Page 75 of Mr. Darcy Forgot I Said No

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Anne has become Kitty Bennet's dearest friend in the world.

I do not know how it happened. It seems to have happened all at once, somewhere between the stile and the cows. They are inseparable. They walk out together every morning, arm in arm, with Mrs. Jenkinson trotting behind with shawls. They sit in the window seat with their heads together over a sketchbook, for it turns out that Anne draws, and draws beautifully, and has been doing so in secret for years because her mother said it was bad for her eyes. Kitty, who had never shown the least interest in drawing before, now carries a pencil about with her everywhere and draws Anne, and the cows, and Mr. Bennet asleep in his chair, very badly and with enormous enthusiasm.

In return, Kitty is teaching Anne to dance.

"She has never danced," Kitty tells me, outraged, in the hall one morning. "Never once, Mr. Darcy. Not a reel, not a country dance, not anything. Her mama said it would overheat her blood. Did you ever hear such nonsense? I have told her she shall dance at the wedding, and she shall dance with the Colonel, and I shall teach her every step."

"With the Colonel?" I say.

Kitty looks at me as though I am very slow. "Well, he is the only gentleman who is tall enough and not taken," she says. "And he looks at her when she is not looking."

I open my mouth. I shut it again.

That afternoon I come into the back parlor and find the furniture pushed against the walls, and Mary at the pianoforte playing a country dance with grim determination, and Kitty and Anne going down the middle of the room hand in hand. Anne's face is pink. Her hair is coming down. Mrs. Jenkinson is standing in the corner holding a shawl and wringing her hands, and murmuring, "Oh, Miss Anne, your blood, your blood," over and over, quite unheeded.

Anne sees me in the doorway. She stops dead. Then she lifts her chin, the way she lifted it on the steps of Rosings, and says, "Darcy. You are just in time. Kitty says I need a gentleman to practice turning with. You will do."

And I find myself, for the first time in my life, going down a country dance with my cousin Anne de Bourgh in the back parlor at Longbourn, while Mary Bennet thumps out the tune and Kitty shrieks the figures and Elizabeth, who has come in behind me, leans against the doorframe and laughs until she cries.

***

I play chess with Mr. Bennet in the evenings.

He is very good. He is a great deal better than I am, which I discover on the first evening, when he takes my queen in eleven moves and says, "Ah," in a tone of mild regret, as though he had not meant to do it and was sorry it had happened.

We play in his library, after dinner, while the ladies are in the drawing room. He does not talk much. He looks at the board, and then at me, and then at the board again, with that same long, considering look he gave me on the morning I asked for her. As though I were a passage of Latin. As though he knows the meaning already, and is only waiting for me to arrive at it.

"You are very quiet tonight, Mr. Darcy," he says, on the fourth evening.

"I am thinking."

"About your bishop, I hope. He is in a great deal of danger."

I move the bishop. Mr. Bennet takes it with a knight I had not seen.

"About Hunsford," I say.

Mr. Bennet's hand pauses on the knight.

"I keep trying to remember it," I say. "I lie awake at night and try. I think, if I could only have that evening back, I should have everything. I know what I said, because she has told me. I know what she answered. But I cannot see it. I cannot see her face when she said yes." I look at the board without seeing it. "Do you think that very foolish?"

Mr. Bennet sets the knight down very carefully on its square.

"No," he says. "I do not think it foolish at all."

He is silent for a moment. Then he says, without looking up, "Mr. Darcy. If you could have that evening back. Exactly as it was. Every word. Would you want it, whatever it held?"

I look at him. "Whatever it held?"

"Memory is a curious thing," says Mr. Bennet. "We always assume the part we have lost was the best part. It is not always so." He moves a pawn, gently. "Check, I think."

I look down. It is check. I did not see it coming at all.

***

I kiss her in the stillroom on Tuesday.