Truffles did not care about spectacles. Truffles had found the centre of her universe and was being forcibly removed from it, and she intended everyone in the room to know of her suffering.
From across the room, Mrs. Bennet's whisper carried like a cannon shot: "That pig will be the end of us."
Mr. Bennet raised his glass. "On the contrary, Mrs. Bennet. I believe the entertainment is only beginning."
CHAPTER 4
Mr. Darcy
The Meryton Assembly, held the following Saturday, was everything Darcy had expected, and none of what he wanted.
The room was too warm. The music was enthusiastic but imprecise, with a fiddle that strained at the high notes and a pianoforte that was half a tone flat. The ceiling was low enough that the candle smoke hung in a faintly amber haze, and the press of bodies made the air close and thick with the smell of tallow and perfume and someone's lavender water applied with excessive generosity.
Darcy stood near the wall with a glass of punch he had not tasted and counted the ceiling beams. There were fourteen. He knew because he had counted them twice. He wondered how many more minutes constituted a socially acceptable appearance before he could leave without causing Bingley to lecture him in the carriage about the importance of being neighbourly.
Bingley was dancing. Of course Bingley was dancing. Bingley was always dancing. He had found Miss Bennet within moments of arriving and secured her hand for the first two dances with a boyish eagerness that made several older women smile and several younger women sigh — and was now hovering near her with the transparent hope of securing the supper dance as well.
Caroline stood beside Darcy, her expression arranged into her practised mask of tolerant disdain she wore at public gatherings below her station. She surveyed the assembly as though composing a letter to a friend in town about its deficiencies.
"The decorations are resourceful," she said, in the tone of a woman who meant "desperate."
"Mm," said Darcy.
"The musicians are local, I presume."
"One would assume."
"That woman's feathers have been dyed. One can tell."
Darcy did not respond. He was looking across the room at Miss Elizabeth Bennet.
She was laughing. She was standing with her friend, Miss Lucas, and another young woman he did not know, and she was laughing at something with such complete, unselfconscious pleasure that it changed her entire face. Her eyes crinkled. Her shoulders shook. She covered her mouth with one hand, which did nothing to muffle the laugh, and the sound of it carried across the room above the music and the chatter.
He noticed her eyes. They were dark and bright and full of something he could not quite name. Wit, perhaps. Or defiance. Or the kind of intelligence that sees everything and forgives very little.
He looked away.
He had thought about her since Lucas Lodge. Not willingly, and not with any clear purpose, but in the way one thoughtabout a song heard in passing that lodged itself in the mind and refused to leave. The pig's total certainty — the way it had ignored every other person in the room and come directly to him, as if drawn by some invisible thread. And the young woman, kneeling before him in a room full of onlookers, trying to pry a boneless pig off his boot with the quiet desperation of someone who knew the entire evening had just become a story about her. The colour in her cheeks. The mortification she had worn like a garment she could not remove.
He had not handled it well. He knew that. He had been stiff when he should have been gracious. He had said "it is of no consequence" in a tone that suggested the opposite, because his throat had locked the way it always did when he was the centre of attention, and the words that emerged bore no resemblance to the ones he intended.
And then there was the pig itself, which kept intruding on his thoughts at odd moments. The warm weight of the creature against his waistcoat in Meryton. Its absurdly large ears. The way it had looked at him, just before she took it back, with an expression that he could only describe as trust.
He did not want to think about a pig. He was Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley, master of ten thousand a year and a thousand acres, and he did not think about pigs. And yet here he was, at a country assembly, thinking about a pig.
Bingley appeared at his elbow, flushed from dancing and radiating happiness.
"Come, Darcy, you must dance. You cannot stand here all evening. It looks ill."
"I am tolerably well as I am."
"There are several young ladies without partners. Miss Elizabeth Bennet, for instance. She is sitting this dance out."
Darcy glanced at Miss Elizabeth. She was seated now, watching the dancers with her chin propped on her hand. Herfoot was tapping faintly to the music. She had not looked in his direction all evening, not once, and he was aware of this because he had checked more than once, which was a fact he preferred not to examine too closely.
"She is tolerable, I suppose, but not handsome enough to tempt me," he said. "I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men. You had better return to your partner and enjoy her smiles. You are wasting your time with me."
He said it to make Bingley go away. He said it in the flat, dismissive tone he used to shut down conversations he did not wish to have. He did not mean it. Or rather, he meant the last part. He was not in the humour. He was not in the humour for anything that required him to be charming and light and easy in a room full of strangers. He wanted to go home. Not to Netherfield, which was not home, but to Pemberley, where the rooms were large and quiet and no one expected him to dance.
