Page 56

Her pelisse is soft wool, and warm from her. My temple rests just where her shoulder curves up into her neck, and above the edge of her collar I can feel the heat of her skin, a finger's breadth from my face. Her pulse is there. I can feel it. It is going fast against my temple, as fast as my own, and the knowledge of that goes through me like brandy.

One of her curls has come loose and lies against my cheek. I do not brush it away.

I could turn my head. Only an inch. Less. If I turned my head, my mouth would be against the side of her throat, just above that collar, where her pulse is hammering. I think about it with a vividness that makes my own pulse stumble. I think about what she would do. Whether she would draw away. Whether she would not.

Not yet.

I keep very still, and close my eyes, and breathe her in, and do not turn my head. It is the hardest thing I have done since the parsonage.

The carriage rocks. Slowly, so slowly I hardly notice it begin, she stops holding herself stiff. I feel her lean. Just a little. Back against me, so that my head is cradled between her shoulder and her cheek, and her weight and mine settle together as though we had been sitting this way for years.

Then I hear a sound. A small, soft sound. Kid leather, sliding.

She is taking off her glove.

I do not dare open my eyes. I hear the glove drop into her lap. And then her fingers touch my hair.

Bare fingers. Cool, and light, and not quite steady. They rest at my temple, on the side away from the bruise, as though she is not certain she is allowed. Then, when I do not move, they move. Slowly. Back through my hair, from my temple toward my ear, the way one might smooth a page, or soothe a horse, or touch something one has wanted to touch for a very long time and has not let oneself.

Something low and helpless rises in my throat. I swallow it. If I make a sound, she will stop.

She does it again. And again. Slow, steady strokes, her fingertips just grazing my scalp, and with every one the ache behind my eye loosens and something else, something in my chest, winds tighter and tighter until I think it may snap.

I have been touched by a great many people in my life. Nurses, and tailors, and fencing masters, and duchesses at the end of a dance. No one has ever touched me like this. As though I were precious, and breakable, and hers.

I am falling asleep. I can feel it coming over me like warm water, and I fight it with everything I have, because I do not want to miss one moment of this. But her fingers keep moving in my hair, and her pulse keeps beating against my temple, slowing now, slowing with mine, and the lavender is too sweet, and her shoulder is too warm, and the dark comes up and takes me gently under.

I hear Anne close her book.

The voices come to me from a long way off, as if through water. I am not sure I am awake to hear them. I am not sure I will remember them in the morning.

"Miss Bennet," Anne whispers. Very low. Very gentle. "Is he asleep?"

Elizabeth's shoulder rises and falls under my cheek. "I think so."

A pause. The carriage rocks. Elizabeth's glove is still resting against my hair.

"Miss Bennet," says Anne, even more softly. "You love him, don't you?"

Chapter Thirteen — Elizabeth

"Lizzy," says Papa, "you told me in October you would sooner marry a toad."

I have been home exactly fifty minutes.

In that time I have been embraced by my mother four times, wept on by my mother twice, and told by my mother that I am the cleverest, most fortunate, most undeserving girl in Hertfordshire, which I think was meant as a compliment. I have been kissed by Jane, and held by Jane, and looked at by Jane with her soft eyes full of a hundred questions she was too kind to ask in front of everyone. I have been shrieked at by Lydia, who wanted to know whether Mr. Darcy had brought any officers. I have been asked by Kitty whether Pemberley has a ballroom, and by Mary whether I had considered the solemn duties of a wife. I have watched Mr. Bingley bow to me with his face shining like a lamp and say, "Miss Elizabeth! I wish you joy! May I—that is—one day, may I hope to call you sister?" before Jane hushed him, pink to the ears.

I have watched my mother discover that Miss Anne de Bourgh, daughter of Lady Catherine de Bourgh of Rosings Park, is to be her guest for an unspecified period, and I have watched her very nearly faint for the second time in a week, and I have watched Anne take her hand and say, "I am so very glad to meet you, Mrs. Bennet. Elizabeth has told me so much about you," in a voice of such sweetness that Mama burst into tears all over again.

And I have watched Mr. Darcy's carriage go on down the lane toward Netherfield, with Colonel Fitzwilliam riding beside it, because Mr. Bingley and the Colonel between them insisted he must rest before he did anything else. He leaned out of the window as it went. He looked back at me. He did not wave, because Mr. Darcy does not wave. He only looked, until the carriage turned the corner by the elms.

And then Papa said, "Lizzy. My library. If you please," in his mildest voice, and walked away without waiting to see if I would follow.

So I followed.

Now I stand on the worn rug in front of his desk, the same rug where I stood when I was seven and had cut off Kitty's hair with Mama's sewing scissors, and Papa leans back in his chair with his spectacles pushed up on his forehead and his fingers steepled, and looks at me with the expression of a man settling down to a very good book.

"A toad," he repeats. "I remember it distinctly. You were very particular. You said you would sooner marry the common toad, or the natterjack, or even the great warty toad that lives under the cucumber frame, which you described at some length." He considers. "You said the warty toad had the better conversation."