A silence. Bingley looked between them with the expression of a man who sensed something was wrong but had not worked out what. Louisa examined her embroidery. Mr. Hurst was asleep.
Darcy, in his chair by the window, looked at Caroline. He did not speak. But something in his gaze made Caroline look away.
Elizabeth sat down with the pig in her lap and said nothing more about it.
The evening continued. Caroline attempted several more sallies, each more pointed than the last. She remarked on the difficulty of cleaning pig marks from upholstery. She observed that the Bennets' neighbourhood must be very different from what she was accustomed to, as livestock in the drawing room was not a feature of London society. She asked Elizabeth whether there were other animals at Longbourn, her tone suggesting that the Bennet family might also keep a goat in the parlour and chickens in the bedchambers.
Elizabeth parried each one. "Only the pig, I am afraid. We tried a sheep, but she preferred the library and my father would not share it."
Bingley laughed. Caroline did not. Darcy turned a page of his book, and Elizabeth could have sworn the corner of his mouth moved.
After that evening, Caroline did not shut any more doors. But her silences grew louder, and her glances at the pig grew sharper, and Elizabeth understood with the instinct of a woman who had five sisters and a mother and no illusions about feminine warfare that this was not over. It was merely beginning. Caroline Bingley had found her target, and the target was twelve inches tall, pink, and sleeping on the rug at Mr. Darcy's feet.
What Elizabeth noticed but did not examine was the way Caroline touched Darcy's arm when she spoke to him. A light touch, barely there, proprietary in a way that assumed permission. The way she angled her chair toward his. The way her laugh, directed at something he said, was pitched lower and warmer than the laugh she used for anyone else. Caroline Bingley looked at Mr. Darcy the way a woman looked at something she had already decided belonged to her, andthe feeling this produced in Elizabeth's chest was sharp and unfamiliar and had absolutely nothing to do with jealousy, because there was nothing to be jealous of, because she did not care.
She did not care at all.
Jane was improving. The fever had broken on the second day, and by the third, she was well enough to be settled on the sofa in the morning room, wrapped in a blanket with a cup of tea and a colour in her cheeks that owed nothing to the fever. Bingley found reasons to pass through the morning room with a frequency that fooled no one, each visit accompanied by flowers from the hothouse or a book he thought she might like, and Jane received each one with a blush that grew deeper every time. Elizabeth sat with her sister and fielded questions about the household that she suspected were really questions about Mr. Bingley.
"He came to ask about my health again," Jane said. "He asked if the sofa was comfortable enough, and whether the fire needed building up."
"That is the third time today."
"He is very attentive."
"He is very in love."
Jane's blush deepened to the shade that Elizabeth associated with her sister being pleased and trying not to show it. "You cannot know that."
"I can. I am looking at it."
"Lizzy."
"He brought flowers. He came three times. He asked about your favourite colour."
"He asked about everyone's favourite colour."
"He asked about yours first."
Jane pressed her hand to her warm cheek and changed the subject.
But there were other things Elizabeth noticed at Netherfield, things she had not expected and did not know how to reconcile with her opinion of Mr. Darcy.
He was kind to the servants. Not with the condescending benevolence of a man performing charity, but with the natural, unremarkable courtesy of a man who considered servants to be people rather than furniture. He thanked Mrs. Nicholls by name. He stepped aside for a housemaid carrying linens. When the young footman Thomas knocked over a candlestick in the dining room, sending wax across the tablecloth, Darcy said "no matter" before the boy could stammer an apology, and his voice held none of the coldness he showed in company.
He asked about Jane. Not once, in the obligatory way of a host whose guest was inconvenienced, but several times, with questions that suggested he had listened to the previous answers and remembered them. When Bingley, in his enthusiasm, sat beside Jane's sofa for the fourth time in a single afternoon, adjusting her blanket and asking whether the fire was too warm or not warm enough, Darcy was the one who said, quietly, "Perhaps Miss Bennet would recover more quickly with rest, Bingley. Your attention, though well-meant, may be tiring."
Bingley had looked crestfallen. Darcy had put a hand on his shoulder and said, "Give her an hour. Bring her a book. Stay twenty minutes. That is the correct amount."
Elizabeth, who had been in the corridor and heard this exchange through an open door, stood very still for a long moment.
He was not the man she had decided he was. Or rather, he was that man and also someone else, someone she had not been looking for because she had been too busy being angry.
Elizabeth left Jane dozing on the morning room sofa and slipped out. It was late morning. The house was quiet. Bingley had ridden out on estate business. Caroline and Louisa were inthe drawing room, writing letters. Mr. Hurst was somewhere, presumably eating or sleeping or engaged in the mysterious activities that comprised his entire existence.
Elizabeth walked toward the library. She was looking for the book Darcy had mentioned at dinner the previous evening, a volume of essays he had dismissed as "fashionable nonsense," which meant she wanted to read it immediately.
The library door was slightly open. She heard Darcy's voice, low and conversational, and stopped.
