“I suppose it should not—but did you, indeed? I see from the smugness of your smile that you did.”
“Has anyone ever told you that you are quite adept at avoiding a question you do not wish to answer?”
“Such as the one you just posed? Let us cross over that stile and take the lane that borders Mr Ridley’s field, shall we?”
“That is an excellent idea, since I have no notion where we are at the moment. After which,” I said drily as I helped her over the top step and down the other side, “I am in full expectation that you will turn the tables upon me once more, and before I know up from down, you will have won the game of conversation.”
When I had also gone over the stile, I again offered her my arm. “Let me save you the trouble by surrendering sooner than later. You may freely interrogate me, madam, and I shall confess any truth. Meanwhile,youare to be absolved from telling me anything meaningful, since you cannot be made to do so.”
“What?” she cried. “You cannot give up so easily! By doing so, you have fairly beaten me at my own game. It is so much more fun to pull words from you than to…” Her words faded and Elizabeth Bennet was, for the first time since I had known her, slightly confounded.
“…Than to what? Tell me what you are truly thinking?”
After a blushing silence, broken only by the flutter of doves we startled as we walked by a fallow field, she said, “The truth is I boldly forced us to meet, and now I am suddenly shy of you, Mr Darcy.”
“You cannot possibly be as shy of me as I am of you. We have been thrown together in miserable circumstances and became used to speaking too freely, perhaps. Now, months later, it seems a treacherous business to return to such intimacy, yet we are incapable of pretending we do not know one another better than we ought.”
She listened with her face averted, and I pressed my advantage while she was still too abashed to defend herself by the judicious application of her superior wit.
“You gave me leave to come to you, and I have come. What now, my love?” I took her gloved hand to my lips. “Should I tell you what I truly learnt in the wilds of the northern counties? I learnt that my feelings for you are unshakeable, unyielding, and unalterable.”
She then looked up from the ground and turned to look into my eyes, seemingly on the verge of reply, and so I put a finger to her lips and said, “Slowly, my darling. Let us not rush through the best part of love. Be assured of my constancy and of the honour I take seriously. I mean to do justice to your worth, and for this I cannot take any moment of your time or attention for granted. You refused to allow me to marry you out of duty to your reputation, did you not? Reject me here and now or allow me to win you fairly as though we did not have any history of—well, I do not know how to put the matter more delicately, except to say that I have held you in my arms as though you were mine already.”
CHAPTER 36
Our walk had ended in the shadow of tired shrubbery on the periphery of her father’s estate.
“I should not have forced our meeting,” she said quietly. “At best, you must think I am too forward and intolerably impatient, and at worst, I am?—”
“I think you are very wise,” I said as I brushed a strand of hair from her cheek. “If you had not forced my hand, you would indeed have had to wait for my courage to rise, and I assure you, it is not nearly as stout as yours. But have I not already told you my feelings for you are beyond hope of alteration? You could not now disgust me even if you wished to, Elizabeth. Even such pitiful self-abasement as you are now subjecting me to has left me unmoved.”
This prompted from her a weak chuckle and after inviting me to come to Longbourn for breakfast as a means to lessen the awkwardness of her feelings, I said, “Surely, you did not just ask me to appear before your mother unshaven and in this rumpled coat. I have changed a great deal, but I have notyetbecome a savage.”
“Very well,” she said with a dismissive shake of her head. “I suppose I shall see you when I may.”
“So you will, and in the future I will be dressed and ready for any adventure by six in the morning.”
I was holding her hand even as she turned to go, and for a long moment as I stood rooted to the ground and she stepped away, we yet held onto each other tightly until at last we could stretch our arms no longer. Her fingers slipped from my grip, and once again I watched her go until at last she disappeared into her house and the door closed behind her.
While the lady herself had somewhat undone my strategy of patience, my cousin’s plan to be of service to her sister remained intact. He chose gallantry, and with no small degree of satisfaction did I watch him apply his soldierly attributes in service to Miss Bennet.
