Something crossed her face. Not offence, precisely. More like a door closing. She tucked the pig more firmly against her chest and turned to her sister, who was deep in animated conversation with Bingley. After a moment of pleasantries, the sisters departed. Darcy watched them go. The pig's face, peering over Miss Elizabeth's shoulder, grew smaller and more mournful with every step. Its ears drooped. If a pig could look betrayed, this one did.
He became aware that he was staring after a woman and a pig in the middle of a village street, and that Bingley was beside him, grinning.
"Miss Bennet is an angel." Bingley's voice had taken on the dreamy quality it assumed when he had been struck by a woman's beauty, which was roughly twice a season and alwayswith absolute conviction. "Did you see her eyes? They were the colour of — I don't know. Something blue. The sky, perhaps."
"She had a pig."
"That was Miss Elizabeth. Miss Bennet was the fair one. Was she not the most beautiful creature you have ever seen?"
Darcy was not looking at Bingley. He was looking at the corner where the brown-haired woman and her pig had disappeared.
"I suppose she was tolerable," he said.
Bingley sighed. "You are impossible."
They walked back to their horses in silence. Or rather, Darcy walked in silence. Bingley walked in a state of rapturous monologue about Miss Bennet's eyes, Miss Bennet's smile, the breathless reverence with which Miss Bennet had said the words "how do you do." Darcy let him talk. Bingley in love was Bingley at his most harmless and his least interruptible.
Darcy gathered Caesar's reins and mounted. As he settled into the saddle, he noticed a small muddy mark on his waistcoat. A hoof print. Tiny and precise, like a stamp.
He brushed at it with his thumb. The mark did not come off.
He told himself he was not charmed. He was Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley, and he was not the sort of man who was charmed by a small pig with large ears and a woman who carried it through a village like a reticule with hooves.
He told himself this for the remainder of the ride home, through the stable yard and up the drive and into the hall where Caroline asked him what he had bought in Meryton and he said "nothing" in a tone that discouraged further enquiry.
He was still telling himself when he dressed for dinner that evening and found a second hoof print on his cravat. Small and perfect, pressed into the white linen like a seal. He removed the cravat and set it aside rather than sending it to be laundered.
At dinner, Bingley mentioned that a neighbourhood dinner was arranged at Lucas Lodge for Thursday.
"Sir William Lucas is hosting. Apparently, the whole neighbourhood will be there. The Bennets, the Longs, the Gouldings. It will be wonderful."
"Wonderful," Darcy repeated, in a tone that conveyed the opposite.
"You might try to enjoy yourself," Bingley said. "You might even speak to someone."
"I spoke to someone today. I said 'the animal is unharmed.' That is quite enough speaking for one week."
Caroline, who had been arranging her fish on her plate with the fastidious attention of a woman composing a still life, looked up. "What animal?"
"Nothing," Darcy said. "A pig in the road. It was of no consequence."
But later, alone in his room, he kept returning to the young woman who had come running for it. The flush on her cheeks. The way her chin had lifted when he said "one hopes," as if she had taken his measure in a single glance and found him precisely as wanting as he feared he was.
He set the cravat on the dresser and turned down the lamp.
He did not examine why he kept it.
CHAPTER 3
Elizabeth
Elizabeth took considerable precautions.
She put Truffles in the kitchen. She latched the door. She latched the window. She placed a turnip in the centre of the floor as a bribe, because Truffles loved turnips with the single-minded devotion other creatures reserved for love or revenge. She instructed Hill to check the latch twice. She instructed Mary, who was staying home with a cold, to check on the pig every quarter hour. She placed a chair against the kitchen door for good measure.
"She will not get out," Elizabeth told Jane, who was watching these preparations with the gentle scepticism of a woman who had seen the pig escape from a locked root cellar, a barred woodshed, and the arms of a grown man.
"Of course she will not," Jane said.
