Page 47 of The Servants’ Matchmaking

By late afternoon, coaches began arriving down the drive in a steady, crunching procession. Darcy dressed early. McKeever tied the plain cravat.

"The embroidered one might be more festive," Darcy said.

McKeever's hands stilled. "Sir?"

"The embroidered one, McKeever."

His valet replaced the cravat without a word of comment. The silence itself was not insolence, Darcy understood, but something closer to a small private celebration, the kind a man allows himself only when he thinks nobody is watching.

"Miss Elizabeth has accepted the first two dances," Darcy said, mostly to fill the quiet.

"So Sarah heard, from a Longbourn maid."

"Your chain of intelligence is genuinely alarming."

"Households require information, sir."

"Households require discretion."

"The two need not be enemies."

Darcy recognised the phrase. It was Elizabeth's, nearly word for word. "Did Sarah say that?"

"No, sir. You did. Some years ago, if I recall it right." McKeever's tone gave nothing away, which was, Darcy reflected, exactly the point.

He finished the knot. The embroidered edge showed only the barest hint of itself above the collar. Festive, by Darcy's standards, meant something most men would call restrained.

Downstairs the ballroom glowed gold with beeswax and candlelight, the air already thick with the mingled scent of hothouse flowers and warming wax. The orange trees stood in their corners at last. Bingley stationed himself at the entrance, greeting neighbours with a pleasure so sincere it seemed almost to embarrass the more reserved among them. Caroline stood at his side in silver, flawless and false. Darcy could not help but see it now, from the arranged tilt of her head to the practised warmth of her smile.

Darcy greeted guests as they arrived. He answered Sir William Lucas's raptures about St James's with more patience than he felt. He endured Mrs. Philips, who had a great deal to say about very little. He declined, with some effort, to discuss Wickham at all with Denny, who had come without him this time, after Bingley had quietly seen to it that no invitation reached him.

Then the Bennets arrived.

Elizabeth wore ivory muslin trimmed with dark green ribbons. Over her shoulders, against the chill of the entrance hall, lay the blue shawl. Sarah received it from her in the retiring-room doorway and caught McKeever's eye across the passage for the briefest instant.

The object was in play now — and there was no stopping it.

Elizabeth looked into the ballroom before her mother had even finished greeting Bingley, and found Darcy at once, as though she had known exactly where to look. Her smile was small, and private, and entirely her own choosing. No scheme had put it there.

Darcy crossed the room to claim his first two dances. For the first time all day, the whole machinery of Netherfield ceased to matter to him at all. The trees, the candles, the careful arrangements upon arrangements. None of it.

CHAPTER 11

Elizabeth

The Bennet carriage reached Netherfield behind Sir William Lucas's and just ahead of Mrs. Long's. The order of it mattered enormously to Mrs. Bennet, who had spent the entire journey predicting a dreadful crush at the entrance. She now descended the steps as though the absence of one were her own doing.

Sarah met the ladies in the retiring room. Her cap had been starched to a stiff, gleaming white. Her expression had not been starched at all. It looked, if anything, rather the worse for wear.

"I will place your wraps in the inner press, miss," she said. "Mrs. Nicholls has ordered me to remain here the whole evening."

Elizabeth handed her the blue shawl. Sarah folded it with a care that seemed, somehow, rather more than the garment required.

"Has something happened?"

Sarah's glance flicked towards Kitty and Lydia, who were locked in a quiet, furious dispute over a ribbon. "Mrs. Nicholls will speak with you before supper, miss, if it is needed."

"That was not my question."