Darcy looked at the fire. Bingley's life was simple and warm and uncomplicated, and Darcy envied him with a ferocity that surprised him. Bingley liked Jane. Jane liked Bingley. They looked at each other and smiled and the world was arranged around them like a garden in bloom. There was no Wickham in Bingley's story. No Georgiana. No public mask that welded itself to his face every time more than four people gathered in a room.
He thought about writing to Elizabeth. He sat at his desk the following morning and pulled out paper and uncapped the ink and composed the letter in his head:Miss Elizabeth, I must explain myself. At the dinner, when I said that all creatures should be kept in their proper place, I did not mean what you heard. I meant nothing at all, which is perhaps worse, because it means I was too cowardly to say what I did mean, which is that your pig is the best judge of character in Hertfordshire and I would give a great deal to have her on my boot again.
He did not write the letter. He stared at the blank paper for twenty minutes and then put the cap back on the ink and returned the paper to the drawer. He was not sure the letter would help. He was not sure anything would help. He was sure that his handwriting, when he was agitated, deteriorated into something that resembled the tracks of a bird across wet sand, and sending such a letter would be adding insult to injury.
He rode to Longbourn instead. He rode alone, without Bingley, on a grey morning when the mist hung low in the lanes and the hedgerows dripped.
He intended to speak to her. He intended to find her in the garden or on the lane and say the things he should have saidat the dinner. He had rehearsed it. He had rehearsed it the way he rehearsed speeches for Parliament: standing in front of the mirror in his dressing room, addressing his own reflection with the rigid formality of a man who had never successfully spoken from the heart in his life.
Miss Elizabeth, I owe you an explanation.
Miss Elizabeth, what I said at the dinner was wrong.
Miss Elizabeth, your pig is not a creature to be kept in any place but whatever place she chooses, and I have missed her, and I have missed you, and I am a fool.
He had dismissed the last version as too honest. He was not ready for that much honesty. He was not sure he would ever be ready.
He arrived at Longbourn. He tied Caesar to the gatepost. He walked up the path.
Hill opened the door. "Mr. Darcy. I am afraid Mr. Bingley is not —"
"I am not with Mr. Bingley. I have come to call on the family."
Hill's expression suggested that this was irregular. A gentleman calling alone, without the stated purpose of visiting another gentleman, was a step away from a declaration, and Hill, who had been in service long enough to read the social weather, looked at him with the cautious interest of a woman watching clouds gather.
She showed him to the parlour. Mrs. Bennet was there, and Kitty, and Mary at the pianoforte. Jane was upstairs writing letters. Elizabeth was out. Walking, Mrs. Bennet said, with the resigned tone of a mother who had long ago accepted that her second daughter preferred fields to furniture.
Darcy sat in the parlour and made conversation with Mrs. Bennet for fifteen minutes. It was not a natural talent. Mrs. Bennet talked about Bingley. Darcy contributed monosyllables. Kitty coughed. Mary played something by Handel, badly. Fromthe kitchen, he heard the faint sound of hooves on flagstone, and his heart did something involuntary and pathetic.
There was a crash, a squeal, and the sound of Hill saying "Oh, for heaven's —" and then the kitchen door burst open and Truffles shot into the parlour like something fired from a siege engine. She crossed the rug, dodged Kitty's reaching hands, upset a tea table — the cups survived; the saucer did not — and arrived at Darcy's feet with such velocity that she slid the last two feet on the polished floor and collided with his left boot.
He looked down. Truffles looked up. Her tail was going so fast it was a blur.
"Mr. Darcy," Mrs. Bennet said, in the strained voice of a woman watching her social ambitions dissolve, "I am so sorry. Hill! Hill, take the pig —"
"She is no trouble," Darcy said. His voice came out differently than he intended. Softer. He reached down and scratched behind her ear before he could stop himself, and Truffles made the sound — the low, vibrating hum of a creature who had found the one person in the world who scratched in exactly the right place.
Kitty giggled. Mary stopped playing Handel. Even Mrs. Bennet fell silent, watching a man worth ten thousand a year scratch a pig's ear in her parlour with an expression that looked, from the right angle, remarkably like tenderness.
He was preparing to leave — to stand, to bow, to walk back to Caesar and ride home with nothing accomplished — when Mr. Bennet appeared in the parlour doorway. He had a book in one hand and his spectacles pushed up onto his forehead, and he regarded Darcy with the unhurried interest of a man who had all the time in the world and intended to use none of it productively.
"Mr. Darcy," he said. "You have come alone."
"I have, sir."
"Without Mr. Bingley."
"Yes."
Mr. Bennet considered this. He looked at Darcy the way he looked at a passage in a book that had surprised him — not with warmth, exactly, but with the acknowledgement that something he had dismissed on first reading might repay closer attention.
"Lizzy is out walking," he said. "She walks a great deal. I have never understood the appeal, but I am told the fresh air is improving, and she does come back in a better temper than she left, which I cannot say for most forms of exercise." He paused. "She usually returns by the garden path. If a man were inclined to wait, the bench by the kitchen garden has a tolerable view of the lane."
Darcy stared at him.
"I mention it only as a point of geography," Mr. Bennet said, and went back to his study.
Darcy did not sit on the bench by the kitchen garden. He was not ready for that — not ready to be the man who waited on a bench for a woman who might not wish to find him there. But he carried Mr. Bennet's words out of the house like something stolen, like something he had not earned and did not deserve and could not put down.
