Page 106 of When Elizabeth's Cat Chose Darcy
Thomas reached behind him and lifted a dish from the cooling rack—a Bakewell pudding, its puff pastry shell golden and flaking, the almond filling risen and set to a trembling custard beneath a glaze of apricot jam that caught the kitchen light like amber. The pastry was layered so finely that Georgiana couldn’t count the laminations—dozens of them, each one a fold of butter and patience, the kind of work that could not be faked or hurried.
Cutting two slices evenly, he handed them across the table on plain kitchen plates—one to Fitzwilliam and one to Elizabeth.
Her brother gazed at his wife and took a bite.
The left eyebrow rose—the fatal eyebrow, the one that had reduced earls to stammering and sent Caroline Bingley retreating to the music room. Thomas stood with dough drying on his knuckles and met that eyebrow the way he met a hot oven.
“Georgie,” her brother addressed her. “What do you see?”
Her throat tightened. Notwho is heorwhat are his prospectsbutwhat do you see. The question Elizabeth had taught him. The question that turned the telescope around and trusted the person looking through it.
“I see a man who was building a pastry tower four feet tall while singing a folk song, in the Prince Regent’s kitchen, without caring in the slightest who might be watching. He had flour in his hair and sugar on his chin, and when I appeared in the doorway, he looked up and offered me a ginger biscuit without asking my name first.” She kept her voice level. “I ate it standing in a palace with flour on my gloves, and I knew. Fitzwilliam—if he had known I was an earl’s granddaughter, he would have thrownflour at me, and I would have thrown it back, and we would have been exactly where we are now, only faster.”
“How long?” Fitzwilliam took another bite.
“Six months.”
“You have kept this from me for six months.”
“I have kept this for myself for six months, because you taught me, at considerable personal cost, that my choices are my own. And I am making one.”
Cinnamon chose that moment to drop from the windowsill. She crossed the kitchen floor, passing Mrs. Jolliffe, Elizabeth, Georgiana, and even Darcy before sitting at Thomas’s feet—delivering her verdict.
Fitzwilliam looked at the cat and then his sister before addressing Thomas. “Mr. Clark, will you walk with me? There is a crossing I should like to show you—a place where my sister crossed a stream in a rainstorm. I should like you to see it.”
Having gained the cat’s approval, Thomas stood taller. “I should be honored, Mr. Darcy.” He wiped his hands on his apron and set it aside.
Glancing at Georgiana, reassuring and confident, he set off through the garden door with her brother, matching in height as well as strength.
Elizabeth sidled over, noting her tension as the two men she loved most in the world walked off into the bright daylight.
“He asked him to walk,” she said. “He’s not interviewing him or evaluating him, only walking. Do you understand what that means?”
“I don’t know.”
“Walking alongside, man to man, to see him and to know him, Georgie. Fitzwilliam does not invite people he intends to refuse to walk beside him. He sends them away standing.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he invitedmeto walk,” Elizabeth said, “to that exact stream, to show me his regard, to say what was in his heart, and I saidyes.”
“I’ve already saidyes,” Georgiana whispered. “But I will not go against my brother’s wishes.”
“His most fervent wish is for you to be happy and lively. Come, let’s follow them.”
Not closely—Elizabeth held Georgiana’s arm and kept them at a distance, far enough that the two men ahead were figures against the hedgerow, walking side by side, and Cinnamon trotted ahead of them all, tail high.
“What if the pastry was not enough?” Georgiana said, because old anxieties die slowly, even in women who have crossed streams in rainstorms.
“The pastry,” Elizabeth stated calmly, “was more than sufficient. And the tasting of it was the point. Honest, and how he stood at the end of that table with flour on his face and held your brother’s gaze without arranging himself into something more impressive first. People have been managing Fitzwilliam his whole life, Georgie. He recognizes those who don’t.”
Ahead, Fitzwilliam had stopped at the bank where the stones caught the afternoon sun. He pointed at the flat stones, and Thomas listened. The words didn’t matter, perhaps, only the expressions.
Thomas’s baker hands moved, open and expressive, as he spoke, shaping the words much like he shaped the pastry, sincerely. Darcy’s shoulders relaxed, his demeanor easy, and she knew.
The two men crossed the stream on the way back. Side by side, stepping from stone to stone. The crossing was the answer before Fitzwilliam put his hand on Thomas’s shoulder and laughed.
“There,” Elizabeth noted. “That is approval expressed in the only currency your brother entirely trusts.”
