“What? Elizabeth is all that is lovely — besides, you made a leap of logic that makes no sense.”
Lady Susan’s blank stare was the reply.
“How would her being dressed elaborately and expensively make anyone think Mrs. Darcy to be less of a fortune hunter?”
“If she follows proper instruction, everyone will agree she iswelldressed.”
“And?” Darcy raised his eyebrows.
Lady Susan threw up her hands. “Men, always using logic!”
She left Darcy to follow her into the drawing room.
It was not, in fact, Darcy’s impression that the women he was closest to, Elizabeth and Georgiana, had any difficulty with the use of logic.
It was Darcy’s ordinary view that women who claimed an inability to think clearly, and further that this inability gave them some special insight into the world, were hiding some form of perfectly clear andlogicalreasoning that they did not wish to confess.
In the drawing room, Elizabeth had settled on a sofa with Lady Matlock and Lord Matlock taking up the positions next to her on the sofa, and Viscount Hartwood in the winged armchair next to her. She had a pinched look to her, and she glanced at him with a frustrated and unwelcoming frown.
Darcy pulled up a chair to sit as close to Elizabeth as he could. Georgiana was with them, but the young children had been gathered by the nurses and taken upstairs to the long empty, and hence outdated nursery. Such at least wasthe complaint that Lady Susan made with a nose crinkled in disgust every year when the Matlocks visited for the holiday that Pemberley had been assigned for the year.
In addition to being a supremely dressed over-spender, she was a loving and attentive mother.
Lady Susan spoke to Georgiana eagerly, “You are even taller than before! I am so jealous — it isn’t quite the height of fashion, not all the crack, to be so tall. But if you wear the right clothes, you’ll make every other girl dead and sick with envy, because they can’t match the style being so short.”
Georgiana frowned. “I don’t want to be odd or to have everyone… look at me.”
“No, no, believe me you do!” Lady Susan said confidently. “Every woman wants to be looked at by their peers and thought better than them. It is deep here,” she tapped her chest as she spoke, “inside the liver and the guts.”
That only brought up a frown from Georgiana.
Elizabeth looked at him, and their eyes met. She had a half smile as though she wished to laugh. And suddenly Darcy had a sense of seeing Lady Susan as rather ridiculous, and he had to look down to keep from smiling as well.
Now Lady Susan turned to Elizabeth. “And Mrs. Darcy. Such an… unusual choice for a morning dress.Wheredid you get that dress? I must know the name of the modiste.”
Elizabeth replied with a name.
“Who? I have never heard of her. I thought I knew every dressmaker in thetonworth knowing about. And several not. An addition to the list! An undiscovered maestro. And such fabric!”
She actually stood up to finger the silk of Elizabeth’s dress. “I did not know that you could even get such silk through a dressmaker.”
“Ah, my uncle — the one in trade, because you must have heard that I have an uncle who lives inCheapside—” Elizabethreplied, her head lifted high, and her color red, “does some business with the Indies. He got it at a discount.”
“I see. Adiscount. And I’d feared you had overpaid.”
Elizabeth shrugged. “When you arethefortune hunter, you must keep such matters in mind. To preserve thefortune.”
Darcy found himself sitting higher, torn between admiration of Elizabeth’s confidence — in this she refused to offer disguise — and a wish that the subject of her family was not brought up at all. And he’d been right, he should have somehow forced her to go to Lady Susan’s dressmaker.
“Yes, yes, I need not care aboutthat,” Lady Susan replied to Elizabeth. “And your almost brown complexion. You could pass for an Italian, or even an Egyptian. I will make you as striking as Georgiana with all her height.”
Elizabeth smiled and opened her hands wide. “I am as I am. Mr. Darcy has admired my complexion.”
Darcy frowned. “Enough, enough. Mrs. Darcy has only just entered our sphere. It does not speak ill of her that the way she dresses is not yet toyourstandards.”
The glare that Elizabeth gave him made Darcy feel as though he’d made a serious mistake by trying to defend her in the female battle of wits. In fact, everyone but Lord Matlock looked at him as though he’d said something shocking and totally inept.
Even Georgiana frowned with worry as she looked between Darcy and Elizabeth.
