On the morning of the tenth day, she wore it worse than he had yet seen.
Darcyknewshemeantto go nearly an hour before he had proof.
The knowledge came neither by revelation nor gentlemanly instinct stronger than observation, but from the small alterations that attended a woman set on movement who wished those around her to think nothing had changed.
Miss Bennet was too careful at breakfast.
Mrs Reeves set the bowl before her.
“Thank you, Mrs Reeves.”
Mrs Reeves stood by the chair. She had brought the porridge expecting the small accustomed declaration—that the dish was tyrannical, or the bread medicinal, or that any further refinement of the household kitchen would render Miss Bennet an invalid in earnest. None of those things were forthcoming. Mrs Reeves went out.
The porridge had been pronounced tyrannical the morning before, and the morning before that; on the strength of those pronouncements Mrs Reeves had begun to bring it more lightly sweetened, that the protest might have a fresh edge upon which to fall. There was no protest now. The bowl was eaten.
She asked after Georgiana's sleep, Hadley's lower carrier, and whether the post had come from Bakewell. Each question she put with the formal civility of a guest in a house she had been visiting some time, and meant to leave shortly. Mrs Marsden answered her briefly. Miss Bennet thanked her for each answer in turn, as a guest thanks a hostess.
When Mrs Marsden said Mrs Hadley permitted another turn in the drawing room later, if the leg held, Miss Bennet replied, “As you please,” and turned her attention to her cup.
Darcy, who had come down late from a letter he did not wish to write to Fitzwilliam and had expected the usual household disorder of tea, warmth, and argument, found instead a breakfast table behaving with unnatural exactness.
He mistrusted it at once.
Mrs Marsden did not. She wore these past days an exhausted politeness, less anger in it than endurance, and at present she watched her sister's plate and the folds of the shawl over her sister's knee with an attention that signified only that she was very tired.
Georgiana, spared by innocence or protected by tact, spoke into the small space the others had left her.
“I should like to send for The Lady of the Lake from the library upstairs, Brother. Mrs Annesley wrote of it in her last letter.”
“By all means.”
“Have you read it?”
“I have not.”
Miss Bennet looked up from her bowl. The wit was on her face in the proper shape—the small lift of the brow, the slight curve at the corner of the mouth that for three weeks had preceded the dryer sort of tease. None of the warmth attended it.
“Then your education has been lamentably narrow, sir.”
He inclined his head for the compliment her tone pretended to bestow. He had, in the last three weeks, been teased by her in half a dozen tempers. None of them had sounded like this.
After breakfast Georgiana went upstairs with Nan to rest before noon. Mrs Marsden carried away the tray and returned for the medicine bottle Mrs Hadley had left by the hearth. Miss Bennet asked, in a tone so casual it nearly passed, whether Mrs Marsden might send Martha for the blue walking cloak from the press.
Mrs Marsden stopped with the bottle in hand.
“The blue cloak?”
“Mine was soaked through and never properly dried. I thought perhaps Miss Darcy would not object to my borrowing it if I sit in the south room again.”
Mrs Marsden looked toward the rain-faded light beyond the windows, then back at her sister. “The south room is warm enough without a walking cloak.”
“Then consider it vanity. I am tired of looking like an invalid wrapped for transport.”
Mrs Marsden’s fingers tightened fractionally on the bottle. “Very well. I will send Martha.”
She went out.
Darcy, who had remained at the sideboard pretending to choose among letters he had ordered twice already, waited until the door shut and then turned.
