Page 5 of Faceless

He reached for his wine. It was very good — stronger than he had been accounting for, that was the most reasonable explanation. He drank, set the glass down, and left it where it was.

“New faces.” Fitzwilliam said it as he might have said fair weather — a pleasant, unremarkable fact. “Rosings could always do with that. Is she pretty, this Miss Bennet?”

“Good company,” Darcy said. “Clever.”

“High praise.” Fitzwilliam reached for his own glass. “Well. Something to look forward to, at least, between the home farm and the west tenancies.”

And that was all. The conversation moved on, and Darcy moved with it.

Tomorrow, they would leave for Kent.

II

The Nature of Trust

Elizabeth had known for the past quarter-mile that she was no longer alone.

She did not look back. She kept her pace and her eyes on the path ahead, gave him no encouragement whatsoever, which had not discouraged him at all the first time, and showed every sign of failing to discourage him again now. The footsteps behind her were unhurried, deliberate, and closing. His legs were considerably longer than hers, and he was not a man who could be outwalked.

She had risen early to avoid this very thing.

“Miss Bennet.”

She stopped. Turned. Arranged her face into something that would pass for pleasant.

He was perhaps twenty yards back, hat in hand, coat dark against the grey morning, and he looked — as he had the first time, a thing she had refused to own — as though the park suited him in a way that Rosings’ drawing room did not. Less contained. Less careful. He covered the remaining distance with the ease of long habit — he had walked these paths since boyhood, she supposed — and came to a stop at a distance that was perfectly correct and somehow still closer than she would have chosen.

“Good morning, Mr Darcy,” she said.

“Good morning.” He fell into step beside her without being invited, which she was becoming accustomed to. “You are abroad early.”

“I generally walk in the mornings.” She had told him this. On Tuesday. When he had appeared on this same path at this same hour, he walked with her for the better part of an hour. She had supposed it to be an accident of timing, easily corrected by a subtle communication of her routine, but then it happened again on Wednesday and once more on Friday, and she had spent the subsequent afternoon trying to decide what to make of it.

She had not decided.

“The weather is better today,” he said.

“It is considerably better,” she agreed. “On Tuesday, I was fairly certain the clouds meant to come down and join us on the path. It would have made the conversation rather crowded.”

“Indeed,” he said, after a moment.

Above them, the oaks were just coming into leaf, thin and pale, the light through them the watery gold of early April that never quite committed to warmth. A wood pigeon called from somewhere to the left and was answered from somewhere further away. Elizabeth breathed the cold morning air and waited to see what he would do next.

He let the silence stand longer than she expected. He never had been skilled in the art of conversation.

“How does your friend find herself settled?” he asked at last. “The parsonage seems very much hers already, from what I could see when we called.”

Elizabeth suppressed a grimace. It was a rephrasing of the same question he had asked on Wednesday and again on Friday. “Charlotte has always been capable. I do not think any house would resist her for long — they know when they have met their match. Mr Collins, of course, is a great asset to the parish.”

“He is very attentive to his duties,” Darcy said, each word chosen for what he could say with a straight face.

“Very attentive,” Elizabeth agreed, with equal care. “I do not think Lady Catherine need have any apprehensions on that front.”

“None whatsoever.”

They walked. The wood pigeon called again and was not answered this time, and Elizabeth thought about Mr Collins’ most recent address over breakfast, which had concerned the proper alignment of the salt cellars at Rosings and had lasted considerably longer than the subject warranted. Much to her present despair, Darcy’s tone on the subject of Mr Collins’ attentiveness had been one of the more eloquent things she had heard all week.

“And Miss Darcy?” she asked, because it was the natural question, and she had not yet asked it this week. “I hope she is well.”