And neither, Miss Elizabeth, do you."
He was not talking about the pig. Or perhaps he was. Elizabeth could not tell, and the not-telling made her pulse do something inconvenient.
Elizabeth collected Truffles, who squealed but submitted, and carried her back to the kitchen without another word. She stood in the kitchen with the pig in her arms and her heart doing something peculiar in her chest and told herself it was irritation.
It was not warmth. It was not the beginning of curiosity. It was not the faintest, most unwelcome stirring of the possibility that she had been wrong about something.
It was irritation. Definitely irritation.
Truffles bumped her chin with a wet snout.
"You," Elizabeth told the pig, "are going to be the death of me."
CHAPTER 6
Mr. Darcy
Darcy had not intended to go to Longbourn. Not that Tuesday, not any day.
He had intended to stay at Netherfield, read his book, write to Georgiana, and avoid all social engagement for the remainder of the day. This was a perfectly reasonable plan. It was the sort of plan a sensible man made after a week that had included a pig on his boot at a dinner party, a pig on his boot at an assembly, and the growing suspicion that the entire county of Hertfordshire considered him an object of comedy.
Then Bingley had said, "I thought I might call on the Bennets this afternoon. Come with me, Darcy. The fresh air will do you good."
"The fresh air will do nothing for me."
"You cannot sit in this house all day."
"I have sat in this house all day for four days running and found it entirely satisfactory."
But Bingley had that look on his face. The earnest, golden look that said he was going to see Miss Bennet and was nervous about going alone and would Darcy please come as ballast. Bingley had worn this look many times before, for other women in other counties, and it had never ended well, but it was impossible to refuse.
So here he was. Riding up the lane to Longbourn on a Tuesday afternoon, in weather that could not quite decide between autumn and winter, telling himself he was here as Bingley's companion and nothing more.
