Page 54 of When Elizabeth's Cat Chose Darcy
“I am dressed for a private context that did not anticipate company, although I was placed in a position to prevent your fall.”The catching was automatic, but the holding on was not, and I still had not let her go. “Are you quite steady?”
“Perfectly.” She was breathing rather harder as I raised her and stood to my full height.
I can attest that the letting go was not automatic, but I stepped back stiffly and produced the book I had hidden. “I have located a book you might be interested in.”
“In the middle of the night? In the dark?” She raised a skeptical eyebrow when I shoved theBelindanovel at her. “I believe you might have found something of mine?”
“I can explain,” she said, exchanging the cravat for the book, where the green ribbon protruded like a tattler. “Cinnamon brought it to my room. I could not have put it in the laundry—the maid, or Mrs. Nicholls, would have?—”
“Drawn conclusions.”
“Devastating conclusions.”
Comprehension dawned on her. She pulled her ribbon from between the pages. “You had it in the orchard when I searched?”
“Yes, I cannot hide anything from you, it seems. Cinnamon found it yesterday.”
“And that is why you said it will turn up—you had it in your pocket?”
“Yes, but I could not return it. One does not produce a lady’s ribbon from one’s waistcoat and say, I believe this is yours. I have been carrying it against my chest since yesterday, without inviting questions I had no strategy for answering.”
She pressed her lips together, and the pressing was not quite suppression and not quite a smile. It was the expression of a woman who had discovered that the man standing before her in his dressing gown was exactly as absurd as she was.
“So your scheme,” she said, with the slow deliberation of a woman who is going to say the thing and intends to enjoy the saying of it, “was to hide my ribbon inside a novel. At midnight.”
“It was asound plan.”
“And my scheme was to drape your cravat over an armchair at midnight, except I had changed my mind and decided to stuff it in the rathole that Cinnamon had used behind the bottom shelves when I had stumbled across you crouching at the selfsame location.”
“Not quite as sound.”
“And we have both crept through a dark house in our nightclothes to execute these unsound plans, and have instead collided with each other, which rather defeats the purpose of secrecy.” She looked at the cravat in my hand, then at the ribbon in hers, and then she giggled, and I coughed back a laugh, because it was still dark, and the corridors were silent, but for our suppressed laughter.
“We are a pair of fools,” she said, catching her breath.
“Exceedingly careful fools. The planning was meticulous.” I picked up her dropped candle and lit it in the fire, handing it back to her.
“Better than leaving it on the breakfast table.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “In front of Miss Bingley.”
“Definitely.”
The laughter settled, but the warmth of it remained—an ember in the space between us that neither of us moved to extinguish. She stood in the low light, the ribbon threaded through her fingers, her hair curling against the collar of her wrapper in ways that candlelight should not have been permitted to illuminate, and I felt the full weight of the evening’s absurdity tilt toward something that was not absurd at all.
“We must never speak of this,” I said.
“Agreed. The cravat was on the chair.”
“And the ribbon was in the book.”
“We were never in this library.”
“Certainly not simultaneously.”
“And certainly not in our—” She gestured at our respective states of attire, declining to complete the sentence.
A soft, decisive burp from behind the bottom shelf broke the silence, and Cinnamon emerged from the rat passage, her privatethoroughfare. She looked first at me and then at Elizabeth, her cat eyes glowing in the dark.
“Our midnight courier,” Elizabeth said. “A cat with questionable boundaries.” She straightened, and the movement brought her closer than the previous arrangement, and neither of us corrected the distance. “I should go now. You are still my employer, Mr. Darcy, and I am still your sister’s companion, and this,” she waved her hand, “whatever this is would be a scandal of such magnificent proportions that even Mama could not spin it into an advantage.”
