The stone sat in his waistcoat pocket throughout. He reached for it between appointments—after the upholsterer, before the painter, during the interminable meeting with the agency that supplied domestic staff. The agency woman regarded him with the frank appraisal of someone who assessed households for a living and haddrawn her conclusions about his before he opened his mouth. A gentleman of considerable means, occupying a house that had been shut for five years, with no wife and no housekeeper and a presentation to plan—the agency woman saw the gaps in his domestic establishment the way Norwood had seen the gaps in the cottage’s mortar, and her professional recommendations carried the same impersonal devastation.
He hired a housekeeper. He hired a cook. He approved the painter’s estimate for the front parlour. He signed papers and wrote cheques and sat in rooms where men and women explained things to him that he did not understand and would not have cared about if he had understood them. It was a weight he carried from appointment to appointment like a stone in his other pocket, one that brought no comfort.
LadyMatlock’sdinnerwassmall. She had promised this. Eight guests, mostly old acquaintances, no one who would tax him beyond the ordinary requirements of table conversation. She had promised this as well, and she had kept the first promise admirably.
The second proved less reliable.
The dining room at Matlock House seated fourteen, and Lady Matlock had arranged the eight with the strategic intelligence of a woman who had been managing dinner tables for thirty years. Lord Matlock occupied the head, genial and largely silent, a man who had long since ceded the social management of his household to his wife and was content to eat his fish and observe. Richard sat at the far end, charming a pair of elderly sisters whose connexion to the family Darcy could not determine and did not investigate. The remaining guests arranged themselves around the middle of the table with the carelessness of people who dined out regularly and who understood their roles in the evening’s composition.
Darcy had been placed beside Miss Arenden.
She was perhaps twenty—fair, composed, with the careful deportment of a young woman whose first season had gone well enough to warrant the expenditure of a second, yet poorly enough to necessitate it, and whose family had sufficient standing to secure an invitation to Lady Matlock’s table. She was, in the language of the world Darcy had been absent from for five years, a prospect. Not a brilliant one—her father was a baronet of moderate fortune and no particular distinction—but a creditable one, the kind of youngwoman whom the mothers of Derbyshire would have placed before him ten years ago with the quiet confidence of farmers setting out seed in well-tended soil.
She addressed him with a composure that suggested either genuine confidence or excellent preparation.
“Mr Darcy, I understand you have been some years abroad.”
“I have been in the north. Northumberland.”
“Oh! How wild that must have been. I confess I have never travelled farther north than York. Is the country very bleak?”
“It is direct.”
The answer confused her, as he had known it would. She recovered well—a small laugh, a tilt of the head, the social machinery turning over smoothly after a brief misfire. “Direct! What an unusual way to describe a landscape. I should very much like to hear more.”
He should have obliged. He knew the steps of this dance—not because he had ever been good at them, but because he had watched George perform them with an ease that had made the watching both a pleasure and an education. George would have told her about the coast. George would have made the grey sea and the cliff and the tower sound romantic, would have drawn the wildness of it into a story that left Miss Arenden leaning forward in her chair, charmed and intrigued and convinced that the man beside her was as interesting as his circumstances suggested. George had possessed that gift.
Darcy did not. Darcy possessed the opposite—the gift of making fascinating things sound like reports, of draining the warmth from a subject by treating it with the thoroughness it deserved rather than the lightness it required.
“The coast is exposed,” he said. “The weather comes off the North Sea without interruption. The villages are small. The economy is fishing, primarily, with some agriculture inland.”
Miss Arenden’s smile remained, but it required obvious effort that had not been necessary thirty seconds earlier. “And what took you there, Mr Darcy? Family business?”
“A lighthouse.”
The word turned over behind her rather unremarkable eyes like a fish delivered to the wrong address. Miss Arenden looked at him the way a person looked at a sentence diagrammed incorrectly—with the conviction that the parts were all present, but the arrangement defied comprehension.
“A lighthouse,” she repeated.
“I was thekeeper.”
The conversation at the centre of the table did not stop, but it thinned perceptibly, the way a stream thinned when a stone was placed in its current. Lady Matlock, three seats away, did not turn her head. She did not need to. Her attention had been on him since the first course, with the quality of a trainer watching a horse approach a fence that he was not entirely confident it would clear.
Miss Arenden rallied. She was, he would grant her, determined. “How very singular. I had not heard of gentlemen taking up—that is to say, lightkeeping is not a profession one typically associates with—”
“With my station. No. It is not.”
He had offered her nothing. He was offering her nothing with every syllable, constructing a wall of brevity and bluntness that a more stubborn woman might have climbed, but that Miss Arenden, who was young and well-bred and had done nothing to deserve this treatment, could not reasonably be expected to scale.
He was being unkind. Not deliberately—he did not wish to wound her—but inevitably, because every word she spoke required him to respond, and every response required him to be someone he was not, and the effort of the pretence was a thing he could not sustain through four courses and a dessert.
He tried. For Georgiana’s sake, for Lady Matlock’s, for the sake of the name that would need these drawing rooms and these dinner tables to receive his sister when the season came, he tried. He asked Miss Arenden about her family. He asked about York. He listened to her account of a musical performance she had attended at Hanover Square and produced what he hoped were appropriate sounds of interest. He ate his fish. He drank his wine. He performed the mechanics of a social evening with the competence of a man assembling a mechanism he had been trained to assemble, but for which he had no natural aptitude.
It was not enough. It showed in the careful way Miss Arenden turned her attention to the gentleman on her other side after the third course—not with relief, precisely, but with the profound gratitude of someone who had been carrying a heavy parcel and had finally been permitted to set it down. It was there in the glance Lady Matlock directed at him across the table during the dessert—a glance that contained no anger but a weariness he recognised, the weariness of a woman who had expected difficulty and had received exactly what she expected.
If Elizabeth had been there, she would have lasted perhaps ten minutes in this room before saying something so direct that half the table would have choked on their wine andthe other half would have wanted to applaud. He could see her in the chair beside him as clearly as if she were there—the sly look, the dry observation delivered just below the volume of general conversation, meant for him alone.
She would have been magnificent, and she would have been impossible, and he would have been content just kindling that spark and letting her shine.
