Page 22 of When Elizabeth's Cat Chose Darcy
CHAPTER SEVEN
NOT TO BE DISMISSED
Darcy
I tugged at my cuffs,checking the buttons on my waistcoat and hurried down the corridor toward the dining room. Bingley and I had spent the afternoon examining the estate’s drainage, a situation that had revealed itself to be far more dire than the steward’s report had suggested. The morning’s unpleasantness with Miss Elizabeth dug like a misplaced hatpin on the back of a settee—its presence felt but its exact location frustratingly elusive.
The morning’s unpleasantness I had not thought about. Not once. Miss Elizabeth Bennet had disrespected my sister, and she had been justly dismissed.
The young lady had likely vacated Netherfield altogether after a bout of weeping and throwing dresses into trunks. The luxury of examining silted channels, testing soil permeability, and grousing about the previous tenant’s neglect had insulated me from the inevitable storm of feminine theatrics.
My duties done, with instructions for workmen to dig a new drainage channel, I proceeded to the dining room with the expectationof a tasty meal, a decent claret, and the somewhat stiff peace that existed before the invasion of oneclever Bennet.
As the footman swung open the dining-room door, the rich aroma of roast pheasant intertwined with the subtle scent of beeswax candles enveloped me in the familiar comforts of a well-appointed home. The room’s occupants—my sister, Bingley, Miss Bingley, and the Hursts—were all present and accounted for. The extra place setting caught my eye, a silent testament to Bingley’s oversight in informing the staff to remove it.
I settled myself at the table, apologizing for my tardiness, and proceeded to say grace. When I looked up, Bingley unfolded his napkin, looking scrubbed and cheerful and entirely too pleased with the world for a man whose western fields were drowning.
“Capital ride today, Darcy,” he enthused. “I noticed the fields in question were bordering Longbourn. Perhaps we ought to call on Mr. Bennet and consult him on the?—”
His words died on his lips because the dining-room door opened.
And in walked Elizabeth Bennet.
She was a vision in green—not the serviceable grey of the morning which had borne witness to her culinary crusade and sisterly subversion, but a deep, lustrous green that I had not seen before. The hue suited her coloring without overshadowing her fine features. Her hair was pinned with rather more care than this morning’s arrangement, and she carried her cat, draped over one forearm like an exceedingly self-satisfied muff. Her expression conveyed nothing whatsoever except the mild, pleasant expectation of a woman arriving for a meal she had every right to attend.
And she did not deign to look at me.
“Good evening, Mr. Bingley. I do hope Mrs. Jolliffe has outdone herself. After this morning’s exertions, I find myself quite famished.”
The footman pulled her chair. She gracefully deposited her cat beneath the table and sat—as if she belonged here and had every expectation of being included in the household. As if my words thismorning had carried no more weight than a breeze through an open window, noted and immediately forgotten.
I did not speak. Every sentence available to me had rearranged itself into a configuration that was either inadequate, inappropriate, or dangerously revealing, and so I studied my wine glass, a perfectly serviceable vessel that did not disobey its purpose.
Caroline’s face underwent a series of cracks, fracturing from the smug satisfaction of the morning to the dawning realization that the impudent companion had refused to consider herself dismissed.
“Miss Bennet.” The frost in her voice could have preserved the pheasant indefinitely. “What an unexpected… pleasure.”
“Not at all unexpected, Miss Bingley. I live here.” Elizabeth accepted the glass of wine that Bingley had poured for her. “Or has that slipped your memory? There has been a great deal to keep track of today.”
She turned her attention and her smiles toward Bingley, who beamed back at her as if she were an adequate representation of Saint Jane Bennet herself.
“Mr. Bingley.” Her voice was warm, conversational, pitched with the easy confidence of a guest complimenting her host. “I trust your ride was productive? The weather seemed ideal for it.”
“Yes, Miss Elizabeth. Quite productive. We inspected the fields bordering Longbourn. The drainage is rather a catastrophe, but Darcy has a scheme. He always has a scheme.”
“How reassuring,” Elizabeth said. “One likes to know that such schemes are in capable hands.”
I gripped my wine glass and said nothing, because what was there to say?I dismissed you this morning, and you are sitting in my—in Bingley’s—dining room eating pheasant as though I had not?The sentence had no ending that did not make me sound ridiculous, and Fitzwilliam Darcy did not make a habit of sounding ridiculous at dinner tables. That was a privilege reserved for Bingley, who was now inquiring about Elizabeth’s opinion of roasted root vegetables.
I suspect Caroline suffered more than I did. Shehad not touched a morsel, her lips pressed into a thin line that did not conceal her fury. She wished nothing but that Elizabeth, the thorn in her side, would be removed, and she had believed her goal achieved after the morning’s kitchen debacle.
“Miss Eliza.” Her voice was brittle. “We had assumed you would be… otherwise engaged this evening.”
“Had you?” Elizabeth turned to Caroline with a smile so serene it could have graced a Madonna in a Renaissance altarpiece. “How kind of you to think of me. I confess I had rather a quiet afternoon. Reading, mostly. Your brother’s library is remarkably well-stocked for a house that has been so recently let.”
“The previous tenant had literary ambitions,” Bingley supplied cheerfully. “Left behind half a library and a truly alarming number of agricultural pamphlets. Darcy has been working through them. Haven’t you, Darcy?”
Every head at the table swiveled in my direction—every head except Elizabeth’s, which remained oriented toward Bingley with the unwavering focus of a lady who had decided that the man six feet to her left did not exist and was not to be acknowledged by so much as a peripheral glance.
