Darcy looked away first. He hated that he looked away first.
The card tables were filling. Mrs. Phillips was directing the guests with the harried authority of a general managing a retreat, and Darcy was seated at a table with Mrs. Hurst, a young officer whose name he did not catch, and Mrs. Long, who had apparently not exhausted her curiosity about Pemberley.
"Is it true there is a lake, Mr. Darcy?"
"There is a lake."
"And a deer park?"
"Yes."
"And the grounds are very extensive, I understand?"
"They are adequate."
Mrs. Long waited for elaboration. Darcy examined his cards. They were playing Commerce, a game he found tedious, but tedium was preferable to watching Wickham across the room. Almost preferable. His gaze drifted toward the fireplace twice during the first hand, and each time he pulled it back with an effort that left his neck stiff.
At the other table, Elizabeth was laughing again. She and Wickham had been placed at the same table. She was holding her cards with one hand and gesturing with the other, telling some story that made the table around her lean in. Wickham was watching her with an expression of delighted attention, his chin propped on his hand, his eyes warm.
It was an excellent performance. It was always an excellent performance.
Without Truffles to break the ice, Darcy was himself again. Stiff. Remote. Silent. He played his cards mechanically and spoke only when the game required it. Mrs. Hurst attempted conversation about a concert in London. Mrs. Long ventured a remark about the weather. Darcy answered each with the minimum number of words necessary to avoid outright rudeness.
He could feel the ice forming. At Netherfield, with the pig on his foot and Elizabeth watching, he had been someone else. Someone who scratched ears and talked about Latin translations and did not mind being ridiculous. That man was gone. The pig was at Longbourn. The warmth was at the fireplace with Wickham.
Elizabeth glanced at him once between hands. Their eyes met across the room.
He made himself nod. It was a small thing — the barest inclination of his head, the kind of acknowledgement that costmost men nothing. It cost him everything. His neck was rigid. His jaw ached. But he did it. He nodded, and then, with an effort that felt like pushing a boulder uphill with his face, he managed something that was almost a smile. Not a good smile. Not the easy, open expression that Wickham could produce the way other men produced pocket handkerchiefs. But the corners of his mouth moved. He felt them move. It was, by any reasonable measure, the least impressive smile in the history of English social gatherings, and it arrived approximately three seconds too late.
Elizabeth saw it. He watched her see it. Something shifted in her expression — not warmth, not yet, but a flicker of surprise, as if a piece of furniture she had catalogued as decorative had suddenly moved. Her brow creased. For a moment she looked at him with something that was not hostility, and the moment stretched, and Darcy held the not-quite-smile on his face with the grim determination of a man holding a door open against a gale.
Then Wickham said something, and Elizabeth turned back to him, and the moment closed. But it had been there. A crack in the wall, barely wide enough to see through. Darcy had made a crack in the wall, and he held on to that the way a drowning man held on to flotsam, and it was not enough but it was more than he had managed at the assembly, and he told himself it was progress.
She said something to Wickham. Wickham laughed. He touched her arm again. Elizabeth did not look at Darcy a second time.
Caroline appeared at his elbow during the break between games. She had been at the third table, playing whist with Louisa and two officers who had the glazed expressions of men who had realized too late that Caroline played to win.
"Mr. Wickham is quite the favourite this evening," she observed. Her eyes were on Elizabeth. "Miss Eliza seems particularly taken."
Darcy said nothing.
"She laughs a great deal in his company. Though I suppose she laughs a great deal in most company. It is her way." Caroline smoothed her glove. "This Mr. Wickham is very charming, is he not? Though charm without fortune is merely entertainment." She glanced at Darcy. "I should have thought a man in a red coat with no connections would be beneath your notice."
She said it to flatter him. To align herself with his supposed disdain. To position herself as the woman who understood his standards and shared them. Caroline was always doing this, offering solidarity the way a merchant offered samples, hoping the taste would lead to a larger purchase.
Elizabeth, who was passing nearby on her way back to the card table, heard it. Darcy saw her hear it. Her step did not falter. She did not look at either of them. But her back straightened, and the brightness in her face when she returned to Wickham was brighter still, and pointed, and Darcy understood, with a sick certainty, that Caroline's words had landed not as a compliment to him but as a condemnation, and that Elizabeth now had one more piece of evidence that he was exactly the man Wickham had described.
The second round of cards was worse. Wickham had abandoned any pretence of playing and was giving Elizabeth his undivided attention. He leaned toward her. He spoke in low tones that made her duck her head to hear. He told some anecdote that made her press her lips together, fighting a smile, and the fighting-a-smile expression was one that Darcy recognised because she had given it to him at Netherfield, once, when the pig had sneezed on his book, and seeing it directed atWickham was a pain so specific he could have located it on a map of his body.
He lost three hands in a row. Mrs. Long won the pot and expressed her delight with a volume that rattled the teacups.
The supper was laid out at half past nine. Cold ham, cheese, bread, and a syllabub that Mrs. Phillips announced with the pride of a woman presenting a state dinner. Darcy stood with his plate and ate nothing. Wickham was at Elizabeth's side again, filling her glass, pulling her chair back from the table, performing the small courtesies that Darcy could never perform because his hands forgot what to do when Elizabeth was near.
He overheard a fragment of their conversation. Elizabeth was telling Wickham about Truffles. About the pig's behaviour at the Netherfield Ball. She was making a comedy of it, the way she made a comedy of everything that embarrassed her, and Wickham was laughing with his head thrown back, and Darcy stood very still because he remembered the ball differently. He remembered the pig at his feet and Elizabeth's face above the piglet's head and his hands touching hers as he passed the animal over, and it had not been a comedy. It had been the closest he had come to honesty in years.
Wickham glanced at him across the supper table. The smile again. The knowing, patient smile. He leaned toward Elizabeth and said something too low for Darcy to hear, and Elizabeth's expression tightened, and Darcy knew, with absolute certainty, that Wickham was talking about him.
At ten o'clock, he could bear no more. He found Bingley, who was talking to Jane by the window with the expression of a man who had found paradise in a small parlour in Hertfordshire and saw no reason to leave.
