Bingley was talking about something. Caroline was watching him.
Darcy realised he had been smiling.
He stopped. But the feeling did not stop with it. It remained in his chest, warm and alarming, like a fire in a room that had been cold for a very long time.
Later, he walked the corridor to his room and found Truffles asleep outside his door. She had left Elizabeth and Jane and come back downstairs, navigated the house in the dark, and found his room. She was curled on the carpet with her nose pressed against the gap beneath the door, as close to him as she could get without being inside.
He stood in the corridor and looked at the pig. The house was silent. The rain had stopped. The only light was the candle in his hand, which cast long, wavering shadows down the hall.
He should step over the pig and go to bed. He should close the door and leave her in the corridor, because she was not his pig and this was not his house and sentimentality about a farm animal was beneath him.
He opened the door. The pig's eyes opened. She lifted her head.
"Come in," he said, very quietly, so that no one else could hear. "But only this once."
Truffles trotted into his room and settled on the rug beside his bed. She circled twice, in the way dogs did but which he now knew pigs did too, and lay down with a sigh.
He closed the door. He changed for bed. He turned down the lamp. In the darkness, he could hear the pig breathing, steady and slow, and it occurred to him that this was the first night since arriving in Hertfordshire that the house felt like something other than a place he was enduring.
The pig had been right about him. She had known it in Meryton, when he held her for thirty seconds and she decided he was worth following. She had known it before he knew it himself.
He was a man who let pigs into his room. He was a man who fed them bread crusts and scratched their ears and talked to them about Latin. He was a man who, for all the weight of his name and his carefully maintained distance from the world, wanted nothing more than to be the person a small, determined creature believed him to be.
He closed his eyes. Truffles' breathing slowed. The house settled around them.
Somewhere down the corridor, Elizabeth Bennet was asleep in a chair beside her sister's bed, and he did not think about her. He did not think about the way she had looked at him in thelibrary, or the quiet certainty in her voice when she said the pig did not do this with everyone. He did not think about any of it.
He thought about all of it. He fell asleep thinking about all of it.
CHAPTER 9
Elizabeth
Elizabeth had been at Netherfield for three days, and the household had rearranged itself around the pig like a river around a stone.
The servants had adapted first. Mrs. Nicholls, the housekeeper, had placed a folded blanket near the kitchen hearth for Truffles, though the pig rarely used it. The cook had begun setting aside vegetable scraps. A young footman named Thomas had taken to greeting Truffles each morning with a "good day, miss" that Elizabeth suspected was only partly ironic.
Bingley had adapted next. He found the pig amusing, in the easy, uncomplicated way he found most things amusing. He had begun referring to Truffles as "our little guest" and had twice been caught slipping her food from his plate at dinner.
Mr. Hurst had not adapted, because Mr. Hurst had not noticed. The pig could have been replaced with a small ottoman and Mr. Hurst would not have registered the difference.
Caroline had not adapted. Caroline was conducting a campaign.
Elizabeth noticed it on the second day. Small things at first. A door to the drawing room closed just as Truffles was trotting through. Instructions to a servant, spoken at a volume designed to carry: "The kitchen is the appropriate place for livestock, is it not?" A comment at breakfast about the smell, when there was no smell, directed at Louisa with a glance at Elizabeth.
On the second evening, Elizabeth came downstairs to find Truffles shut in the cold pantry. The pig was pressed against the door, shivering, making soft, distressed sounds that were nothing like her usual confident squealing. Her eyes were wide and her ears were flat and she was afraid.
Elizabeth lifted her out, wrapped her in her own shawl, and carried her to the drawing room. She sat by the fire and held the pig against her chest until the shivering stopped.
She did not accuse Caroline. She did not need to. When she entered the drawing room with the pig in her arms, Caroline looked up from her embroidery with a smile that did not reach her eyes.
"Oh, is the pig cold? How unfortunate. I do think the kitchen is warmer, Miss Eliza. More suitable."
"The kitchen was not where I found her," Elizabeth said. She did not raise her voice. She did not need to. "She was in the pantry. The door was shut."
"How odd. She must have wandered in."
"The pantry door latches from the outside."
