Page 35 of When Elizabeth's Cat Chose Darcy
“My sincerest apologies!” I called down.
It is,” she said, rubbing her shoulder with more amusement than injury, “the first time I have been assaulted by fruit. Is this also part of the cultural instruction?”
“Indeed, it is—a lesson inreflexes. Excellent for deportment.” I descended from my perch, landing with a thud that startled a pheasant from the hedge. “Now, we shall take our repose upon this charming stile.”
She wrinkled her nose, studying the weathered steps built into the wooden fence. A stile was an obstacle not only for sheep and cattle, but for women dressed in long skirts and voluminous petticoats.
Undeterred, I hoisted my basket with one hand and gathered my skirts with the other, ascending the steps to the topmost rail. “Mind the splinters, Georgiana. A snag here will surely invoke a lecture from your lady’s maid later.”
I settled myself upon the broad top rail, my legs dangling freely. Georgiana hesitated, perhaps worried about her stockings showing. She looked over her shoulder, and then she shrugged. “I suppose my brother is out of sight, as is Miss Bingley.”
I bit into my apple with a satisfying crunch. Georgiana watched me swallow it, and the temptation of the apple and perhaps the even greater temptation of doing something her brother might disapprove of won out. She gathered her skirts with a defiant little hitch and stepped easily onto the stile, her legs being longer.
“Your brother would surely disapprove,” I remarked, offering her an apple as a reward for her daring. “The Bramleys are not for the faint of heart; they have a tart, wild snap that can make one’s eyes water, but they are infinitely more satisfying than those pale, sugary things grown in hothouses.”
“My brother disapproves of everything that was not on the schedule.” She bit into her apple with a crunch that sounded like a glorious insurrection. “He would say this is not part of the programme.”
“And what would you say?”
She considered this while chewing—the considering itself a novelty, because Georgiana Darcy had been told what to think and was only now, perched on a stile with apple juice on her chin, discoveringthat she was permitted to hold her own opinions rather than defer to her brother’s.
“I would say,” she said carefully, “that the programme does not account for everything worth doing.”
I took another bite to hide what my face was doing, which was something between triumph and tenderness and neither of which I wished her to see. Georgiana Darcy was beginning to discover that a lady’s life need not be a series of frozen poses, and that the view from the top of a stile is worth a dozen stained petticoats.
“This is considerably better than I expected,” she confessed, although her lips puckered from the tartness.
“Most things are, when you have picked them yourself.” I wiped the juice from my chin with my sleeve, because there was no one to see and because sleeves were invented for precisely this purpose. “The secret lies in savoring the experience without fretting over one’s appearance.”
She took a second bite. Larger. Juice trickled down her chin. She did not wipe it with her sleeve—the Darcy breeding ran too deep for that—but she did not reach for a handkerchief either, and that, in itself, was a small revolution.
“There.” I pointed to the pond below us, where a family of ducks conducted its morning patrol with the self-important waddle of a committee that believed itself indispensable. “Can you hit the big one?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“With the apple core. Can you hit the duck? Not to injure—they enjoy it. The cores float, and they eat them.”
“I have never thrown anything at a duck.”
“You threw flour at me, and I hazard to say your aim was excellent.”
She beamed at me in a way reminiscent of Lydia up to her worst pranks, and threw the core.
It sailed over the duck and landed in the pond with a splash that sent the entire committee into offended disarray. The large duckrecovered first, paddled to the floating core, and consumed it with the air of a creature who had been vindicated.
“You missed.”
“The duck moved.”
“Ducks do that. It is their primary defense against apple cores and everything else the world throws at them.” I tossed mine. It landed two feet from the big duck, who regarded it with regal disdain before deigning to eat it.
Georgiana threw a second core with considerably more force and less accuracy, and it caught the water at an angle that sent a spray across three ducks and a moorhen.
“Better. You have a talent for disruption, Miss Darcy.”
“Caroline says disruption is unbecoming.”
I did not answer or inquire because Elizabeth Bennet asking questions about Caroline Bingley would produce guarded answers, but Elizabeth Bennet eating an apple in comfortable silence might produce honest ones.