Within days of our arrival, the moment we most dreaded arrived when Bingley hosted a reception for the gentry of the neighbourhood, and the Bennets were naturally included. In a mood of seriousness well-disguised, dressed in his formal regimental regalia, epaulets and medals gleaming, my cousin stood quite near the entrance to the salon. Upon the arrival of Mr Bennet and his family, he went instantly to greet them, taking Miss Bennet’s arm and leading her into the room. He stood beside her as she greeted Bingley and his family and then met Miss Johnson, all of which she managed with subdued but reasonable poise. He then led her away to a seat next to Georgiana who sat in complete readiness to engage that lady in light conversation. I stood behind them in an attitude of pleasant interest as they spoke, and Elizabeth, upon seeing this united front, glanced at me almost in consternation. Had she herselfbeen girded for this battle, and if so, had we stolen a march on her?
Whatever she might have wished to say to me with such a look, however, passed quickly. She could not dwell overmuch on her feelings, for it seemed she was also of a mind to blunt her youngest sister’s audacious pranks and to quell her middle sister’s urge to quote the Bible upon every other topic of conversation brought into the room.
Fortunately, the drawing room being filled to overflowing as it was, meant that the predominant formation was one of clusters of guests, so that when her mother made a cutting remark to Lady Lucas that Bingley had settled for a milk and water miss, no one save for me overheard her.
I may have wished to gloss over that evening as passable, but in truth it was unreasonably taxing to me because of the ever-present undercurrent in Meryton thatsomeonewould be vulgar in short order, and barring that, someoneelsewould behave in such a countrified manner as to cause those of us used to a more refined society to stiffen in dismay. As I watched from my position on the periphery of the room, I attempted to find allies by identifying those who shared my tension.
Georgiana, however, was too disposed to being pleased with her friend’s acquaintances, and she had no exposure to the gaucherie that could erupt from Mrs Philips or any other local. Nor did Fitzwilliam seem too concerned. He was listening to Jane Bennet’s every word as if she were imparting the secrets of the world to him, and in fairness, being a military man, he was used to crude company. Mrs Annesley was alert but primarily on behalf of my sister. Mrs Johnson also seemed an observant lady poised to intervene with some soothing remark or change to some safer topic if need be, but in her case, her attention was squarely placed upon her daughter and her reception amongst Bingley’s country acquaintance.
It began to seem as if the only other person who looked to be tightly wound in suspense of what this horrible mixture of persons would conjure was Elizabeth. I felt for her extremely because, in truth, her causes for vigilance were members of her own family, and being only one person, she could not reasonably expect to contain such an unruly herd.
We were eventually invited to partake of an informal supper, for there were too many present to sit down to dinner. When her sister Kitty began to engage young Lucas in an overloud argument about precisely when the last flood had inundated Meryton, I was sitting close enough to the table where Elizabeth sat to witness her shoulders slump. Her father then leant forwards from several seats away, and with wicked irony, and to no one in particular, he said he should be congratulated for having a daughter who could quibble over something as irrelevant as last year’s weather. Sir William then jovially offered the nonsensical reply that rain must always be welcome except, of course, when it was not, and this prompted Mrs Bennet to decry the inelegance of her old umbrella but—said with a dark glance at her husband—her requests to purchase a replacement had been declared daft.
Because I had been watching Elizabeth, when she lifted her gaze from her plate to look resignedly upon that bit of buffoonery, our eyes met. In answer to our silent meeting, I simply raised my glass to her in a barely perceptible salute—not mockingly—but encouragingly. With all my heart, I wished to remind her that even in this interminable gathering in which gibberish passed for conversation, she should find something to laugh at, and as a testament to how well she understood me, she relaxed her posture.
Predictably, what came next was a spell of musical entertainment. By some stroke of good fortune, Mary Bennet did not have a chance to perform, though I had been braced toendure it. Clearly, she was anxious to display what she alone considered her talent, so much so, that as time went by, I began to suspect that this reprieve was not due so much to luck as it was a calculated intervention.
