Of course she carried it still. The same careless, deliberate ease with which she had scribbled in Derbyshire. But now, there was something else—something habitual in the way her fingers curved around it, like someone gripping a railing in high wind.
“Do I feature?” he asked.
“Only in the most flattering context.”
“I doubt that.”
“Would you prefer infamy? It sells better.”
“Surely you would not trade in scandal, Miss Bennet.”
She grinned. “Only the most anonymous kind. I have standards.”
“Is that what we are calling them?”
“They are very high,” she said gravely. “Just low enough to trip people.”
He almost smiled—dangerously close—but instead took a sip of his punch, gaze flicking toward her mouth and away again.
“I imagine I am catalogued somewhere between a storm cloud and a cautionary tale,” he said.
She looked him over, critically. “Rather, somewhere between a brooding Byronic cliché and a very solemn Greek statue. If you would only look slightly more disapproving, someone might knit a tragic novel out of you.”
Darcy’s mouth twitched. “And what would you be, Miss Bennet? A provincial menace in bonnet and ink?”
“Certainly not. I am very muchà la mode.”
“A troubling trend.”
She beamed. “The best kind.”
He looked at her for a long moment, unsure whether he meant to retort or retreat—and genuinely uncertain which would be more dangerous.
Before he could decide, a familiar voice broke in.
“Ah, Darcy!” his grandmother approached, sherry in hand and satisfaction practically steaming from her bonnet. “I see you have found refreshment—and a conversational partner. Will you introduce me?”
Darcy’s jaw flexed. She knew very good and well who Elizabeth Bennet was, but she was forcing him to make the public introduction, anyway.
He turned, voice even. “Miss Elizabeth Bennet, may I present my grandmother, the dowager Countess of Matlock.”
Elizabeth curtsied. “It is a pleasure to meet you, madam.”
The dowager offered a faint bow of her head. “Entirely mine, Miss Bennet. I have heard… fascinating things.”
Darcy closed his eyes for a single breath.
“We are in need of your opinion,” the dowager continued smoothly, with the air of a woman who had absolutelynotjust laid a trap. “We are discussing the morality of metaphor,” she announced to the nearby listeners, who had all goneconveniently quiet. “Mr. Barrington insists that any poem with a tragic female lead is a veiled indictment of the poet’s mother.”
Elizabeth made a sound that might have been a laugh, if one sharpened a laugh on a whetstone.
“Surely not,” she said. “Sometimes a drowning is just a drowning.”
“I said the same,” Darcy muttered, more to himself than to her.
The dowager’s eyes gleamed. “So you agree, Miss Bennet? Or do you think metaphor always conceals a deeper truth?”
Elizabeth’s smile turned sly. “I think metaphor is how poets get away with melodrama while pretending to be misunderstood.”
