She replayed Darcy's words all night and through the cold morning that followed.All creatures should be kept in their proper place.She put on her oldest dress and her walking boots and took Truffles into the garden and decided she was done. Done hoping. Done looking for kindness behind his silences.
Something nagged at her. She had seen his face when Caroline asked her question — the hesitation, the jaw tightening, the way his eyes had moved to her and then away. That was not the face of a man who did not care. But following that thought meant considering that his stiffness was fear rather than contempt, and if it was fear, she recognised it, because Elizabeth Bennet knew a thing or two about armouring herself in wit when the alternative was vulnerability.
She did not want to recognise him. It was so much easier to be angry.
So she pulled away, with the thoroughness of a woman who did not do things by halves.
The first time Bingley and Darcy called after the dinner, Elizabeth's mother summoned her with the dangerous shrillness that meant refusal would be punished. Elizabeth came into the parlour. She sat in the chair nearest the door. She was polite in the way that ice was smooth: perfect, cold, and impossible to hold.
Darcy tried. He crossed the room and positioned himself near the window where she was pretending to examine the weather. He said something about the fineness of the week. She gave him two words. He tried again. She gave him two more. He began a third attempt and she excused herself to attend her mother, who did not require attending, and sat beside Mary with a book she did not read.
She could feel his attention on the side of her face like heat from a fire she was determined not to sit near. She hated that she had learned the shape of his silences at Netherfield, in the library, in the evenings when the pig slept between them, and that the knowledge would not leave when she told it to.
When they called again, two days later, Truffles heard Darcy's voice from the kitchen and went wild. The pig squealed and scratched at the door and strained toward the parlour with the desperate intensity of an animal separated from its beloved. Hill had latched the kitchen door and set a turnip on the floor for distraction, but Truffles was not interested in turnips when Darcy was in the building. She was interested in escape, and she pursued it with the single-minded determination that had defeated every gate, latch, and barrier at Longbourn since her arrival.
Elizabeth caught her three times. Three times the pig broke free and headed for the parlour, and three times Elizabeth intercepted her in the corridor and carried her back.
The fourth time, Truffles was faster.
Elizabeth heard the scrabble of hooves on flagstone and turned from the staircase too late. The pig was already through the corridor, already past the hall table, already pushing through the parlour door, which Kitty had left ajar because Kitty left everything ajar.
Elizabeth reached the parlour doorway in time to see it. Truffles crossed the rug at a trot, ignoring Mrs. Bennet, ignoring Bingley, ignoring Jane, and sat on Darcy's left boot with a sigh of such profound relief that the room went quiet.
Darcy looked down. His face did the thing Elizabeth had been trying to forget — the softening, the loosening of the mask, the private warmth that surfaced only when he believed no one important was watching. His hand moved, half an inch, toward the pig's ear. He caught himself. He stopped the hand. But the half-inch was enough. Elizabeth had seen it.
She crossed the room. She knelt, as she had knelt at Lucas Lodge and at the assembly and at every other humiliation the pig had engineered, and she gathered Truffles into her arms.
"I am sorry," she said. She did not look at him. She could not look at him, because the half-inch had cracked something she was holding shut, and if she looked at him now it would crack further.
"Miss Elizabeth." His voice was low. Careful. "The pig is welcome."
"The pig is leaving."
She stood. Truffles strained backward over her shoulder, staring at Darcy with the mournful devotion of a creature being carried away from the only thing it wanted. Their eyes met — Elizabeth's and Darcy's, not the pig's — for one unguarded second above the pig's head. Then Elizabeth turned and walked out.
She carried Truffles upstairs and closed the bedroom door and sat on the bed with the pig in her lap, and the sounds of the parlour below filtered up through the floorboards. Bingley's laugh. Jane's murmured reply. Her mother's excited chatter.
And Darcy's voice, low and occasional, saying things she could not hear and did not want to hear.
It hurt more than the assembly insult. It hurt more because she had been beginning to believe, and the believing made the loss sharper than simple dislike ever could.
The days that followed were grey and quiet and long, and Elizabeth filled them with walks and with Truffles and with not thinking about anything at all, which was exhausting work.
Then a letter arrived from Charlotte. Charlotte wrote from Hunsford in the tone of a woman determined to be content. The parsonage was well-situated. The garden was promising. Mr. Collins had planted three rows of peas at Lady Catherine's suggestion and reported their progress to her daily. Lady Catherine herself had called twice, once to inspect the pantry and once to rearrange the furniture in the front parlour, and Charlotte had permitted both intrusions with the serene composure of a woman who had calculated what she was willing to surrender and had made her peace with it.
I am very comfortable,Charlotte wrote.The house is quiet. The neighbourhood is pleasant. Mr. Collins reads to me in the evenings, which I find I can bear if I keep my sewing in my hands and my thoughts elsewhere.She asked after Jane. She asked after the pig. She did not ask whether Elizabeth was happy, which was the kind of tact that only Charlotte possessed, and which said more than the question would have.
Elizabeth folded the letter and put it in her writing desk and thought about Charlotte in her quiet parsonage with her promising garden and her comfortable life, and she thought:Isthat what it looks like? Choosing the safe thing? Is that what I am doing — not with Collins, but with Wickham?
She did not follow the thought. She put it away with all the other thoughts she was not ready to examine, and when Wickham called the next day she was glad of the distraction.
He was everywhere that autumn. He called at Longbourn often, invited by Lydia and Kitty, tolerated by Mrs. Bennet, who found him charming and saw no reason why he should not visit as often as he liked. Elizabeth received him with a warmth that she knew, on some level, was partly performance. She liked Wickham. His conversation was easy and his company pleasant and he never made her feel as though she were reaching for something that kept moving out of range.
She was also, she admitted to herself in honest moments, using him. As a shield. As a contrast. As proof that she did not need Darcy's approval or Darcy's attention or Darcy's hand on a pig's back to feel valued.
Wickham told her more about Darcy. About the promised living, the denied legacy, the cruelty of the son so different from the generosity of the father. Each story confirmed what Elizabeth already believed, and each confirmation felt like a door locking, one more reason not to reconsider, not to look back, not to wonder about libraries and bread crusts and a man's voice, soft and unguarded, talking to a pig who understood nothing of words and everything of tone.
She did not notice that Wickham's attention had shifted. She did not notice that he spent more time with Lydia than with her now, that his visits to Longbourn coincided increasingly with Mr. Bennet's absences, that he sat beside Lydia at tea and walked with Lydia in the garden and told Lydia stories that made her laugh too loudly, with a breathless quality that was different from her usual noise.
