The music swelled, beginning a country dance. They took their places.
For a moment, there was silence. It was a comfortable, companionable sort of quiet, but beneath it was an undercurrent Elizabeth could not place.
Mr Darcy’s eyes held hers, steady and unreadable, but devoid of coldness.
“You were very kind to Georgiana,” he said as they stepped forward and back. “She can be prone to quietness in company.”
Elizabeth smiled. “She reminds me of Jane.”
He brightened visibly. “Then I am doubly glad she has made a favourable impression.”
“I believe she has made a better one than you,” Elizabeth said lightly.
Darcy’s breath caught, stifling a laugh. His eyes sparkled with the understanding that she teased not out of disdain, but out of warmth.
They turned, and new partners shifted into place, gliding in time with the music. When they came together again, Elizabeth felt once again that something had shifted between them, as if their sham courtship had dangerously taken root, poised to bloom into something neither of them had been expecting.
“I find,” Mr Darcy said, his voice lower now, meant only for her, “that you surprise me at every turn.”
“And you perplex me. Which is perhaps the same thing.”
His face broke into a genuine smile, one of the first she had ever seen him wear. It softened his entire face, made him seem less like the man she had once resented and more like the man she was, alarmingly, beginning to understand.
The dance ended. Applause rippled through the assembly. Elizabeth curtsied, Mr Darcy bowed, and yet neither moved away from the dance floor.
“Miss Bennet,” Darcy began, his voice roughened.
Elizabeth’s heart fluttered traitorously, but before he could say more, Caroline Bingley’s high-pitched laughter rang out from the party, snapping the tension between them.
Darcy offered his arm once more. “Shall we resume our investigation?”
Elizabeth placed her hand atop his and forced herself to breathe. He had reminded her of their true purpose. This attachment was nothing more than a means to their end, and she would do well to remember it. “Yes. Let us discover who wishes us ruined before they succeed.”
But as they crossed the ballroom, still faintly flushed from the dance, Elizabeth could not shake the unsettling thought that the most dangerous secret emerging tonight was not in the scandal sheets, but within her own heart.
Chapter 6
Elizabeth prided herself on the firmness of her opinions, particularly when those opinions concerned Mr Darcy. Yet the past week had unsettled her in ways she scarcely wished to name. She had expected irritation, conflict, perhaps even grudging tolerance as then entered their courtship charade. What she had not expected was the disquieting warmth that had taken root whenever their gazes lingered too long, or the startling gentleness he showed where his sister was concerned, or the wry humour he revealed only when the two of them drifted beyond the reach of others’ ears.
Each new glimpse of him contradicted her long-cherished judgments until she felt as if she were walking on uncertain ground, her certainties crumbling beneath her feet.
More troubling still was the betrayal of her own senses. She ought to have resented every hour spent in his company. Instead, she found herself anticipating their next outing, their next whispered exchange behind a fan or in a quiet alcove, their next hurried strategy devised under the guise of polite civility. Impossibly, he had become her favourite co-conspirator. He was decisive, firm, and unyielding in his search for their quarry. Andthe more they uncovered about the scandal-monger plaguing their families, the more she relied on him.
The shift was as unwelcome as it was undeniable. Elizabeth resolved that she must keep her wits about her. Whatever else Darcy might be, he was not a man she could allow to unsettle her judgment.
Still, she suspected her resolve was already fraying.
∞∞∞
The week that followed the Winter Assembly unfurled in a blur of social engagements, each one an exhausting performance in which Darcy and Elizabeth were expected to play the part of a couple rapidly progressing from interest to attachment. Fortunately, their sham courtship provided every excuse to speak quietly in corners, share significant looks across rooms, and slip away from the most tedious company under the pretence of seeking refreshment or air. And in those carved-out moments, they gathered clues.
At Lady Collingford’s musicale, Elizabeth lingered near a cluster of matrons discussing the latest issue of the scandal sheet. One woman remarked that the column’s observations about the Winter Assembly were “shockingly precise. One might almost believe the writer had been present behind every potted palm!” Darcy, standing beside her as though merely listening to the violins tuning, murmured that the timing suggested someone with quick access to both gossip and print, someone embedded in the daily movements of thetonrather than a distant observer.
The next day at a salon, they learned a footman had been dismissed after asking impertinent questions about the romantic entanglements of several guests, and later at a dinner hosted by the Montague’s, Elizabeth found herself seated near a Mrs Addams, who giggled that the gossip columns had grown “far more daring of late, wickedly so!”
There were other fragments, too. None of it amounted to proof, but all of it pointed to someone accustomed to slipping unnoticed through the edges of society’s gatherings.
By the end of the week, Elizabeth felt as though she had spent every moment chasing the next whisper or hint, Mr Darcy at her side.
