"No," Mrs. Bennet said. "No, I see that now."
Elizabeth nodded. She turned to go. At the door, she stopped.
"Mamma. Mr. Bingley adores Jane. He has adored her since the first dinner at Lucas Lodge. The pig has nothing to do with it. And if a man's regard for Jane could be undone by a piglet, his regard was not worth having."
Mrs. Bennet said nothing. But she nodded, once, and the nod was small and chastened and real, and Elizabeth went back upstairs carrying the complicated weight of loving a parent who had done a foolish thing for an understandable reason.
Truffles was awake when Elizabeth returned. The pig had found the bread and milk Hill had left on the floor and was standing beside the empty bowl, working through the last of the bread with the steady concentration of a creature who had not eaten in a day. Elizabeth lifted her onto the bed and sat beside her with the plate in her lap, feeding her the remaining pieces one at a time. She stroked the pig's ears, gently, carefully, the way one touches something that has been returned after being lost.
"I am sorry," Elizabeth whispered. "I am so sorry I did not keep you safe."
Truffles nudged her chin with a wet snout. The pig's whole body trembled with recognition, a vibration that started at her snout and travelled through her, and she pressed closer and closer until there was no space left between them. She settled into Elizabeth's lap with a long, shuddering breath and closed her eyes, and the breath said everything:You found me. I knew you would find me.
Except Elizabeth had not found her. Darcy had.
Elizabeth sat on her bed in the candlelight with the pig asleep in her lap and thought about Darcy's face in the fading light. The roughness of his voice. The way his hands had supported the pig's weight when he placed her in Elizabeth's arms. The way he had carried Truffles inside his coat, against his chest, against his shirt, because that was the warmest place he could find.
She thought about the dinner.All creatures in their proper place.She thought about the assembly.Not handsome enough to tempt me.She thought about the library at Netherfield, and the bread crusts, and the way he had talked to the pig when he believed himself alone.
She had arranged these facts into a story. A man who was kind in private and cruel in public. A man who scratched a pig's ears behind closed doors and denied her in drawing rooms. She had decided this story was the true one, and she had believed it with the absolute certainty of a woman who trusted her own judgment above all other evidence.
The pig had offered different evidence. The pig had loved him from the first moment. The pig had sat on his boot and slept outside his door and followed him through a house because the pig understood something that Elizabeth, with all her wit and all her pride, had not.
Darcy was not a man who was kind in private and cruel in public. He was a man who was kind, full stop. He was kind when nobody was watching and he was clumsy when everybody was, and the clumsiness was not cruelty. It was fear. He was afraid of rooms full of people the way Elizabeth was afraid of silence, and his fear made him say wrong things, and the wrong things were not who he was.
The pig had known. From the very first moment in Meryton, when he scooped her up without thinking, Truffles had known what he was. And Elizabeth, who prided herself on her judgment, had refused to listen.
She thought about Wickham. The charming smile. The easy manner. And the pig — trembling against her ankle the first time they met him, teeth bared, ears flat. Elizabeth had dismissed it. An animal's instinct, nothing more.
But the pig had been right about Darcy. And if she had been right about Darcy...
Elizabeth did not follow the thought. Not tonight. It sat at the edge of her mind, waiting, and she turned away from it.
She thought about her father's words, months ago, spoken from behind his newspaper with the dry wit that was his great gift:I find it interesting that your pig, who has shown excellent taste in all other matters, should fix her affections on a man you find so objectionable. Perhaps one of you has misjudged him.
One of them had misjudged him. It was not the pig.
Elizabeth leaned back against her pillows. Truffles was asleep now, her body heavy and warm, her breathing slow and steady. The candle on the bedside table flickered. The house was quiet. From below, she could hear the faint sounds of the family settling: Hill banking the fires, her father's study door closing, Lydia's laugh from the bedroom she shared with Kitty.
She would have to think about all of this properly. She would have to sit down and dismantle every assumption she had built about Fitzwilliam Darcy and examine the wreckage and decide what was true and what was prejudice and where, exactly, she had gone so catastrophically wrong.
She would do it tomorrow. Tonight, she held her pig and closed her eyes and let the relief wash through her like warm water, and the last thought she had before sleep came was not about Darcy's words or his failures or his cold reserve. It was about his hands. The way they had held the pig. The way they had placed Truffles in her arms with a care that said more than any speech he had ever given or failed to give.
She pressed her face into Truffles' warm neck and let the last of her defences fall.
CHAPTER 20
Mr. Darcy
Darcy returned to Netherfield and went directly to the drawing room.
The scene that greeted him was domestic and serene. The fire was lit. The candles were burning. Louisa was working at an embroidery frame near the window, her needle moving with the mechanical patience of a woman who had long ago accepted that her evenings would be spent on cushion covers. Caroline was on the settee with a novel in her lap, her posture arranged for maximum elegance, her expression composed.
The evening was proceeding as if nothing had happened. As if, two days ago, a pig had not been stolen from a neighbouring family's kitchen. As if a woman had not walked every road in the county searching for it. As if the world were exactly as Caroline wished it to be: ordered, controlled, and free of inconvenient animals.
"Caroline," Darcy said. "A word."
Something crossed her face. A tightening around the eyes, a slight stiffening of the shoulders. She recognised the tone. She had not heard it often, but she had a catalogue of Darcy's tones the way a sailor had a catalogue of weather, and this one was storm.
