Elizabeth leaned toward her with airy cheer. “Did you hear that? How kind. Mr. Darcy has decided I am medicinal.”
Charlotte blinked. “You are not going to respond to that.”
“Certainly not,” Elizabeth said, lifting her chin. “I never contradict a man offering compliments.”
Darcy, without turning, continued: “Not everyone is suited to lively conversation. Or its… consequences.”
Elizabeth took a sip of tea.
“Indeed,” she said. “Just as not everyone is suited to excessive brooding. I have heard it leads to joint pain.”
Charlotte choked on her biscuit.
Elizabeth tilted her head, just enough to let her voice carry across the room.
“Well,” she said airily, “he must be in want of a wife.”
Charlotte blinked. “What?”
Elizabeth took another sip, not looking at Darcy. “Why else would he be expounding on the merits or demerits of every lady present? Though heaven help the woman who accepts the post. She would have to keep to herself, speak only when spoken to, and express her affection chiefly through superior floral decorations.”
Charlotte snorted so violently she had to pretend to cough.
Darcy did not turn, but his shoulder tensed.
Elizabeth reached for another biscuit and broke it in half. Calm. Casual.
Charlotte leaned close. “You are going to get us both cut.”
“Let them try,” Elizabeth said sweetly. “I have excellent penmanship and a gift for satire. I am invincible.”
Darcy’s conversation continued for precisely one minute longer before he excused himself and made for the back of the room.
Chapter Nine
The fire had burnedlow.
Darcy sat alone in the drawing room with a letter open in his hand and an entire conversation lodged behind his ribs like shrapnel. Georgiana’s handwriting was smaller than usual. That alone was cause for concern.
She was uneasy. That much was clear, but whether the cause was her current residence at their grandmother’s dower house or… other matters… was debatable.
“Mrs. Reynolds sent over my letters today. Lady Catherine intends to call at Pemberley sometime in October. She says it is too damp at Rosings, and she ‘ought to make use of the better air.’ I do not know if she means to stay, but she asked that the bluebedchamber be ‘aired and prepared.’ I suppose I ought not be alarmed, but I am rather dreading it.”
That made two of them.
She also mentioned that she was requesting new flannels, that the dowager’s kitchen chimney was drawing oddly, and that the spaniels had misbehaved again. She apologized three times for the dogs. It was not the dogs that concerned him.
He should have been consumed with this.
But unaccountably… he was not.
Instead, his mind returned—again—to Lady Lucas’s overheated drawing room. Too warm, too full of bad tea and worse conversation—and the joyful glint in Elizabeth Bennet’s eyes when she had told Miss Lucas all about his dead language habit.
She had not meant it to sound flattering.
Which was what made it so disorienting that he had liked hearing her say it.
She remembered things he said.Everythinghe said, as far as he could tell. That was the problem.
