Page 32 of A November to Remember

Chapter Eight: A Happy Assembly

November 2nd, 1811

Fitzwilliam Darcy sat at the breakfast table with a cup of cooling coffee and a plate he had no intention of touching, while Miss Bingley settled into the chair beside him. That chair had migrated, since his return, a full eighteen inches closer to his own. He had measured. He had begun taking his bearings each morning from the third window mullion, and the evidence was incontrovertible: the chair was advancing at a rate of some two inches per day. At the present pace she would be seated in his lap by Sunday. He was considering marking the floor. He was considering, more seriously, breakfasting in the stables with Roc.

“Poor, dear Jane,” Miss Bingley sighed, for the fourth time since the eggs. “I scarcely slept for worry. Such a fever! Louisa and I sat with her for hours.”

“Eleven minutes,” Robert murmured into his tea.

“I beg your pardon, my lord?”

“I said, heaven-sent. Your ministrations, Miss Bingley. Heaven-sent,” Robert said, his face a portrait of innocence. “Miss Bennet is fortunate indeed in her nurses.”

“One does what one can.” Miss Bingley pressed a hand to her bosom and inclined towards Darcy, presenting her concern and her décolletage in a single economical movement. “Though of course one wonders what sort of mother sends a daughter out on horseback under such a sky. One shudders to imagine the calculations, Mr Darcy. One positively shudders.”

Darcy grunted. He had perfected, over the course of his stay, a grunt that could be interpreted as agreement, disagreement, or a request for the marmalade, depending on the listener’s needs. It saved a remarkable amount of conversation. Miss Bingley heard agreement, as she heard agreement in everything from his soup preferences to the weather, and rewarded him with a smile he had done nothing to deserve and would not reciprocate.

Richard, working steadily through a beefsteak, gestured with his fork. “I will say this for the mother: bad weather obliges a household to keep you, and a household that keeps you must feed you. My aunt Augusta arranged her whole widowhood on the principle. She once extended a morning call at Matlock into the better part of February.”

“Your aunt Augusta did not have my linens to ruin,” Miss Bingley snapped, then caught the lapse and re-sweetened instantly, sugar over vinegar. “That is—one is only too happy—Charles, must you pace? You are wearing a channel in the carpet.”

Bingley had been orbiting the breakfast table since the moment he entered. He had not sat and he had not eaten, an abstinence so unprecedented that Richard kept glancing at him with genuine medical concern, in the way another man might care for a friend who had stopped breathing. He completed another circuit, paused at the window, and pressed his forehead briefly against the glass.

“Jones said the fever must run its course. What does that mean, run its course? Where is it going? Should I send to London for a physician? I should send to London.”

“You should sit down,” Darcy said firmly, “before you require one yourself.”

“I cannot sit. Sitting feels negligent.” Bingley resumed his orbit. “What if she wants for something and is too polite to ring? She is exactly the sort of person who would be too polite to ring. She would lie there being politely thirsty.”

Darcy opened his mouth to observe that Mrs Nicholls had posted a maid in the room for precisely this contingency, and closed it again. There was no reasoning with Bingley in this condition, only containment.

The door opened and Hughes the butler entered, his expression carefully blank.

“Begging your pardon, sir. A Miss Bennet has arrived and is asking after her sister.”

Bingley spun from the window. “Miss Bennet? Which—another one? How? The roads are a swamp.”

Hughes’s blankness deepened by one degree. “The young lady walked.”

“Walked,” Miss Bingley repeated.

“From Longbourn, madam. Three miles across the country.” Hughes paused for a second. “The fields are somewhat heavy.”

He bowed, and left.

Darcy set down his coffee cup. His pulse had performed a strange, unauthorised manoeuvre at the word walked, and he required a moment to bring it back under regulation. Three miles. Alone, evidently. It could only be her. He had a powerful and wholly inconvenient desire to see the result, and was in the midst of instructing himself that it was beneath him when the question became academic.

Hughes escorted Miss Elizabeth Bennet to the breakfast room, and Darcy’s regulated pulse abandoned regulation entirely and deserted to warmer climates.

She had walked three miles through the countryside, and every step of it was evident on her person. Her hem carried a bucket of good, honest Hertfordshire mud, spattered up the skirts in a fan. Her boots were beyond salvation. Her hair had surrendered its pins, and dark curls had sprung loose about her face in wild disorder. Her cheeks were flushed from the wind and the exercise, glowing with a warmth no fire in this house had ever produced, and her eyes... Her eyes were brilliant. Alight. Blazing with exertion, defiance, and fierce, unapologetic purpose. Darcy, owner of four houses, two mines, and ten thousand a year, swore to everything he held holy that he would lay his life down for her.

The gentlemen rose, and he rose as well, with no memory of instructing his legs to do so.

“I apologise for the intrusion.” Her chin came up as she said it, transforming the apology into a challenge. Her breath was coming fast; he could see the rapid rise and fall of her chest, and he had to force himself from staring. “I had word that my sister is ill. I came as soon as the rain allowed. I should like to see her at once, if I may.”

“Of course! At once, this moment. Hughes, take Miss Elizabeth up directly—” Bingley crossed the room and wrung her hand with both of his. “She will be so glad. Jones has been, the fever is—she asked for you in the night, that is, Sarah told me, I was not—I would never—up the stairs, first landing, yellow room!”

“Thank you, Mr Bingley.” The warmth she gave Bingley was genuine and unguarded, a smile with nothing held in reserve. Darcy caught her gaze as she offered him a sort of acknowledgement, a blade shown but not drawn. “Mr Darcy. My lord. Colonel.”