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“But in a great deal. A good deal more than I like to admit.”

She did not look away when she had said it, and Darcy saw that this was the difference. Ever since the wedding she had looked at him across every table the way a player looks across the card table at whist, waiting for the next trick. She was not waiting for anything now. She was only looking at him, as though he were someone she had just been introduced to and had not yet made up her mind about.

It was not forgiveness. He was not fool enough to think so. But in all the weeks they had been married, he could not remember her looking at him like that before.

There were a dozen things he might have said. He might have told her that he had loved her in the parsonage parlour with the rain still on his coat, and loved her yet, in spite of everything either of them had said since. He said none of it. A man who pushed his luck the first time it turned deserved to have it turn again.

“Thank you,” he said. “For coming to tell me.”

“It was not an easy thing to come and say.” She stood up, and he stood with her. “I suspect it was not much easier to hear.”

She picked up her candle. The flame leaned over as she turned and then straightened. At the door she stopped with her hand on the latch, and he thought she meant to say something more. She only nodded.

“Good night, Mr Darcy.”

“Good night.”

The door shut behind her. He did not sit down straight away. He stood and listened to her step in the passage, and then on the stairs, until it reached the turn of the landing and stopped.

He waited.

After a moment the step went on, without hurrying, and he heard her door close above him. Darcy sat down again, picked up Clarendon and found his place. He did not read a line of it before the fire burned low.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Elizabeth

“You have turned two pages at once, Mr Darcy.”

“I have not.”

He looked at the page, and then at the one before it, and turned back. “You may have made an accurate observation.”

Elizabeth laughed and went back to her hemming. It was the fourth evening that week they had spent in the library. She had given up telling herself that she came down only because the fire there was better than the one in the drawing room. Mrs Hobbs had seen to the drawing room chimney a week ago, and it drew perfectly well now.

Nobody had declared a truce. It had simply come, and for a fortnight it had held. They ate their meals at the same table without a cross word. When it was fine they walked in the park with Georgiana, and when it rained they argued about books. He had read more than she had, which annoyed her, and he was not above pointing it out, which annoyed her a good deal more. But he could be made to laugh, and he could make her laugh, and she had never expected that. She had seen something of it at Rosings, on the evenings when he stood by the pianoforte and refused to be frightened of her. Then Colonel Fitzwilliam had told her about Jane, and she had stopped looking.

She was looking again now. It was not comfortable. Her old opinion of him had been so very convenient, and every evening in the library it fitted her a little worse.

Georgiana was another matter. The girl who had run down the steps with a crushed bunch of sweet william, and a list, had grown quiet without anyone quite noticing when it began. At breakfast on Tuesday her brother asked whether she meant to practise that morning, and had to ask twice. The second time she jumped, and her cup rattled in its saucer. In the park she dropped behind to look at the railings. Once, halfway through telling Elizabeth about the music room at Pemberley, she stopped and did not go on. Elizabeth waited, and then saw that Georgiana had forgotten she was talking at all.

It was Lady Catherine, no doubt, and the two hours’ practice a day she had prescribed. Elizabeth could remember very well what it was to be sixteen and looked over.

“You played the Clementi very nicely on Thursday,” she said one afternoon, as they sat at their work. “I do not think you need worry about it.”

“Did I? I am glad.” Georgiana smiled at her. “There is nothing wrong, truly. I slept badly, that is all.”

She had slept badly on Monday too, and on Wednesday. Elizabeth let it go. A confidence could be invited. It could not be dragged out of anybody.

It was Mr Darcy who thought of a cure. He brought it out at dinner, in the voice of a man who does not care in the least whether his idea is liked, and cares a great deal.

“If the weather holds, I thought we might go to Vauxhall on Saturday. The gardens are to open for a single night in honour of the Christmas season, which has not been done in living memory, and I do not suppose it will be done again. Georgiana has not been since she was a child, and I believe Mrs Darcy has never been.”

Georgiana put down her fork. For the first time in days she looked straight at her brother, and a little colour came into her face.

“Oh, yes. Please, Fitzwilliam.”

“Mrs Darcy?”