Page 80 of When Elizabeth's Cat Chose Darcy
My sisters stayed, chaperoned by my Aunt and Uncle Philips. Darcy stayed. I saw him against the wall. The same wall with the same posture—tall and still and separate. He looked away before he could catch my eye, or perhaps he never looked.
Mama sat beside me in the carriage, took my hand and held it, not asking what had happened. Her silent presence was perhaps the kindest thing anyone had done for me since the evening began.
Longbourn was dark and quiet when we arrived. Papa was in his library with a candle and a book, and a glass of port. He looked up when we entered, and whatever he saw in my face made him set the book down without marking his page.
“Mrs. Bennet?”
“A headache, Mr. Bennet.” Mama’s voice was smooth as poured cream. “Elizabeth was good enough to accompany me home.”
Papa looked at me, and I looked at the floor.
“I see,” he said. And he did see, because Papa always saw, even when he chose not to act. “I hope the headache improves, my dear.”
“It will.” Mama squeezed my hand. “Go up, Lizzy. You look tired.”
I climbed the stairs. My room was cold and smelled of lavenderand the stillness of a house that had been waiting. I did not weep because weeping would have conceded that the evening had held enough weight to warrant tears, and I would not make the concession.
Cinnamon was on my pillow.
I gathered her up and pressed my face into her fur, which smelled of the kitchen and the fields and the life I had been living before I went to Netherfield and let a man with a programme convince me that I was something more than a function he had purchased.
“You would not survive Pemberley,” I told her. “There is a Persian who rules the north wing. She has a pedigree and a programme, and she has never once sat on a stile or eaten an apple core or slept on an employer’s boot. You would be quite beneath her notice.”
Cinnamon purred and did not dignify the fiction with a response.
Outside, the carriage wheels had fallen silent, the house was dark, and somewhere in Meryton, the dancing carried on without me. And a man stood against a wall in the same assembly room where he had stood weeks ago.
The wall had not changed, and neither, it seemed, had he.
