Page 98 of Faceless

Darcy.

She knocked it down. She had spent two hours on a cliff knocking it down. He had taken Bingley out of Hertfordshire because Bingley had formed an attachment to her sister, and he would have wanted nothing to do with any of the Bennets.

She let the laughter settle, and she gave him a quarter-minute of the sort of silence supper had taught them was not unfriendly, and then she picked up the next thing on her plate and did the most ordinary thing she could think to do.

“I had a letter from my sister Kitty today.”

“Was she well?”

“Tolerably. The letter is older than it looks; Kitty wrote a fortnight or more ago, by the date on it, and the post was held up somewhere south of the border by weather, so the news must be older still. Kitty has had a letter from Maria Lucas — they were our neighbours in Hertfordshire. You have heard me speak of Maria, who travelled with me to Kent for Easter last spring. Maria has had news of her elder sister Charlotte, who is the friend I have spoken of often. I had not had a letter from Charlotte herself since the spring, because my cousin Mr Collins, who is her husband, took possession of my father’s house at the time of the entail and has not been disposed to let her write to me since.”

“I am sorry to hear it.”

“You have heard so much from me that is sorry to hear that I begin to feel I have run my entire life on a pension of your sympathy.”

“It is, as I have said, generously allowed.”

“I am grateful for it.” She took a bite of her fish and chewed for a moment. “Maria’s news, however, is not sorry. Charlotte has been delivered of a daughter.”

The whisper did not answer her at once.

She was not certain, the first heartbeat afterward, that she had heard anything at all. The breath had come in shorter than it should have, perhaps, or the breath had not come at all for a count she did not entirely trust herself to have measured. She was reaching, she knew that. She had been reaching all day. It might have been a man considering the proper response to a small piece of domestic news from a household he had never met. It might have been any number of things, and she could not know which, but she had been listening to him for weeks now, and what she had just heard was something she had never heard from him.

“I am glad to hear of the child.”

The deadpan was gone out of it. What had replaced the deadpan was a feeling he had not given her at the table tonight, and the change itself was the cleanest piece of evidence she had heard from him all evening.

“And I am sorry,” she countered, “for the lady’s connection. Mr Collins is my father’s cousin, and I knew him very ill before he became master of Longbourn, and not better since. He has the living at Hunsford from a great patroness named Lady Catherine de Bourgh, of whom no description of mine could do justice. I saw Rosings, her estate, in the spring, and walked the dullest lane in Kent every morning, and conceived a permanent dislike for Easter.”

There. If anything might provoke some sort of sputter or rise in his breath, it might be the mention of Lady Catherine.

But his whisper was perfectly neutral. “That sounds restful.”

“It was nothing of the sort. The parsonage was as full of Lady Catherine as the great house at the top of the lane. I think the autumn rain has now been added to her grievances. I have it on excellent authority.”

“Your authority being?”

“Maria, by way of Kitty. Charlotte’s view of the lane has not improved with weather, and her opinions on Lady Catherine are much the same.”

“I am sorry to hear of it.”

“You are sorry to hear of the lane or of Lady Catherine?”

“I suppose I must divide the sorrow between the two.”

“You have a remarkable economy of sympathy.”

“Such a thing must be rationed.”

She laughed. “Have you been to Kent? If you can ignore my account, which is complicated by other connections, it is rather a pleasant part of the country.”

“I have been over a great deal of England in the course of my life.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is the only answer I have for you tonight.”

The whisper had not faltered through Maria or Mr Collins or Lady Catherine or the parsonage or the lane or a single thing she had laid out for him in the last three minutes. Either there was nothing in any of it that meant anything to him, or he had learned to prepare himself against her, and his discipline had held.