Darcy, Robert, and Richard surrendered their hats to the porter and moved into the main room. Darcy’s eyes swept over the high-backed chairs and the clusters of gentlemen discussing the latest scandal involving Lord Byron.
“There,” Richard murmured, nodding towards a corner near the great bay windows.
Darcy followed his cousin’s gaze.
Sitting in a pair of wingback chairs were Charles Bingley and his brother-in-law, Hurst. Hurst was asleep, a half-eaten piece of cake resting precariously on his stomach, rising and falling with his snores.
Bingley, however, was not asleep, nor was he staring blankly out of the window in a fit of melancholic despair. He was not pale. He was not clutching a miniature portrait of Jane Bennet and weeping into his cravat.
Charles Bingley was leaning forward in his chair, gesturing wildly with a rolled-up sporting gazette, speaking animatedly to a bewildered baronet in the next seat.
Darcy exchanged a glance with Robert. The viscount’s eyes were narrowed, his jaw set in a calculating line.
“Let us go pay our respects,” Robert drawled, his voice dropping into its most dangerously polite register.
They crossed the room.
“Bingley.” Darcy stepped into Bingley’s line of sight.
Bingley’s head snapped up, his face breaking into an ecstatic smile.
“Darcy! Lord Keathley! Colonel!” He leapt to his feet, abandoning the baronet. He pumped Darcy’s hand. “By God, it is good to see you! I thought you were still lingering in Kent, counting trees with your aunt!”
“We returned this morning.” Darcy searched Bingley’s face for any sign of hidden sorrow, any lingering melancholy over his separation from Jane Bennet. There was none. The man looked healthier than a prize-winning turnip. “You seem well, Bingley.”
“Well? I am magnificent!” Bingley crowed, motioning for them to take the empty chairs around the table. Hurst snorted in his sleep, the cake wobbling dangerously. “Gentlemen, you have arrived at a momentous juncture! I have made the most significant decision of my life!”
Darcy’s heart stopped.He is going to say he is returning to Hertfordshire,he thought with delight.He is going to try and win Jane back, and Elizabeth will adore me forever.
“Oh?” Robert asked, his voice dangerously low. “Do tell, Bingley. We are positively breathless with anticipation.”
“I have let the lease on Netherfield lapse!” Bingley announced proudly.
Darcy blinked, the air rushing out of his lungs in a sharp exhale. “You... you let the lease lapse? Entirely?”
“Indeed!” Bingley waved his sporting gazette like a flag of victory. “Hertfordshire was all very well for a season, of course. Pleasant enough assemblies, decent partridge shooting, but lacking in serious agricultural prospects. Barely a memory now! No, gentlemen. I have purchased an estate in Yorkshire!”
“Yorkshire,” Richard repeated slowly, exchanging a baffled look with Darcy.
“A breeding estate!” Bingley continued, his eyes shining dreamily. “You must come up in the autumn! Darcy, you will weep when you see the stables. I have acquired a foundation herd of the most magnificent creatures God ever put on this earth.”
He leaned in, his voice dropping to a tone of reverent, hushed awe. It was the exact tone he had used in the Meryton assembly rooms when he had first laid eyes on Jane Bennet.
“The bloodlines,” he whispered passionately. “You have never seen such symmetry. The hocks! The fetlocks! I purchased a mare last week—a dappled grey—and I swear to you, looking into her eyes is like looking into the soul of an angel.”
Darcy stared at his friend, at the man whose heart he had agonised over breaking, at the man who had driven Elizabeth Bennet to tears of righteous fury.
Charles Bingley was currently comparing the soulful eyes of a farm animal to a celestial being, and he meant every single word of it.
“A mare,” Robert enunciated the syllables. “How very... poetic, Bingley. And tell me, does this dappled grey angel occupy your every waking thought? Does she eclipse any prior... attachments?”
“Absolutely!” Bingley agreed, oblivious to the trap Robert was setting. “I can think of nothing but geldings and mares! I was just telling Lord Ponsonby—before you arrived—that a Yorkshire stallion is superior to anything bred in the South.”
“And the South holds no lingering regrets for you?” Richard leaned forward, deploying his interrogation voice. “No fond memories of the... the local society?”
“The society?” Bingley laughed. “Oh, it was a pleasant fancy, Colonel, a brief diversion. But a man must look to his legacy! And my legacy lies in Yorkshire. In fact!” Bingley clapped his hands together. “You must all join me. I have secured a box at Astley’s Amphitheatre! We shall watch the trick riding. It will be a triumph of equestrian skill!”
“Astley’s,” Darcy repeated, his voice hollow, as though it belonged to someone else.
