"Do not tease me, Lizzy. I am too ill for teasing."
Elizabeth smoothed the hair from her sister's forehead. Jane closed her eyes. Within minutes, she was asleep, her breathing heavy and congested. Elizabeth pulled the blankets higher and sat in the chair beside the bed, listening to the rain against the windows and the faint sounds of the household below.
She was at Netherfield. She was at Netherfield for the night, at least, because the rain would not stop and the lanes were impassable and Jane needed her. She was in the same house as Mr. Darcy, and her pig was downstairs on his boot, and Caroline Bingley probably wanted to set fire to the carpet.
She thought about Darcy's face when she walked in. The way his eyes had moved over her and then stayed, not with the dismissive sweep she had seen at the assembly, but with something that looked almost like admiration. For what? She was soaked and filthy and carrying a pig. There was nothing to admire.
And yet he had looked at her. He had really looked at her.
You walked three miles. In this weather.
He had said it as though the walking mattered. As though the fact that she would walk through rain and mud for her sister was something worth noting. Something worth saying aloud.
She pressed her hands against her face. She was cold and tired and her thoughts were doing things she did not sanction. She would nurse Jane. She would avoid Mr. Darcy. She would collect her pig at the earliest opportunity.
She would not think about the expression on his face, or the quietness of his voice, or the gentle way he had dislodged Truffles from his boot. She would not think about any of it.
From somewhere downstairs, she heard a faint, contented grunt. Truffles, settled in front of a fire, on or near the boot of a man who Elizabeth did not like. Did not want to like. Would not like.
The rain beat against the windows. Jane slept. Elizabeth sat in the chair and told herself lies until she believed them.
CHAPTER 8
Mr. Darcy
The pig had taken up residence, and Darcy had made himself a rule: he would be civil to Miss Elizabeth during her stay, he would enquire after Miss Bennet's health with appropriate concern, and he would not, under any circumstances, form an attachment to the pig.
He broke the rule on the first morning. He came downstairs to the breakfast room at half seven, which was early by Netherfield standards and which he preferred because it meant he could eat in peace before Caroline appeared. He opened the door and found Truffles on the rug in front of the sideboard, asleep on her side, her small body rising and falling with the deep, contented breathing of an animal who had found exactly where she wanted to be.
She opened one eye when he entered. Her curly tail gave a small, satisfied twitch. She did not get up. She simply watched him cross the room, take his seat, and begin buttering toast, and then she closed her eye and went back to sleep.
He ate his breakfast. The pig slept. The rain hammered against the windows. It was, he realised, the most peaceful morning he had spent at Netherfield.
Something about the pig's trust unsettled him. The absolute defencelessness of a creature that small, sleeping in the open with no concern for who might walk through the door. It reminded him of Georgiana. His sister had that same quality, the willingness to believe that the world was kind, and it had nearly destroyed her last summer at Ramsgate. He had arrived in time. He had not been too late. But the memory of how close it had been still woke him at three in the morning, and looking at the pig on the rug, small and trusting and entirely at the mercy of whoever chose to walk into this room, he felt the same cold flicker in his chest.
The peace did not last. Caroline appeared at nine, dressed for the drawing room though there was no one to receive. She stopped in the doorway and looked at the pig on the rug.
"That creature is in the breakfast room."
"Yes."
"It should be in the kitchen. Or the stable. It should not be in the breakfast room."
"She is quiet. She has done no harm."
"She is a pig, Mr. Darcy."
Darcy looked at Truffles. Truffles looked at Darcy. Her snout lifted and her ears pricked forward, the whole small body tensing with hope.
"I am aware," he said, and returned to his toast.
Caroline sat down. She poured tea. She did not look at the pig again, but her jaw was set in a way that suggested she was merely regrouping.
Over the course of the morning, Caroline raised the question of the pig four more times. She raised it with Louisa, who agreed that a pig in a drawing room was irregular. She raised it withBingley, who said the pig was harmless and rather charming and had he mentioned that Miss Bennet's complexion was remarkable even when she was ill? She raised it with Mr. Hurst, who said "mm" and continued eating.
She did not raise it with Darcy again. But she looked at the pig with the careful assessment of a woman formulating a strategy.
Darcy retreated to the library after breakfast. He opened Mr. Bennet's book of Cowper, though he had brought a volume of his own. He read the poem Miss Elizabeth had marked, the one about the quiet comfort of familiar places. He read her margin note again.This is the best line in the whole collection and no one ever talks about it.He turned the page and found another note, beside a poem about solitude:If this were true, I would live in a field.
