Page 74 of When Elizabeth's Cat Chose Darcy
“Thank you, Mr. Bingley.” Georgiana accepted the tea and tucked a scone onto her plate with the brisk appetite she had recently recovered—another small victory I attributed to Elizabeth’s influence, though Elizabeth would have dismissed the attribution and said Georgiana was merely hungry.
“The assembly is tomorrow evening.” Mr. Hurst yawned. “I don’t suppose we must attend. There was not a single person of note, and it was rather crowded and noisy.”
“Oh, but we must attend,” Mrs. Hurst argued. “To be seen.”
“Not only that, it will be capital fun.” Bingley buttered his toast with vigor. “I, for one, am looking forward to it enormously. The Bennets will be there, and the Lucases, and I am told the fiddlers are rather good, and Miss Bennet, Jane, mentioned that the supper is always excellent, and I intend to secure the first—” He caught himself and studied his toast. “I intend to enjoy myself.”
Caroline’s gaze moved from Bingley to me over the rim of her cup. “And you, Mr. Darcy? Shall we expect you to participate, or will you resume your post against the wall with your distinguished air of country suffering?”
“I am looking forward to it,” I said, and meant it, and the meaning surprised me almost as much as it surprised Caroline. “Now that I know some of the local families, I expect the evening will be rather more engaging than our first assembly.”
“Really, Mr. Darcy?” Caroline’s eyebrow bolted toward her hairline. “You would find a provincial assembly engaging? How delightful. I suppose the country does improve upon acquaintance, though I maintain that improvement has its limits.”
“Everything has its limits,” Mrs. Hurst agreed, loyally.
“I should like to go,” Georgiana’s voice piped up, small but clear. While she addressed the table as a whole, she was looking at me with the directness that Elizabeth had built in her, not defiance, not demand, but the steady assertion of a girl who had decided what she wanted and was trusting herself to ask for it.
“To the assembly,” she clarified, in case the table had misunderstood, which it had not. “I should like to attend.”
I set my coffee down. “Georgiana, you have not yet been formally presented?—”
“This is not a London ball, Brother. It is a country assembly. Lydia Bennet is my age, and she has been attending since she was fifteen. She dances every set, and nobody thinks anything of it, and I should like—” She caught her breath, and the catching was the only sign that the request had cost her more than the steadiness of her voice suggested. “Elizabeth says that confidence is not something one feels before doing the thing. It is what one feels after the doing, and I have not yet done any such thing.”
That was so precisely Elizabeth that I could hear her saying it.
“You wish to attend a public assembly,” I said, “with strangers.”
“With you, and with the Bingleys, and the Bennets will be there. Lydia promised to introduce me to everyone, which I suspect means she will talk continuously, and I will stand beside her and nod, and for a first assembly, that seems quite manageable.”
I ran the assessment. A guardian’s assessment, performed with the thoroughness that Ramsgate had taught me, was not optional.
The militia had decamped for winter quarters at Colchester a month prior. I had confirmed this through the innkeeper,through my steward’s enquiries, and a remark to Sir William Lucas, who had noted their departure with the mild regret of a man who missed their patronage at his card table. I need not worry about redcoats. Of the local families I knew, John Lucas was a sensible young man of no fortune and no ambition toward thirty thousand pounds. The Goulding sons cared more about their gun dogs than heiresses, and the Longs had no sons. Meryton was safe precisely because it was small and provincial and beneath the notice of anyone who would target a Darcy.
“I see no objection,” I pronounced.
Georgiana’s smile broke with a sweetness that was not entirely painless, reminding me of our mother. Her confidence was exactly what I had employed Elizabeth to build. A girl of seventeen might attend a country assembly and survive it, and perhaps even enjoy it, and emerge on the other side with the knowledge that the world contained rooms she did not need to fear.
“What a courageous step, Georgiana,” Caroline’s voice was patronizing, as always. “After all that Miss Bennet has accomplished with your confidence, it would be a shame not to display it.”
“I am not displaying it,” Georgiana said. “I am using it.”
Bingley rapped his knife against his plate. “Hear, hear! Miss Darcy at the assembly. Splendid, absolutely splendid. You will have a marvellous time. The fiddlers are enthusiastic, the punch is—well, the punch is the punch, I should not oversell the punch—but the company is excellent, and nobody stands on ceremony, which is the whole charm of the thing.”
“Quite right, Charles,” Caroline unexpectedly concurred, and I could not detect her usual irony. “Although, who will open the first set with Miss Darcy? She certainly cannot sit amongst the wallflowers—not after everything Elizabeth has accomplished. I suppose perhaps, Louisa, Mr. Hurst might do?”
Mr. Hurst looked up from his sausages with the alarmed expression of a man who had been volunteered for the Napoleonic Wars.
“I am a danger to young ladies’ feet, Caroline, and I will not haveMiss Darcy’s first assembly ruined by my left boot. Louisa can attest. I have trodden on her no fewer than four times this year, and those were dances I knew.”
“Five,” Mrs. Hurst corrected, without sympathy.
“Well then, what about her brother?” Mr. Hurst returned to his sausages, satisfied at having deflected the obligation. “Darcy dances well enough when he can be persuaded to stand up at all.”
Every eye in the room turned to me, and the turning produced a silence in which I was expected to volunteer, had the first set not already been promised—secretly, privately, to a most remarkable woman. I hesitated, and Caroline’s eyes narrowed a fraction, and in that narrowing, she suspected.
But Georgiana slapped her fork onto the plate. “I do not want to dance with my brother.” She said it with the cheerful exasperation of a girl who had spent the last ten minutes arguing for normalcy and was not about to undermine her own case. “I want to dance like a normal girl at a normal assembly. Charlotte Lucas has several brothers, and Lydia told me she would rather eat her own bonnet than open with any of them, and there is a Mr. Goulding who Lydia says is perfectly adequate if one does not mind being steered like a cart-horse, and even Sir William Lucas is?—”
I would have to speak to her about dropping objects, like forks, battledores, apples…
