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She encountered Mr Darcy again in Meryton three days later, as she walked briskly through the market intent on purchasing embroidery floss. He was standing outside the mercer’s shop with an expression of faint bewilderment, holding a small, paper-wrapped parcel and looking very uncomfortable and out of place. He moved slowly amongst the stalls with the careful tread of a large man in a small space who is determined not to knock anything over, but seems utterly unsure of how he will achieve that goal. His concentration was so intense that it was practically visible.

“Mr Darcy,” Elizabeth said in greeting, both because good manners would not permit her to walk by him without acknowledgement, and because she could not resist a bit of fun at his expense. “What a pleasant surprise. Are you quite well?”

He turned, and the bewilderment reshaped itself into composure with a speed that might have been impressive were it not so indicative of his need to be perceived as in control at all times. “Miss Bennet. Yes. I was in want of something.” He looked down at the parcel in his hands. “And I have obtained it.”

“How very efficient,” she said. “I trust the process was not too alarming.”

He looked back along the street as though he were cataloguing the dangers of a battlefield, not a market in a small town. “The stalls are placed without obvious logic,” he observed seriously. “I have been directed to three different locations for the same item. There seems to be no agreement amongst either the sellers or the patrons as to where any particular object might be discovered.”

“That is Meryton,” Elizabeth agreed. “It has always been arranged this way, and so people see no reason that it should be different, and claim the whimsical arrangement as part of the market’s charm.”

“I see,” he said gravely, in a tone that somehow conveyed that he did not, in fact, see any charm in purposeful disorder. Elizabeth pressed her lips together.

“Good day, Mr Darcy,” she said. “I hope your return to Netherfield is less eventful.”

“Good day, Miss Bennet.” He inclined his head, and she continued past him.

She was three stalls away before she allowed herself to smile, and it took rather longer than three stalls to stop.

∞∞∞

The third time, she had not been expecting to meet anyone at all.

She was out walking alone in the pale morning, with no particular destination and no particular thought in her head beyond the pleasure of being out in the crisp air and away from the cloying atmosphere of the Longbourn drawing room, when she came around a bend in the path and found Mr Darcy crouched at the edge of the road, apparently inspecting something in the ditch beside it.

He had not heard her approach. Elizabeth considered going back. Simply turn around, and she would not have to talk to him at all.

Instead, she stopped and spoke. “Have you lost something, Mr Darcy?” she asked.

He looked up, and she noticed he appeared entirely unsurprised at her presence, which indicated that he did not startle easily. Either that, or he had known she was there and had chosen to remain crouched in the mud rather than acknowledge her, which seemed rather antisocial even for Mr Darcy. “No,” he said, and gestured at the plant before him. “I believe that I have found a bee orchid. The winter rosettes can be very difficult to identify, and I cannot recall having found one in the wild before. It is quite an unexpected find.”

She crouched beside him, curiosity winning over decorum. The plant was small and unassuming, just five flat, grey-green leaves growing out of a slight spiral in the centre. “Why is it so named?” Elizabeth asked. “I see nothing that resembles either a bee or an orchid.”

He nodded. “At this time of year, it is just the greenery you see. When it blooms in summer, however, the flower is a deep pink, and its lower petal is shaped and coloured so that it looks nearly exactly like a bee settling into the blossom. It is a mimic — it has grown to resemble a bee to attract bees, who believe they have found another such as itself and land on the flower.” He paused, seeming to realise he had been animatedly lecturing about a flower, and stood. “The farms at Pemberley have them in the south meadow in summer. I have been attempting to determine what conditions encourage their growth.”

She stood as well, looking at him in surprise. “I had not realised that you are so interested in farming, Mr Darcy,” she said.

His expression brightened, not quite to the point of warmth, but approaching closer than she had seen before. “I find it a most interesting process, filled with so many variables. The soil, the drainage, all the conditions that must be met to ensure that the thing you want to grow can do so.” He stopped, looking slightly self-conscious. “The south meadow on the main estate produces twice what it did five years ago. I hope you will not think me too arrogant in claiming it is not due to coincidence.”

“That much of an increase can certainly not be attributed to coincidence,” she agreed. She thought of the careful attention he had given Mr Blanchard’s rather terrible poetry, and his quiet observations during their conversation in the Netherfield grounds, and now his intense concentration on a small, winter-bare flower. From their first meeting, she had dismissed him as a man who cared for nothing beyond his own importance, yet she was discovering with increasing certainty that she had been wrong.

They had begun walking together along the path, past the quiet fields and bare hedgerows, and Elizabeth reflected that the unexpected conversation that continued between them was almost companionable, in the rather improbable way that things with Mr Darcy always were.

Then she saw Lydia. She stood half-concealed by a low branch at the edge of the treeline in the gap between two fields, speaking to someone Elizabeth could not see.

She might have missed her sister entirely had her eye not caught the scarlet of Lydia’s new winter coat. Lydia had teased their mother for that coat so that she could match the soldiers, pressing so hard that Mrs Bennet had given in even though Lydia already had a new winter coat for the year.

But though the figure was unmistakeably her sister, she looked somehow odd. Her posture was different from Lydia’s usual exuberant carelessness: she was standing intent and quiet, so focused that she looked…wrong. That was the only way Elizabeth could put it, even in the privacy of her own thoughts. The situation looked wrong.

She was on the point of saying something when the path curved, and Lydia could be seen no more, even when Elizabeth turned to look back and tried to locate her. Beside her, Mr Darcy had said nothing, but she noticed he held himself with a tension that had not been there before, and that the warmth of their conversation, fragile and new as it was, had gone out of him entirely. When she glanced at him, he was looking ahead, his jaw set, his expression neutral and carefully controlled. Elizabeth opened her mouth to ask him what he had seen, but he spoke before she could.

“You have walked quite far,” Mr Darcy said abruptly. “You ought to return home.”

The coldness of it was so complete and so sudden that it struck her like a door slamming shut in her face. She had been speaking to the man who enjoyed poetry and could identify wintering orchids, but he had vanished, bringing back the coldly superior Mr Darcy, who disapproved of everything, who judged her from a distance, who thought her tolerable, but not worth his time.

“Thank you for the observation,” she said, her voice perfectly level, and turned around on the path.

“Miss Elizabeth.”