“I do not know whether I trust you in that office, Mr Darcy. You have the air of a man who despises unnecessary adjectives but may, under provocation, indulge in righteous nouns.”
That did it. Not a smile exactly. Something rarer, more dangerous—the actual movement of amusement across his face before he remembered himself and suppressed it.
“Righteous nouns,” he repeated. “I shall write that into my next instruction and see whether the solicitor obeys more quickly.”
“Then heaven help the solicitor,” Elizabeth said.
“He has clerks for that.” He glanced toward the little table by her bed, where the laudanum stood untouched beside the lamp.“Mrs Marsden is out longer than she expected,” he said.
“So she is.”
“If your pain grows worse, you may require something before she returns.”
Elizabeth made a face. “I assure you, sir, I have formed an intimate dislike of ‘requiring something’.”
“Yes. I had observed that your principles are nowhere so firm as in resistance to being eased.”
“Laudanum does not ease. It conquers, which is a very different matter, and one I do not choose unless absolutely pressed.”
He smiled faintly. “Then I shall hope for absolute pressure before the hour is out.”
“How benevolent of you.”
His hand remained on the back of the chair, but his eyes moved toward the far end of the room, where the smoke from the morning fire had left its faint memorial above the door.
“I am glad to see your fire is still drawing properly,” he said, with an air too deliberate to be accidental. “The chimneys, I have discovered, are in a lamentable state.”
“Is that why you are here with your account books? You are fleeing another room?” she asked.
He made a noise that was close to a grunt. “The room is either cold enough to freeze the ink or so full of smoke that a man must choose between coughing and blindness. I could not see to write in it an hour ago, and I do not answer for the quiet of my hand when frozen.”
“A most affecting catalogue of hardships.”
“I thought you would feel for me.”
“Deeply. Especially as all these sufferings have brought you no farther than the next room.”
That checked him. Not because she had wounded him, but because she had come too near the truth for comfort. He inclined his head as if conceding a point in argument he had never intended to yield.
“The next room, Miss Bennet, has the superior fire.”
“And the more troublesome patient. I assume your sister’s fire upstairs draws well enough?”
“Georgiana finds my account books dull enough to lull her to sleep. She already sleeps far too much for my liking, whereas you, Miss Bennet, can hardly be persuaded to close your eyes when you ought to. Therefore, I consider it my duty to bore you into being a good patient. May I?”
Elizabeth tried to smile, probably failed, and opened the book on her lap. “It is your house, Mr Darcy.”
“Much to my regret, it is.”
He sat down then, the account book still in hand. Not at the writing desk across the room, but in Jane’s chair. Near enough that, when she passed the volume of Miss Edgeworth across the coverlet to free her hand for the cup at her elbow, her knuckles grazed the dark wool at his sleeve, and the contact was no longer the question it had been a half-second before. It was a fact. Brief. The width of a knuckle. Neither remarked upon it. Neither moved a hand away with any haste that would have made the not-moving plain. The nearness changed the room more than the lantern in his hand had done.
“Did Mrs Hadley approve the day’s progress?” he asked.
“She approved it in the tone of a woman who would rather have found fault.”
“That resembles my own experience of her.”
“She informed me I would soon require occupation or become unfit for polite society.”
