He was not thinking about Miss Elizabeth Bennet. He was not thinking about her chin lifting when he spoke, or the way her eyes sharpened when she was amused, or the colour of her hair in sunlight, which he had noticed at the assembly despite his best efforts not to notice anything about her at all.
He was not thinking about any of this. He was thinking about his book, which he had left at a very interesting chapter, and how much he wished he were still reading it.
Longbourn was a gentleman's house, but only just. The grounds were pleasant if somewhat unruly, with a garden that suggested competing jurisdictions and a lawn that had surrendered to the seasons. The front door needed paint. The drive was narrow. It was, in every way, a house of modest means and large family, and it wore both facts openly.
Bingley did not notice any of this. Bingley dismounted with the eagerness of a man arriving at a palace.
They were shown into the parlour. Mrs. Bennet received them with an enthusiasm that made Darcy want to retreat behind the nearest piece of furniture. She was loud. She was effusive. She directed every comment at Bingley and every pointed observation at Darcy, whom she clearly considered a secondary prize but a prize nonetheless.
Kitty coughed. Lydia stared at them with the frank appraisal of a girl who had not yet learned the art of subtlety. Mary, at the pianoforte, was producing a melody that Darcy suspected had been written in a different key than the one she was playing.
Jane Bennet entered from the sitting room, and Bingley's face did something that Darcy could only describe as melting. He watched his friend cross the room to greet Miss Bennet and felt, simultaneously, affection for Bingley's transparent sincerity and concern about where it was leading.
Darcy chose a chair near the window. It was the farthest seat from the centre of the room and offered a partial view of the garden, which was better than a full view of Mrs. Bennet's performance. He sat down, arranged his coat, and prepared to endure.
He was doing reasonably well at it, too. He had survived three minutes of Mrs. Bennet's account of Jane's accomplishments, two minutes of Lydia's questions about London, and one minute of Mary explaining the philosophical implications of social obligation. He had nodded at appropriate intervals and said "indeed" twice, which was his contribution to most conversations and which people generally accepted as sufficient.
Then he made the mistake of glancing at the garden, and he saw Miss Elizabeth.
She was outside, near a flower bed that appeared to have been recently excavated by something with a snout. She was wearing a plain grey dress and her hair was coming loose and she was bending down to pick up what appeared to be a chewed stick. She looked up at the window, saw him, and went still for a moment before looking away.
His chest did something inconvenient.
And then the squealing began.
It came from somewhere deep in the house. A crash. A scraping sound. A clatter that suggested a broom handle hitting a stone floor. Then the squealing, high and joyful and unmistakable, followed by the rapid percussion of hooves in a corridor.
Mrs. Bennet's face went white. "HILL!"
The parlour door, which had been closed, burst open.
The pig came through it like a loosed arrow. She crossed the room at full speed, her hooves sliding on the rug, her ears flapping, her small body aimed at Darcy as though he were the only thing in the world worth running toward.
She hit his boot. She sat down. She pressed her flank against his calf and looked up at him with her enormous dark eyes and sighed the sigh of an animal who had been separated from the centre of its universe and had been restored to it at last.
He looked down at her. She looked up at him. Her tail was wagging.
He should have been annoyed. He should have been offended, or at the very least embarrassed. A pig was sitting on his boot in a lady's parlour, and everyone in the room was staring at him, and Mrs. Bennet was making a sound that suggested she was either about to faint or to commit violence against the pig.
But the pig was warm on his foot. And her eyes were very bright. And her ears were velvet. And she was looking at him with such absolute certainty that he was good, such unshakeable faith in his character, that something in his chest loosened the way a fist loosens when you stop making it.
No one looked at him like that. Not his friends, who respected him. Not his sister, who loved him but also feared disappointing him. Not the women in London, who saw his income and his estate and his name. No one looked at him and saw simply a person worth sitting on.
Except this pig.
He reached down. His hand moved before the thought formed. He placed his fingers behind the pig's ear and scratched, gently, in the spot where the ear met the skull. The pig's eyes half-closed. A low, steady grunting vibrated through her body, rhythmic and content, the sound of an animal settling into pleasure the way a cat settles into a warm spot. Elizabeth would have called it a pig's version of contentment. Darcy, who had no experience with pig sounds, simply noted that the animal appeared to be enjoying itself enormously.
He scratched again. The pig leaned into his hand with such complete surrender that he almost laughed.
He did not laugh. He was in a room full of people and his reputation could not survive laughing at a pig.
Miss Elizabeth appeared in the doorway. She had been in the garden. There was dirt on her gloves and a leaf in her hair, and she stopped short when she saw him, and her face did something complicated that he could not read.
She crossed the room and knelt in front of him. Their faces were close. He could see the faint freckles across her nose and the exact shade of her eyes, which were brown but not simply brown. There was gold in them, near the centre.
"Mr. Darcy," she said, very quietly. "I am running out of ways to apologise."
He should have said something graceful. Something witty, or kind, or at least warm enough to erase the memory of "tolerable" and "evidently" and "one hopes." What came out was: "The pig has nothing to apologise for. And neither, Miss Elizabeth, do you."
