Page 40 of The Servants’ Matchmaking

Elizabeth

Darcy came to Longbourn four times in twelve days.

Elizabeth counted them the way a woman counts things she has decided not to care about. Carefully, and more than once. The first visit might have been courtesy. The second, loyalty to Bingley. The third, habit, if a man like Darcy could be said to form one so quickly. The fourth admitted no such excuses. His intention was difficult to misunderstand, though Elizabeth, in fairness to herself, tried.

He brought no gifts. He made no speeches. He sat through Mrs. Bennet's raptures with the patient endurance of a man weathering a squall he had chosen to sail into. He answered Mary's earnest questions about the duties of an estate as though they mattered — which, to Mary, they did. And he let Lydia beat him twice at spillikins after she had changed the rules both times to suit herself.

He was easier at Longbourn than he had ever been at Netherfield. Not easy, precisely. Darcy would probably never be easy, the way some men were never quiet. But easier. He chose where to stand and whom to answer and which silences were worth keeping. He listened when the servants spoke to him. He thanked Hill by name, and meant it, and never once treated ordinary civility as though it cost him something noble.

Small matters, all of them. But then character showed itself in small matters — Elizabeth had begun to suspect that was rather the point of them.

Jane recovered her colour and her strength both. Bingley recovered no restraint whatsoever. He arrived whenever propriety allowed him to, and once a full half hour before it did, at which point he was seen walking his horse up and down the lane like a man rehearsing patience he did not possess, until the clock permitted him to knock. Hill saw him from the kitchen window. All of Longbourn knew of it by breakfast.

"He is very considerate," Jane said.

"He is very visible," Elizabeth said. "The lane has never had so devoted an admirer."

Jane only smiled into her tea, which was answer enough.

The Netherfield ball was fixed for the last Thursday of the month. Bingley delivered the invitations himself, beaming as though he had invented the very concept of dancing. Caroline came with him and spent the whole of the visit lamenting the crowding, the provincialism of country dances, and the general burden of entertaining so very many people she did not know and had no wish to.

"They will not remain unknown after the ball," Elizabeth said.

"Some acquaintances improve with distance."

"Then you may station yourself at the far end of the room, Miss Bingley, and admire us from there."

Caroline's smile hardened into something that resembled a smile the way a held breath resembles calm.

Darcy did not come that day. Elizabeth had no claim on his presence. None whatsoever. She told herself so several times, which was itself rather telling. She noticed the absence before she noticed herself noticing it, and then felt irritated on two separate counts.

His third visit, the one that had come in rain, deserved rather more credit than she had given it at the time. The weather had confined the whole household to the drawing room that day, rain streaking the windows in long silver ropes. Darcy arrived with Bingley, carrying two books and making no pretence whatsoever that the visit belonged only to his friend.

Lydia proposed charades. Mary objected that imitation encouraged falsehood, a position nobody troubled to argue with. Kitty sided with whichever sister had spoken most recently, as was her custom. Mr. Bennet stayed shut up in the library, his door open just enough to suggest supervision and closed just enough to preserve his peace. It was a compromise Elizabeth suspected he had perfected over twenty years of daughters.

"We might read instead," Darcy said.

"That is not a game," said Lydia.

"It is when two servants have chosen the books," Elizabeth said.

Darcy handed her one volume. "McKeever denies choosing this one."

She opened it. A length of blue thread marked a comedy roughly a third of the way through.

"And Sarah denies recommending the path it was found on. Their denials share a colour, I notice."

"What are you two even talking about?" Lydia asked.

"Household treason."

Lydia approved of this at once and without further question, which struck Elizabeth as rather in keeping with her general approach to treason.

They played charades. Darcy proved terrible at guessing and worse at acting. A man who held his composure so carefully in every other circumstance apparently had none whatsoever to spare for pantomime. Bingley represented a shipwreck by flinging himself bodily against a footstool, with such conviction that Mrs. Hurst would have wept to see the furniture endangered. Jane laughed until Mrs. Bennet warned her, twice, against bringing on another cough.

Elizabeth drew the word pride. She rose, walked to the centre of the room, lifted her chin exactly as high as dignity required and not one inch higher, and looked directly at Darcy. He guessed it before she had finished the pose.

"That was unfair."