And Darcy sat in the middle of it all, looking like he’d been dropped into an alien civilization and was trying to work out the local customs through careful observation.
Shehadwarned him.
“So, William,” her mother said, settling into her seat with the satisfied air of a woman who’d successfully got everyone fed. “Elizabeth tells us you work in finance?”
“I do,” Darcy replied. “Investment management, primarily.”
“Ooh, fancy.” Lydia speared a roast potato with enthusiasm. “Do you make loads of money?”
“Lydia!” Elizabeth exclaimed.
“What? It’s a reasonable question. I mean, look at his car. That’s not a poor person’s car.”
Elizabeth felt her cheeks burning. This was what she’d been afraid of, her family treating Darcy like an exotic specimen to be studied and dissected.
“I do well enough,” Darcy said.
“I’m sure you do.” Her father had that twinkle in his eye, the one that made Elizabeth nervous. “Our Elizabeth’s always been attracted to the finer things in life. Remember when she was seven and insisted we buy the expensive cereal because the box was prettier?”
“Dad,” Elizabeth warned.
“Or when she was sixteen and convinced that boy with the BMW was the love of her life?”
“He had a very nice car,” Elizabeth said. “And I was sixteen. We all make questionable decisions at sixteen.”
“Some of usstilldo,” Mary muttered, which made Lydia throw a piece of carrot at her.
Elizabeth watched Darcy take in this exchange. She could see him cataloguing every detail: the casual disorder, the way her family interruptedone another, the complete absence of the formal dinner conversation he was likely used to.
“So, what do your parents do, William?” her mother asked, determined to gather as much information as possible.
Oh no. She’d forgotten to tell her mother about his parents.
“My father passed away about five years ago,” Darcy replied. “He was a barrister, but spent much of his time managing Pemberley, our family’s estate. My mother died when I was quite young—she was a musician.”
The table went quiet for a moment, the respectful silence that her family, for all their unruliness, always managed when it mattered.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” her father said gently. “That must have been difficult.”
“It was,” Darcy replied. “But I have my sister, Georgiana. She’s just completed university.”
Her mother nodded. “That’s wonderful. Family’s important, isn’t it? Elizabeth adores her sisters, even when they drive her mad.”
“Especially when we drive her mad,” Lydia added. “It’s more fun that way.”
Elizabeth spent the rest of dinner in a state of low-level panic, watching Darcy navigate her family’s particular brand of misrule. He answered Lydia’s inappropriate questions with dry humour, listened with patience to Mary’s lecture about cognitive dissonance, and even managed to look interested when Kitty showed him photos of her university friends.
But Elizabeth could see the way he sat just a little apart from it all, polite and engaged but somehow separate. Like he was attending a performance rather than taking part in a family meal.
When her father started telling the story about Elizabeth’s disastrous decision to dye her hair purple when she was fifteen, she wanted to sink through the floor and disappear.
“She looked like a bruised aubergine for weeks.” Her father was too delighted by his own storytelling to consider not embarrassing her. “Refused to come out of her room except for meals.”
“It was supposed to be subtle highlights,” Elizabeth muttered.
“Nothing about you has ever been subtle, love." Her mother's voice was touched with both fondness and exasperation. “Even as a baby, you did everything at full volume.”
Darcy smiled at that, the first genuine smile Elizabeth had seen from him all evening. “I can imagine,” he said, and there was something warm in his voice that made Elizabeth’s heart flutter.
