Page 7 of When Elizabeth's Cat Chose Darcy
“I want to negotiate. There is a difference.”
I looked at her—this woman who had baked bread and balancedaccounts and married above her station and raised five daughters on borrowed time, who had stood beside me at an assembly not twelve hours ago and cut a man to ribbons for reducing me to a function—and she was now proposing toaccept the reductionand weaponize it. It was, I was beginning to suspect, the most brilliant and most maddening thing she had ever done.
“You are not actually interested in the companion position,” I said slowly, watching her face.
“I am interested in your proximity to Netherfield,” she agreed. “And to its inhabitants. Both of them.” Her gaze found Jane, who had been very still and very quiet throughout this entire conversation. “Mr. Bingley danced with your sister twice. He smiled at her as though she were the first sunrise he had ever troubled to notice. He lives at Netherfield, and Jane will give him her heart whether I send you there or not, because she is already halfway and she has never learned to protect herself from men who smile too easily.”
Jane looked up, and her expression—that complicated tangle of gratitude and guilt and quiet, helpless love—was rather too much to behold.
“You want me to watch him,” I said.
“I want you close enough to see what kind of man he is before your sister gives him everything she has.” Mama’s voice was matter-of-fact because sentimentality was, in her view, a luxury best reserved for moments when practicality had already done its work. “You are the only one in this family who can see past a charming smile to what lies behind it. And you cannot do it from Longbourn.”
Cinnamon, who had been attending the proceedings with an expression of regal neutrality, chose this moment to resettle on my lap with her nose pointed at the ham.
“If I do this,” I said—and I was already, I could feel it, doing this, which was deeply irritating, “Cinnamon comes with me.”
“Naturally.”
“I am not a servant. I am not answering bells or fetching shawls.Whatever Mr. Philips negotiates, I am a guest who happens to provide companionship. The distinction matters.”
“The distinction is everything,” Mama agreed. “I would accept nothing less.”
“And if Mr. Darcy is intolerable—if he treats me as anything other than a gentleman’s daughter—I come home. Without argument.”
“With my blessing and not a moment’s hesitation.”
I looked at Papa, who had abandoned any pretense of the newspaper and was watching me with an expression I had never quite seen on him before—not anger nor retreat, but something rawer. A man confronting, with some difficulty, the arithmetic of his own choices.
I also looked at Jane, who said nothing, because Jane never asked for the things she wanted most. She only waited and trusted that someone who loved her would notice.
“Fine,” I said. “Under protest. I want that noted.”
“Noted,” Mama said, sipping her tea with the expression of a woman who has won a chess match in fewer moves than anticipated.
“And Mama?”
“Yes, Lizzy?”
“If Mr. Darcy so much as looks at me the way he looked at me last night, I am unleashing Cinnamon on his correspondence, and you will not pay for the damages.”
Mama set down her cup. “Darling,” she said, and the hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth was the most unsettling thing she had produced all morning, “if he looks at you the way he looked at you last night, the cat will be the least of his concerns.”
