Page 1 of A November to Remember

Prologue

October 16th, 1811

It was a widely unacknowledged truth in the county of Hertfordshire that eighty provincials, when packed into an assembly room designed for forty, did not merely generate warmth; they produced a distinct, humid atmosphere that was fatal to a gentleman’s cravat.

Fitzwilliam Darcy stood by the whitewashed wall of the Meryton Town Hall, feeling very much like a monument of polished marble that had been deposited in the middle of a livestock market. The air was thick with the scent of cheap lavender water, while the greasy drip of tallow candles threatened to ruin his finest blue coat. Every instinct he possessed—instincts cultivated through years of navigating the elegant drawing-rooms of Mayfair—screamed at him to retreat to his carriage. His collar, stiffened to a degree that made turning his head an exercise in minor self-decapitation, was not an article of clothing but rather a bowstring holding his frame together.

He was, by any sensible criterion, in a state of acute agony.

“I am dancing with the most beautiful creature I have ever beheld! Come, Darcy,” Charles Bingley had whispered only moments before, his face flushed with an unbridled cheerfulness that Darcy found exhausting and was beginning to view as a form of mild brain fever. “I must have you dance. I hate to see you standing about in this stupid manner. You had much better dance. There. I can see Miss Bennet’s younger sister is not engaged. Let me arrange it. She is a wonderful lady!”

It was this persistent badgering that had finally worn through the veneer of Darcy’s composure. He had not meant to speak loudly; he had certainly not meant to create an insult of such proportions in a neighbourhood he had known for only a fortnight. He had simply wanted Bingley to leave him to his misery.

And so, his tongue—acting without the consent of his superior intellect—had delivered the fatal blow.

“She is tolerable, I suppose,” Darcy had said, his voice carrying that cool precision that silenced troublesome cousins, “but not handsome enough to tempt me; and I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men. Go. Enjoy your partner’s smiles and leave me be.”

The words had barely cleared his lips when Darcy felt the first cold prickle of dread.

Beside him, Bingley went rigid. The bouncing motion that characterised his physical presence ceased so abruptly that it seemed he had been brought up against a wall. Bingley’s mouth remained open, his eyes round and glassy, staring at Darcy as though he had suddenly sprouted horns.

“Darcy,” Bingley breathed, his voice a horrified whisper. “You did not.”

“I merely stated—”

“Turn,” Bingley interrupted, his knuckles white where he gripped the edge of his waistcoat. “Slowly. Disguise the motion, but for the love of heaven, Darcy, turn.”

With the rotation of an iron weather-vane in a dying wind, Darcy turned his head.

His gaze travelled past a bowl of negus and came to rest on a small knot of young women gathered not ten feet behind him.

The breath was instantly knocked from his lungs.

Earlier that evening, Sir William Lucas—a man whose conversational style resembled a bugle at full blast—had marched a dizzying array of local inhabitants past the Netherfield party. Darcy, whose mind had been occupied with his sister’s well-being and the discomfort of his boots, had treated the introductions as mere noise. He had bowed at the appropriate intervals, of course, but he had categorised the names—Bennet, Long, Lucas, Philips—as generic syllables, a sprawling catalogue of interchangeable country faces.

He had been monumentally wrong.

The young lady sitting behind the bowl of negus was, without a shadow of a doubt, the loveliest creature in the kingdom.

She was small, but she carried herself with an unbothered grace that made the shivering ladies of the ton look like wooden marionettes. Several curls had escaped their pins, forming delicate tendrils around a face of extraordinary animation. But it was her eyes that held him captive. They were brilliant, and had a sharp, searching lustre that seemed to pierce straight through his coat and lay bare the anxious gentleman beneath.

At that precise moment, her right eyebrow rose by a fraction of an inch. There was no ironic amusement in the movement. Her lips had gone still, and the fingers holding her fan tightened until the painted paper buckled between them.

She knew. Good God, she knew. She had heard every single word.

Darcy’s heart performed the leap of a thoroughbred horse attempting to clear a stone wall that was too high. He expected tears and the crumpled, humiliated posture of a slighted country girl.

Instead, Miss Elizabeth Bennet turned to him, her eyes burning with fury. If he were made of timber, he would catch fire, he realised. She then leaned to her companion—a sensible-looking young lady whom Darcy vaguely recalled as Sir William’s daughter—and lifted her fan. Her gaze never left his as she whispered behind it. Darcy could just see her exquisite lips, tight with anger. Miss Lucas glanced at Darcy and released a discreet, muffled laugh, her shoulders shaking. Miss Elizabeth did not join her. Instead, she continued to regard him with narrowed eyes.

Darcy was clutching his lapel so tightly that the threads groaned. The realisation that he had just made himself a laughingstock in the eyes of a lady who despised him, and whom he found to be the handsomest woman of his acquaintance, left his knees momentarily hollow.

Before he could even begin to comprehend the extent of this internal ruin, a ragged gasp sounded not three feet to his left.

“Oh, my heavens!”

Darcy flinched. Standing near him was a stout matron dressed in an alarming quantity of brown velvet trimmed with three ells of lace. Countless ivory ribbons were attached to her coiffure, each one trembling with indignation. It was Mrs Philips, the sister of Mrs Bennet, he recalled. She was staring at him with a look of such concentrated, venomous disapproval that he half-expected his coat to begin smouldering.

“Well!” Mrs Philips hissed, her chest heaving beneath her lace frills. “Of all the shocking, ill-bred behaviour!”