Page 19 of A November to Remember

Bingley had kept this up throughout the twenty-four-mile journey from London and showed every sign of filling the mere three miles between Longbourn and Netherfield today. It was, Robert reflected, rather soothing, provided one ignored the meaning of the words. It functioned as birdsong, or a distant waterfall, or any other natural phenomenon requiring no reply and having no awareness it was being ignored.

“...and when she laughed at my story about the grey gelding, Colonel, she laughed with her whole face. Most ladies laugh with only the lower portion.”

Because you are a buffoon, Bingley, Robert thought, his fingernails biting into his palms. She did not laugh at your gelding. She laughed at the remark I made during your interminable story. My remark, which I delivered specifically for her, before I panicked and turned to stone. Her laugh is the sound of celestial bells.

He needed a distraction. If he allowed his mind to dwell on Jane Bennet’s laugh for one more second, he would undoubtedly confess everything and ruin three lives before they reached the Netherfield gates.

Seeking salvation from his own mind, Robert turned his attention across the carriage. “Brother.”

“Mm,” Richard offered, staring out of the window.

The colonel’s face revealed that he was occupied by pleasant thoughts. Robert knew that expression. He had come across it multiple times during the last twelve years at the dinner table. It was the same look Richard wore when he had secured an extra portion of pudding without their mother noticing. However, there was no pudding in the carriage; there was only the lingering memory of a bespectacled girl playing a dirge while Richard conducted with a cucumber sandwich. His brother was actually smiling. It was quite an astonishing development.

Robert shifted his gaze to the fourth corner.

Darcy had not spoken since descending the front steps of Longbourn. This was not remarkable. Darcy was quiet by nature; silence was his mother tongue and English a language he had acquired for business purposes.

What was remarkable, and what Robert was turning over in his mind with the suspicion of a jeweller inspecting a stone of dubious provenance, was that his cousin was also smiling.

Not broadly, no, nothing so vulgar. It was a small, inward curve at the left corner of his mouth. Darcy was unaware of its existence, because had he been aware, he would have strangled it on the spot.

Robert observed the curve of Darcy’s lips. He then glanced at his brother. Richard caught his eye in the window glass and lifted one eyebrow a quarter of an inch.

So you saw it too.

Robert settled back and reviewed the morning’s evidence with the rigorous care he usually reserved for his tailor’s invoices. It provided an excellent reprieve from thinking about blue eyes and angelic grace.

Fact the first: Fitzwilliam Darcy, a man who claimed corners and windows the way other men claimed inheritances, had abandoned a perfectly good one voluntarily and crossed a drawing-room in which he had every reason to expect hostility.

Fact the second: he had supported a philosophical argument in public, an occurrence Robert had not witnessed since their grandfather’s funeral, and possibly not even then.

Fact the third: he had invoked Plutarch in support of a woman.

Fact the fourth: on departure, he had pronounced the words “Miss Elizabeth” in a register Robert had previously heard him employ only for Georgiana and, once, a promising foal.

Individually, trifles. Collectively, a diagnosis.

“...of course, her hem has quite recovered from the treading incident,” Bingley was saying. “I inquired about it. Discreetly.”

“Of course you did, old chap,” Robert replied, patting Bingley’s knee without listening, his mind reaching the realisation that every single man in the carriage was under the spell of a Bennet woman.

Caroline Bingley occupied the chaise longue, a velvet cushion clutched to her chest, trying not to inhale the scent of earth inside the Netherfield drawing-room. Her sister Louisa was draped over a wing chair, pressing a handkerchief steeped in lavender water to her nose, while Mrs Nicholls stood before her holding an earthenware bowl containing several freshly scrubbed beetroots.

“I do not want the root itself, Mrs Nicholls,” Louisa groaned, her voice muffled by the lace. “The texture is too fibrous. I need its essence. The blood of the beetroot, squeezed and chilled.”

“I have instructed the kitchen maids to press them, madam,” Mrs Nicholls replied, her expression neutral, as though pressing root vegetables for pregnant women was a normal use of her morning. “We shall have a glass of the juice shortly.”

From the settee, Mr Hurst opened one bloodshot eye. He had been asleep since breakfast, a condition he interrupted only to consume food or complain about the draught. “Beetroot juice,” he grunted, the words rumbling from his chest like boulders down a hillside. “Foul stuff. Tastes like mud. Tell me, Mrs Nicholls, if you leave it in a barrel for a month and add enough sugar, will it ferment?”

“I could not say, sir,” the housekeeper answered.

“Everything ferments if you ignore it long enough,” Mr Hurst reasoned, closing his eye again. “Put brandy in it. Call it a medicinal tonic. Bring me a pint.”

Caroline rolled her eyes so forcefully that an ache shot through her temples. She looked at her sister, weeping over a tuber, and her brother-in-law, attempting to invent a new category of alcoholic sludge. Despair washed over her. She could not be related to these people; it defied all logic. There must have been an error at her birth. She was undoubtedly a changeling, the stolen daughter of a duke or a very affluent marquess, left by accident in the cradle of northern tradesmen.

Before she could fully immerse herself in the tragic fantasy of her stolen aristocratic birthright, the clatter of carriage wheels echoed from the drive.

The men had returned from their call to Longbourn.