“You might have sent word if it troubled you in the night.”
“By what means? A carrier pigeon through the connecting door? I assure you, Mr. Darcy, I slept quite soundly.” This was not true, but the lie was a kindness, and she dispensed it without any attendant nagging of guilt.
He accepted it with a nod that suggested he did not believe her but would not press the point. They ate in a silence that was not, Elizabeth decided, uncomfortable—merely unfinished. The toast was excellent; the chocolate was better than anything she had tasted outside of her Aunt Gardiner’s table, and a clock struck nine.
Whereupon, the door swung wide, and Georgiana entered at a velocity that suggested she had been running and had slowed to a walk only at the final threshold—a deception undermined by the flush on her cheeks and the strand of dark hair that had escaped her pins and hung over one ear. Behind her, Elizabeth caught a glimpse of the housemaid, pink and breathless, peering around the doorframe. She caught Elizabeth’s eye, gave a desperate little bob, and vanished.
“You are both here,” Georgiana announced, as though their presence at their own breakfast table were a stroke of astonishing good fortune. She kissed Darcy’s cheek in passing and fixed Elizabeth with an assessing gaze surprisingly similar to Darcy’s perpetual accounting of her all through her stay at Netherfield.
“Mrs. Darcy. How is your poor hand? Hannah told me everything.”
“Did she,” said Darcy.
“She could hardly help it; she was there. She held the basin while you were on your knees, binding Elizabeth’s hand with your own handkerchief, and she says you were—her words, Brother—the most gentle she has ever seen you with anything that was not a horse.”
“I was applying salve, Georgiana. It merely required a steady hand.”
“But Hannah says?—”
“I am beginning to form a policy regarding what Hannah says.”
Elizabeth decided to rescue both the conversation and Hannah’s employment before Darcy could formulate the policy in question. “Your brother was very kind, Miss Darcy. The bite is healing nicely, and I bear Thomas no ill will. He was frightened, I was a stranger, and small creatures bite when they are frightened. I have a cat at Longbourn who does the same, though she has the grace to look sorry afterward.”
Georgiana accepted this with a nod and helped herself to a toast with the air of a young girl not at all ready to subside.
“I have been thinking,” she said.
“A dangerous occupation,” said Darcy.
“I have been thinking,” Georgiana repeated, undeterred, “about how very little I know of your courtship, and how very unfair it is that George should write me the most tantalizing account of Fitzwilliam’s secret love—those were his very words—and that I should then be expected to sit across from both of you and ask nothing.”
“You were expected to do precisely that,” Darcy said. “You appear to have decided otherwise.”
“Tell me how it began. I must know, or I shall invent something far worse.”
Elizabeth looked across at Darcy. The tips of his ears had begun their treacherous ascent toward red, and she knew—because she had watched him in this state before at Hertfordshire, when her mother had been at her most effusive—that he would rather face a charging bull than answer his sister’s question.
She took pity on him. Or what looked like pity.
“You must not tease your brother for what he will not say,” Elizabeth said, reaching for her chocolate with her good hand. “You will embarrass him to no purpose. He is a man who does rather than speaks, and you must learn to read the former.”
“Then you tell me.”
“Very well. Your brother and I first met at an assembly in Hertfordshire. He stood against the wall for most of the evening and regarded everyone as though they had arrived uninvited to their own party. He was persuaded to dance with me—persuaded, Miss Darcy, I emphasize—and we managed two dances and perhaps eight sentences, four of which were mine, three about the weather, and one unaccounted for.”
It was, strictly speaking, a fabrication, for he had in fact refused to dance with her at all. But she chose to count the dance he had later requested, which she had declined, as well as the actual, awkward, nearly speechless set at the Netherfield ball. It was, she decided, a charitable embellishment for his sister’s sake, not the rank lie that it was.
“Two dances at the first meeting.” Georgiana’s mouth fell open wide. “But Brother knows that is highly improper. Two dances practically declared himself.”
Darcy set down his knife. “It was Hertfordshire, Georgiana. The customs are less formal.”
“The customs are exactly the same, and you know it perfectly well,” his sister replied archly. “You lectured me for half an hour last autumn on the significance of a second dance, and you were very firm that a gentleman does not stand up twice with a lady he does not mean to distinguish.” Miss Darcy sat back with the satisfied air of a barrister who has produced the decisive document. “And so, when I am out, I shall expect the same liberty. If any gentleman asks me twice, I shall accept and cite my brother’s excellent example.”
“You will do nothing of the kind.”
“But you have set the precedent.”
“I have set no precedent. Mrs. Darcy has described a sequence of unrelated events in Hertfordshire, and you have built a cathedral upon it.”
