The anger had arrived now. Not the cold, controlled displeasure he displayed in society, the aristocratic frost that people mistook for temperament. This was different. This was hot and raw and it burned behind his ribs with an intensity that frightened him, because he was not a man who lost control, and he was losing it.
Caroline had taken Elizabeth's pig. She had paid a stranger to remove the animal from its home. She had done it coolly and deliberately, with servants and carts and money, because the pig was in her way.
She had taken the creature that Elizabeth loved. The creature that Darcy had held in his arms and fed bread crusts and talked to in the library when nobody was watching. She had taken thesmall, warm, trusting thing that had loved him from the moment he picked her up in a Meryton street, and she had paid someone to make it disappear.
He rode to Haye Park. It took forty minutes. The farm was small and muddy, tucked into a fold of ground behind a stand of beech trees. The farmyard smelled of cattle and wet straw. A dog barked from a chain. The farmer appeared in the doorway of the barn, a weathered man with suspicious eyes and hands that were too still.
"I was told the pig was a stray," the farmer said, before Darcy had finished his first sentence.
"The pig has a name. She belongs to Miss Elizabeth Bennet of Longbourn. She was taken from the house without permission."
"I was paid to keep it. The lady said it was unwanted."
"The lady lied. The pig was stolen. You were an instrument in a theft. Return the animal or I will have the magistrate here within the hour, and you can explain to him how a pig from a gentleman's household ended up in your pen."
The farmer's jaw worked. He looked at Darcy's horse, at Darcy's coat, at the set of Darcy's expression, and he made the calculation that men made when confronted with authority and found it unfavourable.
He led Darcy to a pen behind the barn. It was small and dirty and backed up against a stone wall. The floor was cold mud. There was no bedding. No food. No water.
Truffles was inside. She was pressed into the far corner, as small as she could make herself, her body tight against the stone wall. Her ears were flat. Her eyes were wide. She was making sounds that Darcy had never heard from her before: small, thin, desperate squeals, the keening of an animal that had been taken from everything it knew and left in a cold place with no one who loved her.
Darcy opened the pen gate. He stepped inside.
Truffles saw him. For a moment she did not move. Her eyes found his face and stayed there, and he could see the recognition happen, the slow, trembling realisation that the person standing in front of her was not a stranger but the man whose boot she had sat on, whose bread crusts she had eaten, whose voice she had followed through the corridors of Netherfield.
Then she squealed. A high, breaking sound of recognition and relief that split the air of the quiet farmyard. She launched herself at his boots with such force that he staggered backward. She hit his shins and scrambled upward, her hooves scrabbling at his coat, her whole body shaking, her snout seeking his chest with the blind urgency of an animal reaching for safety.
He bent down. He picked her up.
She pressed against him and shook. Her whole body trembled against his chest. Her snout buried itself in his coat, in the crease between his coat and his waistcoat, seeking warmth. Her hooves clutched at the fabric. She was cold. She was filthy. She was terrified.
He held her. He held her the way he had held her in Meryton, the way he had held her at the ball, but this time there was no one watching and he did not need to be careful or measured or correct. He held the pig against his chest and he said, in the voice he used only when he believed himself alone, "You are safe now. I have you."
The pig made a sound. Not a squeal. Not a grunt. Something softer and smaller and more broken than either of those, a sound so raw and small that Darcy, who had never been sentimental about animals, felt his throat close. She pressed closer and closed her eyes.
He opened his coat and put her inside, against his shirt, where she was warm and close and where she could feel his heartbeat. She fit against his chest the way she always had, as though the space had been made for her. She stopped trembling.Her breathing slowed. Her body went heavy and trusting against his.
The farmer watched from the barn door. He said nothing. He had the expression of a man who was watching something he did not understand and knew better than to interrupt.
Darcy mounted Caesar. The pig was inside his coat, warm against his chest, her snout resting against his collarbone. He settled the reins in one hand and pressed his other hand against the pig through the coat, holding her steady for the ride.
He rode back toward Longbourn with a piglet against his heart, and the anger burned steady and clean, and he knew what he had to do. Not just about Caroline. Not just about the pig. About everything. About Elizabeth and the dinner and the things he should have said and the man he should have been.
The pig had been right about him from the beginning. It was time to prove her right.
CHAPTER 19
Elizabeth
Elizabeth heard the hoofbeats before she saw the horse.
She was on the lane between Meryton and Longbourn, walking back in the grey light of late afternoon. She had been walking since dawn — the second dawn, the second day of searching. Her feet were numb in her boots and her throat was raw from calling and her hope was down to the thin, stubborn thread that was the only thing keeping her moving. She had covered every path again, every farm, every ditch within two miles. She had walked the Haye Park road and the Meryton road and the lane to Lucas Lodge and the path that wound through the fields behind the Longbourn estate, all of it for the second time. She had found nothing. Again.
The afternoon was fading. The sky was low and grey and the wind was picking up, carrying the smell of rain. She should go home. She should eat something. She should sleep.
She could not face the empty blanket at the foot of her bed for another night. She could not.
The hoofbeats came from behind her. Fast. A single horse, coming from the direction of the Haye Park road, riding hard. Elizabeth stopped and turned and shaded her eyes against the grey light.
