She climbed them steadily, one hand on the banister, her back straight out of habit. The house was silent around her. The quiet of a home that was well-run and well-loved, where doors closed softly and voices carried no further than they needed to.
At the top of the stairs, she paused. She allowed the thought—just one, small and cautious, barely admitted even to herself.
It might not be so bad after all.
She turned towards the nursery and refused to think about dimples.
Five
The first morning, he went to the nursery to say good morning to Anne.
He had done this every day since she was old enough to expect it. It was routine. Sacred, even—one of those small rituals that held the architecture of fatherhood in place. There was nothing unusual about it. There was no reason for his pulse to be stuttering on the landing.
He opened the door to find Elizabeth already there. She was seated at the table with Anne, pouring milk into a cup with a steady hand. She had been awake and working for at least an hour. Her sleeves were pushed to her elbows. The inside of her wrist caught the morning light, a pale curve of skin, the faint trace of a vein beneath it, and Darcy’s thoughts, which had been functioning adequately until that moment, ceased.
“Good morning, Papa!” Anne waved a piece of bread at him. Muffin was propped against the milk jug, supervising breakfast.
“Good morning, sweetheart.” He kissed the top of her head. He nodded to Elizabeth. “Miss Bennet.”
“Mr Darcy.” She inclined her head. Polite, professional, giving nothing.
He lingered. He asked about the day’s plans: what Anne would be studying, whether the chalk had been replenished, and if the nursery was warm enough. Perfectly reasonable questions. The questions of a devoted father taking an interest in his daughter’s education. No one could fault them.
No one except the man asking them, who was aware that his attention had fixed on the strand of hair Elizabeth tucked behind her ear as she answered. He had retained not a single word she said about Anne’s reading progress and absolutely everything about how her fingers had moved against her temple.
He excused himself and went to his study. He sat at his desk and opened his correspondence, his hand trembling slightly. He read the first line of a letter from his steward four times without absorbing a syllable.
By Tuesday, the pattern had established itself with the inevitability of the tide.
He found reasons. He was appalled at the transparency of them, and he found them anyway. Anne had requested a book. He could have sent it with a footman, but he delivered it personally. He stood in the schoolroom doorway and watched while Elizabeth read the inscription aloud to the child, her voice quiet and clear. And then there was this window latch in the nursery corridor that he suspected was loose. It was not loose, it had never been loose, and the ten minutes he spent examining it while Elizabeth passed withAnne on their way to the garden were the most dishonest ten minutes of his week.
The corridors were the worst. Darcy House was not small, and yet he kept finding her in every passage. Or rather, and he was not fool enough to deny it, he kept choosing the passages she used, at the hours she used them. The east corridor was the most direct route from his chambers to the schoolroom. It was not the most direct route to his study, which was west, but he had developed a sudden conviction that the east corridor had superior ventilation.
She smelled of lavender. Cheap soap, a bar she had brought from Somers Town, he supposed. The scent was faint, only noticeable when she passed within arm’s reach, and it stopped him mid-stride every single time, a hand closing around his chest and squeezing.
Then there were the dinners.
Three people at a table built for fourteen. Georgiana at his right, Elizabeth at his left, and a mahogany desert between them that no amount of white soup could fill. Georgiana carried the conversation cheerfully, determined to civilise every awkward silence her brother produced. She asked Elizabeth about books, about walking, about Anne’s progress. Elizabeth answered carefully at first, measured, accustomed to giving nothing away. But Georgiana was patient, warm, and genuinely interested, and slowly Elizabeth’s replies had grown longer. Eventually, she ventured a question of her own, about the wedding preparations, about Lord Lofton, delivered with a hesitance that suggested she was not entirely certain she was permitted to ask.
Georgiana seized upon it with visible delight and talked about silk organza for twenty minutes. Elizabeth listened with an expression that hovered between genuine interest and quiet amusement. Darcy watched the amusement surface—the slight lift at the corner of her mouth, the brightness returning to her eyes—and felt it in his sternum like a bruise.
On Friday, she made Georgiana laugh.
It was a small remark about Anne’s latest campaign to understand why the sky was blue, delivered in a tone so dry it could have cured leather. Georgiana’s laughter rang across the dining room, and Elizabeth’s mouth curved in an involuntary, unguarded smile, the first one that reached her eyes since she had arrived. Darcy reached for his wine and drank because the alternative was to say her name aloud at the dinner table in a voice that would have betrayed everything.
He knew her schedule. He had not asked for it. He had simply absorbed it the way a man absorbed the tides—by paying relentless attention to the thing around which his days had begun to orbit. She rose early. She breakfasted with Anne at eight. Lessons ran until eleven. The garden, weather permitting, occupied the hour before luncheon. Afternoons were quieter—reading, drawing, the occasional battle over arithmetic. She retired to her room after Anne’s supper and did not reappear until dinner time.
He knew all of this, and it shamed him, because this was not concern. This was not fatherly interest. He was a man mapping a woman’s movements through his own house, and the word for it was not devotion.
He caught his reflection in the hallway glass one morning, on his way to the nursery with a picture book he could easily have sent with Alice. His ears were flushed. His eyes were too bright. He recognised the expression. It was the same one that had stared back at him from a tailor’s window on Grafton Street. He had not learned a single thing.
He heard her singing on a Sunday afternoon.
He had not planned to be there. That was the lie he told himself as he shamelessly eavesdropped. It was a poor lie, thin as tissue, and he knew it. The truth was that he had heard Anne ask for a song as he passed the schoolroom, and had stopped, unable to make his feet carry him onward.
The schoolroom door was ajar. He stood to the side of the frame, where the angle hid him from view but gave him a narrow slice of the room. He could see the edge of the table, Anne’s blonde head bent over a drawing, and Elizabeth in the chair beside her, hands folded in her lap.
“Please, Miss Bennet? Just one?”