Page 28 of The Longbourn Bloodline

“Your sister sounds kind. Tell me about her. What is she like?”

Darcy calmed the rabbit by stroking its head. “Georgiana is twelve years younger than me, orphaned too early. She is shy and reserved. People mistake it for coldness, but it is only caution. She plays the pianoforte beautifully and reads too much, loves novels more than philosophy. She cries over injured rabbits and abandoned kittens and any creature that seems to need protecting.”

“She sounds lovely.” Elizabeth felt at a loss for words at the tenderness in Darcy’s tone regarding his sister.

“She is.” He finished binding the rabbit’s leg and sat back on his heels. “She would like you, I think. You would terrify her at first—you terrify most people—but she would like you.”

Elizabeth’s eyebrows arched. “I terrify people? Good heavens, Mr. Darcy, I am merely a country miss of no particular stature.”

“Who carries a sharp intellect.” He looked at her, and the speculation in his expression made her breath catch. “Most people prefer not to be challenged. But Georgiana, I believe, would thrive with the lively debate of opinions and attitudes.”

“Like you?” The words escaped before she could bite her tongue.

“Yes, like me.” His gaze was deliberate, seeing through her. “Although being hated by a woman I regard can be quite challenging.”

“I don’t… I mean, that was anger that I had no right to, Mr. Darcy. You are within your rights to befriend my father and offer to improve his daughters. I now understand that your interest in Longbourn is solely a responsibility you are preparing for, even though my father might yet live another twenty years.”

“I wonder…” His gaze dropped to the cradled rabbit. “If that was my sole purpose to come to Longbourn. What do you suppose, Miss Elizabeth?”

The answer surfaced unbidden, and she drowned it before it could take shape.

“The rabbit will need tending,” she said, and did not look at him as she stood. “We can take him to the bootroom.”

CHAPTER TEN

AN ACCOMPLISHED EVENING

Elizabeth should not have expected a respite, not after the miles she had walked and the greenery she had clipped and collected to offer any reasonable excuse to absent herself from her mother’s matchmaking festivities. The two young and eligible gentlemen had been invited to dinner, naturally, but what she had not expected was the transformation of the drawing room into a veritable greenery-infested and cramped miniature ballroom. The furniture had been moved to the walls; holly adorned the mantelpiece, with ivy wound up the banisters. Every doorway and eave was strung with dangerous-looking kissing boughs—an unwieldy construction of evergreen branches and mistletoe suspended from ribbon that had seen better decades.

Darcy kept his reserve upon entering the room with her father at his side, lambasting a popular pamphleteer, while Colonel Fitzwilliam appeared delighted.

“Now, girls, you must demonstrate what you have learned.” Mrs. Bennet clapped her hands as the young people stood around awkwardly—all of the sofas, other than Mr. Bennet’s easy chair, having been draped with dropcloths as if going into storage but in reality were a discouragement for sitting. “Mary, if you please, go to the piano and play a reel or a jig. Your sisters must demonstrate their dancing abilities.”

“But Mamma, I have been diligently studying with the dancing master.” Mary picked up her bulging blue improvement journal and turned it to a page near the end. “See here? Monsieur Belcourt has given me high marks on both the cotillion and the quadrille. In fact, Mamma, let me read to you his observations on my precise execution.”

Darcy moved to Elizabeth’s side, bending close. “I observe that your journal, the pink one with its rose pink ribbon, has vanished from the side table.” His tone carried no inflection she could safely interpret. “Have you finally surrendered to the tyranny of self-betterment, Miss Elizabeth, or merely hidden the evidence of your resistance?”

“I know which one you have assigned to me.” Elizabeth refused to glance at the table. “But Mr. Darcy, do you always keep a close inventory of our drawing room furnishings?”

“Only when it applies to you, my star protégé.” His voice was low, pitched for her ears, while Mary read the dancing master’s commendations loudly from her book. “You have opened it, then? Begun your improvements?”

“I have found a better use for it than writing poetry about my deficiencies.”

“May I inquire as to what?”

“I am sketching a new chimneypiece, perhaps cornicework, or noting the angle of the sunlight in the breakfast room. Your ribbon makes an excellent page marker.”

“I did not give you the ribbon for page-marking, Miss Elizabeth.”

“You intended it as a silent, malicious reminder that you caught me eavesdropping beneath my father’s window.” She kept her voice steady, though her heart was beating rather faster than the situation warranted. “A fact we have both been studiously avoiding.”

“And so you are eager to discuss it, naturally.”

“Wisdom dictates we continue ignoring it, as it would require admitting things neither of us is remotely prepared to acknowledge.”

“A fascinating theory, which presumably means you would expect me to inspect your nonadmissions at some regularity.”

“You will discover nothing save ink stains, Mr. Darcy, and therefore I shall not grant you the privilege.”