Then, slowly, he nodded.
“Very well. In five years. Perhaps we should set a date, to be sure matters can be settled decently and in order. Say… oh, December of…”
“1811.”
“Yes. December of 1811. If we still remember each other’s names by then.”
“I will do my very best to forget.” She held out her hand.
He took it.
The sun glinted off the ribbon still pinned to his coat, flashing him in the eyes. And he suddenly, terribly, no longer hated the afternoon.
Chapter Four
March, 1807
Mrs. Pennington’s London Salon
Elizabeth should have knownit would be dreadful when the footman announced the reading would begin promptly at half-six. Nothing good had ever come from literary punctuality.
She was seated two rows from the hearth in the drawing room of Mrs. Pennington—Mrs. Gardiner’s cousin, and the kind of woman who wore spectacles even when she was not reading. The parlor was overflowing with bookish sorts: poets with ink-stained fingers, ladies with notebooks tucked into reticules, and a few gentlemen who clearly thought this gathering might earn them a mistress or a muse.
Elizabeth had been promised conversation. Instead, she was enduringThe Siege of Tyre, a poem in thirty-seven stanzas, most of which seemed to be about cliffs.
“Do you suppose it ever ends?” Elizabeth muttered under her breath, wishing Jane were there to hear it.
But Jane had sensibly declined the invitation and was likely back at the Gardiners’ townhouse by now, sipping tea and reading a far better story.
Elizabeth shifted in her chair and tried to catch the eye of an elderly man two seats away who appeared to be dozing. Sensible.
She pulled out her small notebook—carefully, carefully—and made a note:
The poem is like a poor dinner guest. Long-winded, difficult to interrupt, and certain he is owed applause.
It helped, the writing. Not just for mischief’s sake, but to hold herself together. Always had.
The next stanza featured a woman named Leucadia who wept into the sea and was possibly also a metaphor. Elizabeth made another note:
She drowns. One hopes intentionally.
There was a faint sound—someone shifting just behind her—and she had only just scribbled a third line (a scandalous one, which involved the poet’s hair and possibly a lobster) when a voice spoke over her shoulder, low and dry.
“I wonder if Miss Leucadia would have lasted longer had she been permitted an editor.”
Elizabeth froze mid-word.
She glanced sideways—just enough to catch him from the corner of her eye.Mr. Darcy.Seated directly behind her.
She had not seen him since last July, and she had certainly had no notion she ever would again. And yet here he was—close enough to read over her shoulder, apparently, and certainly close enough to deserve a good solid stab from a hairpin.
He was not looking at her. His eyes remained trained on the hearth, expression carved from marble.
But he had read it. The lobster. Everything.
Her pulse did a strange thing.
“Perhaps,” she said just as quietly, turning just enough to be heard but not seen, “if she had a better rhyme for ‘tide,’ she might not have died at all.”
