Page 76 of When Elizabeth's Cat Chose Darcy
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
UP AGAINST THE WALL
Elizabeth
I had attendedthe Meryton Assembly more times than I could reasonably count, but I have never approached the rooms above the Red Lion quite in the state tonight. My palms were damp inside my gloves, and my heart was doing that embarrassing lurch at the base of my throat. I told myself I wasn’t staring at the entrance in case a certain gentleman had already arrived.
No one knew I had promised the first set to Darcy, and I couldn’t allow my strategic mother to guess. She would trumpet it to the surrounding five or six counties before the gentleman himself had arrived.
“Lizzy! Over here.” Charlotte’s voice blessedly found me before I had gawked at feathers and waistcoats to my mortification. I crossed to Charlotte and took her arm, and the arm was an anchor.
“You look well,” she said, studying me with the frank appraisal of a friend who could read volumes in the angle of a ribbon. “That green suits you. You have taken particular care this evening.”
“I have takenordinarycare. The green was clean and pressed, and the ribbon was available.”
“Available.” Charlotte’s mouth curved. “And the flush in your cheeks. Is that also available, or is there someone who has been exerting himself in that direction?”
“The room is warm.”
Charlotte’s eyebrow rose. “There is a draught from the card room that could chill wine.”
I ignored her with the dignity of a woman whose pulse was proving her a liar.
Our friends and neighbors milled through the entrance, familiar with the bustle gathering in the same rooms and the same dances, sharing the same gossip told in different ways. There was no sign of the Netherfield party, although like London royalty, they would no doubt arrive fashionably late.
“Elizabeth!” Mary King descended upon me as she’d done since we were in leading strings. “Is it true? About Miss Darcy? Lydia told me she plays battledore in the fields and climbed a stile, and that you smashed a shuttlecock into Mr. Darcy’s chest.”
I tried to hide the secret smile at the memory of that most satisfying moment, and was saved from relishing it by Mrs. Goulding drifting over. “My dear Miss Bennet, we heard that Mr. Darcy attended your family’s dinner at Longbourn. Was he very stiff? My husband says a man of ten thousand a year cannot eat common food without frowning, but I told him that was nonsense?—”
“He ate two helpings and complimented the biscuits.”
“Two helpings!” Mrs. Goulding turned to share this intelligence with every matron in the room before the first set was called, and I did not mind, because the image of Darcy eating two helpings from Mama’s table was exactly the sort of detail that made him human in a room where his income had rendered him mythological.
Lydia erupted from somewhere behind Mrs. Goulding, with Kitty in her wake.
“Lizzy, tell them about Commerce! I won Commerce! I beat Mr.Bingley and Mr. Hurst and even Mr. Darcy, though in truth I think Mr. Darcy was distracted because he sat right next to you the entire game and never moved his chair even once, and Bingley noticed and?—”
“Lydia.” I used the voice, the one Mama had perfected and passed down, the one that carried the weight ofthat is quite enoughwithout requiring the words.
“Well, I did win,” Lydia muttered, deflating by half an inch before re-inflating with her usual resilience. “And Georgie says she will introduce me to her London friends when we visit, which I told Kitty is practically?—”
“An invitation you have invented entirely,” I said, but without heat, because Lydia’s enthusiasm for Georgiana was genuine and ungovernable and exactly the sort of noisy, unquestioning acceptance that a girl who had spent two years in social terror needed.
The door at the far end opened, and a tall figure appeared. My heart swung upward before my eyes dropped with disappointment. It was only John Lucas, not the tall, dark-coated figure my nervous system had been monitoring for since we walked in.
Charlotte noticed, because Charlotte always notices.
“He will come,” she said without elaboration.
Lydia reappeared, dragging Kitty, both flushed from whatever social devastation they had inflicted on the Gouldings. “Lizzy, when is Georgie arriving? I told Arthur Goulding she was brilliant at battledore and could eat four walnut biscuits in succession, and he said he did not believe any lady could eat four biscuits, and I said he clearly had not met Miss Darcy.”
“Miss Darcy is not attending, Lydia. She is not yet out.”
“Not out? She is my age, precisely seventeen, and I have been out since I was fifteen. That is absurd. Her brother keeps her locked away like a princess in a castle, and I told her she should insist?—”
The doors opened again, and this time, my heart was right.
Sir William surged forward, already glowing. “Mr. Bingley!Mr. Darcy! What an honor! What a pleasure to welcome the Netherfield party once more. We are so delighted.”
