Page 18 of Faceless

“I am very well. In earnest.”

“The summer will do you good. Your uncle’s scheme of going north sounds rather merry. The lakes, was it not?”

“It was. Though I had a letter from my aunt this morning that the plan has fallen through. Uncle Gardiner finds he cannot get away after all.”

Her father eyed her over his spectacles. “Did she say why?”

“Only that his business requires him in town this summer. She was very cheerful about it.”

“Mm. Your uncle is not a man who is cheerful about disappointment unless he has decided to be cheerful about it for someone else’s benefit.”

“You think his affairs are not well?”

“I think a man who cancels a journey to the Lake Country and sounds perfectly sanguine about it is either genuinely sanguine, which your uncle is capable of, or is declining to worry his wife and niece with something he has not yet resolved.” He set the pen down. “I do not know which. I mention it only so that you are not entirely surprised if it turns out to be the latter.”

“I am sure it is nothing,” she said.

“You are very likely right.” He picked up the bookseller’s letter again, which closed the subject. “Now. This edition. I am minded to think the price entirely reasonable, but I suspect you are going to tell me otherwise.”

“I am going to tell you it is extravagant,” Elizabeth said, “and you are going to buy it anyway, and I am going to pretend to be surprised.”

“Just so,” he said. “Which is why I asked you. So.” He set the bookseller’s letter aside. “The lakes are gone. What will you do with yourself this summer?”

“I shall manage,” Elizabeth said. “There are the assemblies, if one is feeling ambitious enough. Lydia claims she will be in Brighton, which will make the house considerably quieter, but I think it would be a very bad thing for her. Netherfield is empty, as my mother has mentioned seventeen times this week, so there is no hope from that quarter. I may read every book in your library and become very learned and disagreeable.”

“You are already disagreeable. The learning would only give it a veneer of respectability.” He tilted his head. “And no eligible gentleman will ride through Meryton and catch your eye? They have a way of doing that. Appearing out of nowhere, letting properties in the neighbourhood, overturning everything.”

“I think I have had quite enough of eligible gentlemen for some time.”

“Well, Hertfordshire in summer is not so very bad. The evenings are long. The neighbours are bearable in small doses. And I shall be here, which I flatter myself counts for something.”

“It counts for a great deal.”

“Good. Now, I have decided to order two copies.”

Elizabeth looked up. “Two?”

“A plain calfskin one to hide in my desk. The gilt one for you, for whichever room you happen to leave it in, which, judging by past experience, will be at least three rooms away from where it started.” He dipped his pen. “Dawkins will think me extravagant. I find I do not mind. The letter shall go with the afternoon post.”

She stood and kissed the top of his head — she almost never did, and it surprised them both. Then she went back to the drawing room.

Lydia was still talking about Brighton.

“Colonel Forster has quite decided,” she announced, helping herself to more potatoes. “Harriet says the whole regiment goes in June. And she has asked if I might come to stay with them for some weeks as a companion. She was very pressing about it in her letter.”

“You are fifteen,” Mary said.

“I am nearly sixteen, which is entirely different.”

“In what respect?”

“In every respect.”

“Mrs Forster is very young herself,” Jane said gently. “She might find it lonely without some company of her own age.”

“Exactly,” said Lydia, with the satisfaction proper to one whose argument has been made for her. “She needs me.”

“That is not precisely what I—” Jane began.