Page 9 of Most Truly the Gentleman

“I am not a sociable man,” Darcy pronounced frostily. “If people wish to call me conceited because I do not rattle on about nothing at all to anyone who smiles at me, they are welcome to do so.”

Fitzwilliam’s brows rose, and a look of amusement spread across his features. “I shall not quarrel with you about it, Cousin. It is not for me to teach you how to go on. More capable hands than mine will take up that task one day or another, I expect.” He nudged Boreas into motion. “Come, let us return. If we are late to breakfast, Miss Bingley might learn of our love of early rides, and we may find her lying in wait for you in the stables some morning!”

Denby Hall was small and draughty, with narrow corridors and narrow rooms that seemed to hang onto every scrap of sound released within them. Darcy felt he was in great danger of conceiving a headache from the reverberations of all the chatter and laughter—a great portion of it emanating from his own friend and his cousin, he noted with resignation, as the group of which they were a part burst into giggles and guffaws at some witticism.

He was acutely uncomfortable. He had arrived this evening with the intention of displaying to Fitzwilliam his ability to unbend and converse with those beneath him. Perhaps, he had thought, he might even discover why his cousin and Bingley were so delighted with this place and its people. But the babble of so many voices made his head spin and turned his thoughts into slippery, elusive things. In familiar company and surroundings, he was generally able to focus upon the soothing, well-known voices of those among the company he liked best, but hemmed about by so many strangers, he felt himself entirely incapable of doing aught but finding the quietest place in the room and standing there, wishing the hours away, and hoping Miss Bingley would not find him, to add to the cacophony with her disparaging bon mots.

It was not she who noticed him first, in his place between a cabinet and a window overlooking the estate’s small park, but rather Miss Elizabeth Bennet. He saw her gaze find him, and he nodded to her.

“Mr Darcy,” she acknowledged with the same bare civility she had displayed the other morning.

She made him a curtsey and seemed on the cusp of continuing on her way when he surprised them both by bowing and saying, “Miss Elizabeth. How do you do?”

“I am well, thank you, sir. And yourself?”

“I am also well,” he replied, and found himself at a loss for any further conversation.

“I see you have found the quiet corner,” she remarked as he fumbled for something more to say.

Here was an open opportunity to suggest to her that he was not a complete boor, yet he struggled to take advantage of it. “Yes. I had hoped for some conversation, but…” He realised that he was nervously shifting his weight and exerted himself to be still. “But in such a clamour of voices, I have always had great difficulty attending to what is passing.” He immediately felt that he had been foolish to say as much, but her expression softened, and she produced the first smile directed towards him alone of their slight acquaintance.

“My father is the same way. He says that when there are too many people speaking at once, his mind becomes as a lump of glass, and anything which then attempts to penetrate it can only slide off and be lost forever,” she related. “He and the elder Mr Denby are great friends, but he will not come here if more than our family are included in the invitation. The way these rooms fling sounds about like cricket balls is quite dreadful. I am not at all bothered by noise in the ordinary course of things, but I often leave this house with a bit of a headache.”

“I look forwards to meeting Mr Bennet,” he replied with a tentative smile, “at some less noisy occasion.”

She laughed, and his attention was forcefully recalled to her beauty, which he thought must be at its greatest when she was happy. “If you are a bibliophile, or else an avid reader of the newspapers, he will look forward to the acquaintance as well.”

“I would venture to claim that I am both, without much fear of being contradicted by those who know me.”

Her smile widened, and his heart lurched. “Then you and my father are certain to be great friends.” She glanced about and nodded to someone. “Forgive me, sir, but Charlotte has been attempting to catch my eye for several minutes. I must attend her. I hope you find the rest of the evening more pleasant.” She made to leave, then paused. “It may please you to know that the dining room is a newer addition, with higher ceilings. You will find it easier to enjoy your time there, I think.”

He thanked her for the information and she went on her way, leaving him to puzzle over the great and strange effect her presence had upon him.

“Dare I ask why your mother felt the need to converse with you for a full ten minutes immediately upon your arrival, Eliza?” Charlotte enquired as Elizabeth reached her at last. She had turned a little away from the group clustered about Mr Bingley and the colonel to greet her.

Elizabeth allowed herself the slightest of eye rolls, knowing her old friend would observe and understand. “She had some additional instructions, to add to those she issued on the journey here, for me to convey to Jane. Also instructions for myself, on the subject of ‘helping Jane along’,” she confided in as low a voice as could be understood in the cacophony of Mrs Denby’s drawing room.

“I see,” said Charlotte, and Elizabeth was quite certain she did. On the strength of two dances and the gentleman’s purported fortune of five thousand a year, Mrs Bennet had singled Mr Bingley out as Jane’s future husband; therefore, all the demands she made of her two eldest daughters tended towards that end. Elizabeth would not, of course, be conveying so much as a word of it to Jane.

“Did my eyes deceive me, Eliza, or did I spy you in conversation with Mr Darcy?” Charlotte then asked, face alight with amusement. They had spoken the day after the assembly, at which time Elizabeth had declared her disdain for the gentleman and her intention to avoid him whenever she might.

“I had every intention of passing by without a word, but he gave me a nod. Had I continued on without returning his greeting in any way, I should have been the rude one,” she related drily.

“And naturally you could not bear to surrender the superior position,” her friend remarked with open amusement. “Dare I hope he was civil?”

“I must say that he was, and even slightly more than civil.” As Charlotte’s eyebrows rose, she explained, “Our speech together was terribly stilted at first, until he conveyed that he suffers from a similar affliction to Papa’s, with regard to any sort of clamour. Knowing as much, I could no longer censure him for hiding in the corner tonight.”

“I imagine the assembly was not to any great degree better,” her friend suggested.

“I see what you are suggesting, and though I agree, it does not make his behaviour there much less offensive. Perhaps it explains his lack of desire to be sociable, though if he could exert himself to dance with Mr Bingley’s sisters, he might have exerted himself just a bit more to have some little conversation with one or two others.”

Charlotte inclined her head in agreement. “And what he said of you was unconscionable, I do not deny it. Still, might your view of the gentleman have altered even slightly in his favour, now that you understand he had some reason to be in a foul mood?”

“Perhaps a little,” Elizabeth allowed. “He is not, it seems, an utter and unrelieved boor. If he behaves entirely as a gentleman in more tranquil surrounds, I may even give him credit for some good qualities one day.”

Charlotte laughed, as Elizabeth had intended, and suggested that they join the larger group. The colonel was giving a hilarious account of how a set of verbal orders, misinterpreted or misremembered by the new and incompetent corporal sent to deliver them, had led to his regiment marching twenty-odd miles in the wrong direction and finding themselves deep in enemy territory without supplies, forced to raid the coops and orchards of nearby farms to fuel their flight back to the rest of their brigade.

A little later, when the group had broken up into smaller clusters, Charlotte said to the colonel, “May I ask, was your diversion and return truly such a lark in the moment? You made it sound like a continuous chain of mischief, but I suspect you were in a great deal more danger than you made explicit.”