Page 5 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

When she opened them, Mr Darcy had taken the chair he was offered, and was answering her mother's questions with grave courtesy, one by one. Yes, the house was comfortable. Yes, the rooms were fine. No, he could not say how rich Mr Bingley was, as it was not his business to say. He did not smile, but he did not sneer either. He sat very straight and very still, like a man enduring a storm with good grace, and Elizabeth, who had braced herself for the contempt she had seen on grander faces, felt something in her chest loosen.

Then he turned towards the pianoforte.

"Miss Mary, is it? That is Handel, I think."

Mary's hands stopped. She stared at him as if he had spoken in Greek. Nobody, in Elizabeth's memory, had ever asked Mary what she was playing.

"It is," Mary said at last. "From Esther. It is very difficult."

"It is. My sister has been trying to master it for a year. She says the left hand is written by a man who hated left hands."

Mary's face did something extraordinary. It went pink, and then it very nearly smiled.

Elizabeth looked at Mr Darcy, sitting stiffly in her mother's best chair, being kind to her plainest sister without any appearance of trying, and decided that the matrons of Meryton were fools, and that she had known it all along.

Mr Bingley, after twenty minutes of gazing at Jane, discovered that the sun had come out.

"Such a fine day," he said, with great enthusiasm, to a sky that was mostly grey. "Would the ladies care to walk in the garden?"

#

Bingley and Miss Bennet walked ahead, very close together, speaking very low. Within five minutes they were a full hedge ahead. Within ten they had vanished round the corner of the house altogether, and Darcy found himself alone on a gravel path with Elizabeth Bennet and a great deal of damp shrubbery.

He had planned what to say. He had planned it in some detail on the ride over, while Bingley whistled. None of it seemed suitable now. She walked beside him with her hands tucked into a worn blue pelisse, her bonnet pushed back, her cheeks already pink with cold, and every sentence he had prepared seemed pompous and dull.

"You were kind to Mary," she said, before he could say anything at all.

"I was honest with her. She plays well. Too loudly, but well."

"She plays loudly because nobody listens. She thinks if she is loud enough, somebody may." Elizabeth glanced up at him. "You listened. I do not think she will forget it."

He did not know what to reply, so he said nothing, and they walked on. A robin hopped along the wall beside them, cocking its head.

"You spoke of your sister," she said, more gently. "The one who hates left hands."

"Georgiana. She is sixteen." He hesitated. He did not speak of Georgiana to strangers. He did not speak of her to anyone, these days, except his cousin and his aunt. But this was the woman who had guessed, behind a pillar, that he was worried about someone at home. "She has not been well this autumn. Not in body. In spirits. She is with my aunt in town."

"And you came into Hertfordshire so that you could be miserable at a distance, instead of close at hand."

He stopped walking. She stopped too, and looked up at him, and her dark eyes were not teasing now.

"Forgive me," she said. "That was impertinent."

"It was accurate," said Darcy. "Which is worse."

She laughed, softly, and the moment eased. They walked on.

"What does she read?" Elizabeth asked. "Your sister. A girl in low spirits ought to be given the right books. Not sermons. Mary would give her Fordyce, and she would be in a decline by Christmas."

"What would you give her?"

"Shakespeare. The comedies. Much Ado, to begin with. Nobody can be melancholy for long in the company of Beatrice."

"Beatrice is a shrew."

Elizabeth turned on him with such outrage that the robin fled. "Beatrice is the cleverest woman in the whole of Shakespeare!"

"She is clever. She is also cruel. She mocks Benedick without mercy from the first scene to the last."