CHAPTER TWENTY
TOO MUCH GINGER
Darcy
A gentleman does not enterkitchens. This is not a written rule so much as an unwritten understanding, the kind that forms the foundation of civilized society alongside the prohibition on discussing money at dinner and the expectation that one does not follow a woman through a servant’s door simply because she has retreated through it.
But with Elizabeth, I had to act. She had endured Caroline’s ridiculous airs and Mrs. Hurst’s cuts. A gentleman did not enter kitchens, but what I had to say to Elizabeth could not wait.
I found her dusted with flour, cutting biscuits with the force of a woman converting her anger into baked goods. Mrs. Reynolds at Pemberley had once explained to me that the quality of bread was often directly proportional to the baker’s fury, and that the finest loaves in Derbyshire were produced during marital arguments.
Elizabeth’s spirited pair of eyes darted toward me as if she had expected my entrance, and her quick wit made mincemeat of anyexcuses I might have offered, directing me to the port on the second shelf.
“I didn’t come for the port,” I said.
She turned her back on me, placing the biscuits into the oven. They would be ready in a quarter of an hour. Enough time for what I had to say.
Cinnamon, that loyal feline, wound herself sleekly around my legs. I picked her up, gaining confidence in her warmth, and cleared my throat, hoping to melt the frost.
“You need not have come,” she said without looking at me. “I am perfectly well.”
“I did not suppose you were unwell.”
“Then you came to inspect the biscuits.”
“I came because the word I used in the drawing room was insufficient.” The sentence emerged with more directness than I had planned, which was becoming a pattern in Elizabeth’s proximity. Her interactions with Georgiana had been more than competent, and yet, when faced with criticism from the Bingley sisters, I had resorted to my cursed reserve—a contrast to Bingley’s effusiveness.
Elizabeth, however, would not make any amends easy. “Do not presume to judge your words, Mr. Darcy, especially if they are accurate.”
“Accuracy is not the hallmark of commendation. I called your work merely competent in the drawing room with Caroline and Mrs. Hurst as audience. The word I used was inadequate to the truth.”
She unfolded her arms. The unfolding was slow, and I noted it the way I noted everything about Elizabeth Bennet’s physical arrangement in space.
“Much like the commendable caraway seeds.”
“Yes, they made the Shrewsbury cake truly… unique.”
“And the drawing room renders them only adequate?”
“I am working on that.” I swallowed, my throat suddenly dry.
“You are working on a word.”
“I am working on several words. The drawing room requires a measured response, and the measure was inadequate.” I heard myself and winced internally, because I was repeatinginadequateas though my vocabulary had become insufficient, which, in fairness, it had. Elizabeth Bennet had been eroding my vocabulary since the first morning she walked into the dining room after I had dismissed her and sat down as though dismissal were a suggestion rather than a directive.
And now, she watched me with an expression bordering on annoyance rather than expectation.
“What you have done with Georgiana,” I said, and the sentence headed somewhere honest, so I let it go, “exceeds any programme I designed. The girl who accused Bingley of feeding seven points to Miss Bennet’s forehand… the one who threw apples at the sow and climbed stiles… That girl did not exist before you came to be her companion.”
The tension in Elizabeth’s shoulders eased, and the easing meant the thing I had said was closer to what she needed to hear than what I had said in the drawing room.
“She is becoming,” I continued, “the person she might have been, if?—”
I stopped because the sentence had been heading toward Ramsgate, toward that summer when she had been enticed and almost ruined. Innocent and unassuming, my sister had almost fallen prey to the most vile and conniving fortune hunter, but Elizabeth did not need to know.
“If? Mr. Darcy, are you well?” Elizabeth’s concern drew my thoughts back to the surface.
I shook my head, because how could a loving brother ever be well when he had failed his younger sister, an orphan dependent on him for guidance and protection?
