Page 39 of Mr. Darcy Forgot I Said No

Silence.

I look at Miss Bennet. Miss Bennet looks at me. Her bonnet is crooked. Her face is scarlet. Her eyes are enormous.

And then, at exactly the same moment, we both begin to laugh.

She laughs so hard she has to sit down on the bench. I laugh so hard I have to sit down beside her, which Pettigrew would not approve of. She puts her face in her hands. I put my head back and look up at the green and gold light through the lilac and laugh until my ribs ache and my head pounds and my eyes run.

"He bowed," she gasps. "He bowed four times."

"Into a laurel bush."

"He was composing."

"He is a clergyman. He understands these distinctions."

She gives a little shriek and collapses against my shoulder.

And stays there.

The laughter fades, slowly, into breathing. Hers and mine. Her bonnet brim is crushed against my coat. Her shoulder fits against my arm as though it had been measured for it. Somewhere back in the shrubbery, very far off, I can hear Anne's voice asking Mrs. Collins whether she has seen any interesting birds.

I do not want to move. I do not ever want to move again.

"Miss Bennet," I say into the top of her bonnet.

"Mm."

"I have never been so content in my life."

She goes very still against my shoulder.

"Is that the head injury?" I ask. "Pettigrew says it may make me odd. I have been wondering."

She does not answer for a long moment. Then she lifts her head, and looks at me, and her eyes are full of something I am beginning, very slowly, to hope I understand.

"I hope not," she says.

Chapter Nine — Elizabeth

"Lizzy," says Charlotte quietly. "You are not pretending any longer."

We are halfway home across the park. The sun is high and warm, and the gravel is white with it, and I have been walking for a full five minutes without hearing a single word Charlotte has said. I know this because she has just told me so.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I said that you are not pretending." She does not look at me. She looks straight ahead, at the parsonage roof showing through the trees, and twirls her parasol. "Anne and I came round the end of the shrubbery just as Mr. Collins came out of it backwards, with laurel in his hair. He passed us at a run. He did not stop to explain."

My face goes hot from collar to bonnet.

"Nothing happened," I say.

"I did not say anything had happened."

"You were thinking it."

"I was thinking," says Charlotte, "that I have watched you for eight days now, and that on the first of them you sat at that man's bedside looking as though you were being made to hold a hot coal. And today you came out of that shrubbery looking like a girl who has been given a hot coal and discovered she would rather like to keep it."

I open my mouth.