Page 38

"I suppose," I say, "I said something of the kind in Mrs. Collins's parlor. I am sorry I cannot remember saying it. I should like to have said it twice."

She makes a small sound. When she looks up, her eyes are wet, and she is smiling, and I do not understand either.

***

We have come, without either of us deciding it, to the shrubbery.

It is a narrow place, all laurel and box and overgrown lilac, with paths that wind back on themselves. My aunt never comes here. She says the paths are too narrow for a lady's skirts. Miss Bennet says they are only too narrow for my aunt's. I laughed so hard at that on Thursday that I had to sit down on a bench, and Pettigrew came running from the terrace in a panic.

Mrs. Collins and Anne are somewhere behind us. I cannot hear them. I suspect this is not an accident. I suspect my cousin Anne has become a great deal cleverer than anyone at Rosings has noticed.

The lilac is just coming out. The air is thick with it. A late bee drones somewhere.

Miss Bennet stops beside a bench, and does not sit, and does not let go of my arm.

"You are tired," she says. "We have come too far. Fitzwilliam will have my head."

"I am not tired."

"You are pale."

"I am always pale. I am a gentleman from Derbyshire. We are bred pale." I look down at her. "You have a curl coming loose."

"Have I?"

She lifts her free hand. Before she can find it, I do.

It has come down from under her bonnet at the left temple, dark and soft against her cheek. I take it between two fingers. I mean only to tuck it back. I do tuck it back. And then my hand does not come away. My fingers stay there, resting just at the edge of her jaw, where her skin is warm from walking and the pulse goes very quick under my fingertips.

She does not move.

She does not breathe, I think. Neither do I.

"Miss Bennet," I say. My voice comes out low and rough, not at all the voice I use in drawing rooms. "Is it yet?"

Her eyes go to my mouth.

I watch them go there. I watch her lips part. I feel her sway toward me, the smallest fraction of an inch, as though the lilac and the bee and the warm air are leaning her in.

I bend my head.

The laurels behind her explode.

"Mr. Darcy! Cousin! A thousand pardons! I did not know—I had no notion—I was composing my sermon, I always compose in the shrubbery, her ladyship never comes here, it is so very conducive to thought—"

Mr. Collins bursts onto the path in a shower of laurel leaves and stops dead three feet from us. His mouth falls open. His hat falls off.

Miss Bennet springs back from me as though I am on fire. I very nearly am.

"Mr. Collins," I say.

"Mr. Darcy!" He bows. He sees Miss Bennet's face, and bows to her. He looks back at me, and bows again. He seems unable to stop. "Forgive me—I would not for the world—an intrusion of the most unpardonable kind—" He bows a fourth time, backing up as he does, and walks straight into the laurel he came out of. "I shall—I shall withdraw—"

He withdraws. Backward. Into the laurel. Still bowing.

There is a great deal of rustling, and a muffled cry of my hat, and then a hand comes out between the leaves, gropes about on the path, finds the hat, and vanishes with it.

The rustling dies away into the distance.