“Mr Darcy.” She curtseyed with the composure of a woman who had been raised near enough to great houses to know their customs, though her hands, when she clasped them before her, pressed together more tightly than courtesy required.
“I am Mrs Gardiner. Forgive me—we have not been introduced, but I grew up in Lambton, not five miles from Pemberley, and your family’s name is well known to me. Please, come in.” She stepped aside to admit him to the parlour—the green curtains were there, faded to sage at their edges—and gestured toward a chair.
Two young women occupied the far end of the parlour. One sat at a small upright piano with her hands still resting on the keys, a piece of music propped before her that she had evidently been working through with more discipline than ease. She had Elizabeth’s colouring—the dark hair, the firm line of the brow—but none of her sister’s quickness in the face. Her expression, turned now toward Darcy, carried a gravity that belonged to someone who had decided early what she thought of the world and had not yet been given reason to revise it. Mary. He was certain of it before Mrs Gardiner spoke her name.
The other was curled in the window seat with a shawl drawn close around her shoulders and a book open in her lap that she had not been reading. She was fairer than her sisters, thinner, with the fine translucence of someone whose health had been unkind to her for longer than a single winter. She stared at Darcy with open, undisguised curiosity—her lips slightly parted, her book forgotten entirely—and did not look away when he met her gaze.
Neither of them had Elizabeth’s composure. Elizabeth had never once looked at him as though he were something unexpected that had wandered into her parlour and required cataloguing. She had looked at him as though he were already explicable, and she had simply not yet decided whether the explanation interested her.
Mrs Gardiner performed the introductions, and he had been correct. Elizabeth had described them too well to mistake their identities. Darcy inclined his head to each, then assumed the seat Mrs Gardineroffered.
“My husband is in his study, Mr Darcy. He will be with us directly. May I offer you tea while we wait?”
“You are very kind, Mrs Gardiner. I must apologise for calling without prior notice. I should have left my card.”
“Not at all. We are happy to receive you.” The courtesy was genuine, though it sat alongside something more watchful. “I hope—that is, there is nothing amiss in Derbyshire? No trouble at Pemberley?”
His brows raised. “Trouble, madam?”
A line formed between her eyes, though her smile remained fixed. “Forgive me for assuming, sir. I was trying to account for the pleasure of your call, and that was the nearest connexion I could conceive.”
He looked down and shook his head faintly. “I fear I have caused you unnecessary alarm. No, I am aware of no troubles in Derbyshire.”
“Oh. That is well.” She folded her hands on her lap and nodded faintly to her niece. “Mary, will you call for tea?”
The younger woman rose to cross to the bellpull just as Mr Gardiner’s step sounded in the passage. He entered the parlour with a pair of spectacles pushed up onto his forehead and a pen still in his hand. He was smaller than Darcy had imagined, trimmer, with the kind of compact frame that suggested a quickness of character not unlike his niece. He looked at Darcy the way he might look at a column of figures that did not yet balance.
“Mr Darcy.” He set the pen on the mantelpiece without looking at it, then came forward, offering Darcy his hand in greeting. “Edward Gardiner. This is a pleasant surprise.”
Darcy rose to accept Gardiner’s hand, and beside him, Mrs Gardiner stood as well. Probably expecting to pass their unusual caller off to her husband and bid her pleasantries as he departed.
“Mr Gardiner,” he said. “I regret calling without prior notice.”
“Not at all.” Gardiner’s tone was cordial, but not warm. “You must be acquainted with Mrs Gardiner.”
“Only by proximity. Mrs Gardiner has just informed me that she was raised near my home.”
She inclined her head. “I confess it has been many years since I have visited.” She hesitated—the restraint of one who wished to ask a question and was deciding whether courtesy or urgency ought to govern. “My sister still lives there, and it was mentioned thatthe master of Pemberley had recently returned. We understand you had been abroad for several years, and your return, naturally, was a matter of some remark in her letters.”
Five years reduced to “a matter of some remark.” He deserved worse.
“Yes, I have been away some while. I have only recently arrived in London.”
Gardiner had not sat down. He stood with one hand resting on the back of a chair, watching Darcy with an attention that was neither hostile nor welcoming but something more exacting—the regard of a man reserving judgement until sufficient evidence had been presented. The spectacles on his forehead gave him a look of interrupted industry, of a mind called away from work it intended to return to.
“You will forgive me for asking directly, Mr Darcy. It is not often that a gentleman of your position calls upon a household in Cheapside without a particular matter to discuss. Have you come on business?”
There it was. The offer and the question in one—the study door opened, the social pleasantries set aside, the ground cleared for whatever he had actually come to say.
“No… a rather more personal nature, sir.”
Gardiner's brows rose, causing his glasses to slide fractionally until he pushed them back absently. “Oh?”
“I have come because of your niece.”
The room changed. Not visibly—the green curtains did not stir, the fire did not leap, the piano in the far room continued its patient siege—but the air between the three of them altered in a way that Darcy could trace to each face separately. Mrs Gardiner’s clasped hands returned. Gardiner’s grip on the chair tightened by a single degree.
“Which niece?” Gardiner said, though his eyes said he already knew.
