Elizabeth turned and walked away before she could examine what it was. She walked to the morning room, each step deliberate, each step carrying her farther from the library and the man in it and the pig between them. She sat in the chair beside Jane's sofa and pressed her hands against her face and breathed.
"Are you all right?" Jane asked, stirring beneath her blanket.
"I am fine. Mr. Darcy was talking to the pig."
"Is that unusual?"
Elizabeth thought about his voice. The way it had softened. The way he had saidyou are exactly like your mistress.
"Yes," she said. "It is very unusual."
She looked out the window. The rain had stopped. The grounds of Netherfield stretched green and wet into theafternoon, and somewhere below, in the library, a man she had been so certain she understood was talking to her pig in a voice full of a tenderness he would never show to people.
The pig had been right. Elizabeth was beginning to suspect the pig had been right from the very first moment in Meryton, when Darcy had scooped her up without thinking, held her against his chest, and let her press her muddy hooves against his cravat.
The pig had seen his hands. Elizabeth had only seen his words.
She was not ready to forgive the words. She was not sure she would ever be ready. But she could no longer pretend, sitting in this house where he fed pigs bread crusts and told his friend to be gentler with her sister, that the words were the whole of who he was.
Tomorrow they would leave. She would take Truffles home. She would return to Longbourn, where the pig would sleep at the foot of her bed and escape from kitchens and root up her mother's roses. Things would return to normal. She would not see Mr. Darcy every day. She would not hear his voice through library doors.
This should have been a relief. It did not feel like a relief.
"Jane," she said. "When we return home, please remind me that I do not like Mr. Darcy."
Jane, who was half-asleep, murmured, "Of course, Lizzy."
"He is proud. He is rude. He insulted me at a public assembly."
"Mmm."
"And his ears turn pink when he is embarrassed, which is not endearing. It is merely a physiological response."
Jane smiled without opening her eyes. "As you say."
CHAPTER 10
Mr. Darcy
Darcy asked Miss Elizabeth Bennet to dance.
He had not planned to. He had planned to stand at the side of the ballroom, as he always did, and endure the evening with the stoic resignation of a man fulfilling a social obligation. Bingley's ball at Netherfield was to be a grand affair, twenty families invited, the ballroom opened and polished for the first time since the previous tenant, a full supper, an orchestra brought in from London. Bingley had thrown himself into the preparations with the delirious enthusiasm of a man who had a specific woman to impress and an unlimited budget with which to do it.
Darcy had spent the previous week telling himself that the departure of Elizabeth and Jane and the pig had been a relief. The house was quiet again. The library was his own. No small hooves tapped across the corridors. No warm weight settled on his boot at mealtimes. No one argued with him about books or caught him scratching a pig's belly or looked at him in a waythat made him forget, for one dangerous moment, that he was supposed to be immune to all of this.
It had been a relief. A vast, echoing, hollow relief that felt nothing at all like relief and everything like loss.
But now the ball was beginning, and the Bennet family was arriving, and Elizabeth was walking through the door in a white gown with her hair pinned up and that look on her face, the one she wore when she was determined to enjoy herself despite everything, and every lie Darcy had told himself for the past week stopped working at once.
He watched her from across the ballroom. She was laughing with Charlotte Lucas. She was greeting neighbours. She was looking around the room with the sharp, observant gaze that saw everything and missed nothing. She had not looked at him.
He wanted her to look at him.
The dancing began. Bingley danced with Jane, of course, with the beaming, transparent joy of a man who had been counting the days since he last saw her and did not care who knew it. Other couples took the floor. The music swelled.
Elizabeth danced with a young officer whose name Darcy did not catch. She danced well. She moved with a natural grace that was nothing like the studied elegance of women in London who danced to be watched. She danced as if the music were pulling her forward and she was simply choosing to follow.
He watched her through two dances. He watched the officer's hand on her waist during the turns and felt something he refused to call jealousy, because jealousy would imply a claim, and he had no claim.
