“Business, yes. And I… I was not certain my call would be welcome.”
Jane looked up then. “Why would it not be welcome, Mr. Bingley?”
“I… I was led to believe… that is, I understood…” He stopped, took a breath, and looked at Jane with a raw, pleading honesty. “May I call on you? Tomorrow? I should very much like to call.”
Jane set her spoon down and folded her hands in her lap. She looked at him with the quiet courage of a woman who had been hurt but was still willing to leave the door ajar.
“You would be welcome, Mr. Bingley. We are at home most mornings.”
Bingley’s face broke into a smile so transparent, like a sunbeam at early dawn—the look of a man who had just been handed a reprieve.
Elizabeth watched them and felt a strange, cold pull at her heart. The machinery of courtship was moving again, but was it because of love, or because the landscape had shifted? Her house on Grosvenor Street was no doubt reported on by his sisters. Her canal shares, the fortune in Consols, and her estate in Derbyshire—all of it was subjected to recalculation.
“Well,” Allegra said, sensing the charge in the air. “Since we are all settled, Mr. Bingley, I suggest you order the lemon ice. It is the only thing in this shop as sharp as Miss Elizabeth’s wit.”
Elizabeth said nothing. She finished her ice and wondered how her fortune, which was supposed to grant her independence, had become a glass that colored every kindness with suspicion and every smile with design. She could not discern whether the fault lay in her own new, cynical sight or in the world that now surrounded her.
Did even the great Mr. Darcy find the “Elizabeth of Grosvenor Street” a far more palatable creature than that impertinent country miss with the mud-stained hems?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
BE NOT ALARMED
Elizabeth would sooner eather embroidery scissors than admit it aloud, but the emerald silk was perfection. Madame Delacroix’s shop girl had deposited the altered gown with its silver-netting early, before the rest would be promised.
She eyed her reflection in the tall pier glass, marveling at the transformation. A girl who had arrived in London with three threadbare morning dresses and a sturdy pair of walking boots was now the possessor of an emerald silk, an ivory gown, and a celestial blue walking costume that Allegra insisted made her look like a threat to the peace. Not to mention the new bonnets—those absurd, beautiful confections of lace and feathers that apparently served as the primary currency of a London Season.
Forty-seven pounds spent in a single morning. Her mother would have fainted from sheer, ecstatic joy; her father would have locked himself in his library and refused to emerge until the receipts had been ritually burned.
And Elizabeth loved every bit of it. Like a princess in a fairy tale, she twirled around, pressing the cool, heavy silk against her cheek. Except no princess had ever grinned at her trustee the way she had at Darcy.
She had not stopped thinking about that smile. It was absurd. She was a creature of smiles; they were her standard currency, her shield, and her weapon. Yet that particular look had slipped out unbidden, and Darcy’s answering look had settled somewhere deeply inconvenient. The days since had been spent in the increasingly futile effort to deem it inconsequential, alongside memories of his loosened cravat and the roughness in his tone when he confessed his error.
Why, oh why, should the opinions of a mere trustee signify when she was now wealthier than he? Elizabeth caught her uncharitable thoughts and hung her new dress over a rack, the better to admire the light catching over the silver net.
Nettle, sprawled on the coverlet, yawned and flopped onto her back, unimpressed by dresses or smiling trustees.
A knock at the door, soft and familiar. “Lizzy?”
Elizabeth performed a quick, instinctive check behind the heavy window curtains—a habit born of a lifetime of Lydia’s eavesdropping—before she crossed the room and opened the door.
Jane’s hair was loose over her nightdress, and her face still bearing the flush of their adventure at Gerrard’s.
“May I come in?” Jane asked.
“Since when do you ask?” Elizabeth pulled her sister inside and closed the door. “I was just admiring my ‘trouble.’ Madame Delacroix was right; the green is scandalous, and the ivory is heavenly.”
Jane curled up beside Nettle, feet tucked under the coverlet.
“Well.” Her breath was soft. “That was rather a day, wasn’t it?”
Elizabeth sat on the other side of Nettle and began unpinning her hair. “Which part? The bit where I spent a schoolteacher’s annual salary on dresses, or where Allegra declared our trustee ‘quite handsome, the brooding sort,’ or when Charles Bingleywalked into a confectionery, saw you eating vanilla ice, and promptly forgot how to form complete sentences?”
“We may start with whichever you find least alarming,” Jane said, but Elizabeth could sense hesitation in her voice, as if the day’s events weighed differently beneath the calm surface.
“Oh, definitely the dresses. I have never in my life seen such styles, and those fabrics—who knew sheen and texture could be so extravagant?
“Isn’t it incredible?” Jane agreed. “Even Mary was enthralled. Did you see her face when Allegra suggested the lavender? She looked so pleased and so wistful, like she’d never dreamt of something so fine.”
