“You should also ensure that Miss Bennet has—” He cleared his throat, glancing at Madame Delacroix. “Everything else she might need.”
“Everything else,” Georgiana repeated.
“Yes. Shoes. Stockings.” He was going to stop there. He was absolutely going to stop there. His mouth, which had apparently seceded from the union of his better judgement, continued. “Underthings.”
The word landed in the drawing room like a stone in a pond, spreading ripples. Madame Delacroix developed a sudden and intense fascination with her measuring tape. Georgiana’s lips pressed together. Her nostrils flared and her shoulders began to shake.
“Underthings,” she said, her voice admirably serious.
“For the household. For representation. It is—” He was drowning and there was no rescue. “A practical matter.”
“Of course it is, Brother. Entirely practical.”
He fled.
He crossed the entrance hall at a pace that Barton would later describe to Mrs Hatfield as brisk, which was his way of saying the master had been moving as though pursued by dogs. He seized his hat from the stand, jammed it onto his head, and was through the front door before the echo of Georgiana’s laughter had faded behind him.
The laughter was still ringing in his ears when he turned the corner onto Brook Street, and he could not blame her. The image of Fitzwilliam Darcy, master of Pemberley, standing crimson-faced in his drawing room saying the wordunderthingsto his three- and twenty-years old sister and a French modiste was, he had to admit, unquestionably comic.
It was also, underneath the comedy, devastating. Because the word had come from a place where Elizabeth existed not as his governess or his responsibility or his carefully maintained professional concern. She existed as a woman with a very fine body beneath the grey cotton, a body that wore stockings, chemises, and things he could not name without his pulse doing somersaults.
He walked faster.
White’s was mercifully quiet that afternoon. The usual collection of elderly gentlemen occupied the bow window, conducting their lifelong surveillance of St James’s Street like dedicated sentries. A cluster of younger men argued abouthorses near the fireplace. Darcy sank into a chair and willed his pulse to behave.
Richard’s boots were propped on a footstool, a newspaper open on his knee.
The Earl of Matlock was sixty-three, silver-haired, and had the particular authority that came from four decades of sitting in the House of Lords and never once doubting that he belonged there. He was not a large man, but he occupied space as though he were, and when he spoke, rooms adjusted. He had the Fitzwilliam jaw, the Fitzwilliam directness, and a mind that his younger son had inherited and his nephew had learned to respect.
“Darcy.” The Earl raised his glass. “You look as though you have been running from something.”
“Georgiana’s modiste,” Darcy said, which had the advantage of being true.
Richard snorted. “I warned you. Wedding preparations are a siege. The modiste is merely the advance guard. Wait until the florist arrives.”
“God help us all.” Darcy accepted port from a passing waiter and drank.
The conversation settled into its usual grooves. The Earl was exercised about the Corn Laws, which had passed three years prior, in 1815, and were, in his opinion, a catastrophe in progress. Bread prices were climbing. The poor were restless. There had been riots in East Anglia, and the government’s response had been to send cavalry rather than grain. The Earl considered both morally indefensible and strategically idiotic.
“You cannot charge a crowd into compliance, Darcy. You can only charge them into fury. Sidmouth has learned nothing and will learn nothing until the mob is at his own gate.”
“Sidmouth will not learn then either, Uncle. He will merely lock the gate and blame the mob for the inconvenience.”
The Earl smiled grimly. “You sound like your mother. She had no patience for fools in Parliament either.”
Richard steered the conversation to lighter waters. He had attended a debate the previous week at which a member from Suffolk had fallen asleep mid-speech, had begun to snore, and the Speaker had been forced to intervene. The Earl laughed. Darcy managed a smile that was almost genuine.
“And how is young Anne?” The Earl set his glass down and turned to Darcy with the warmth he reserved for his great-niece, who had him thoroughly in hand. “Richard tells me she has a new governess.”
“She does. Miss Bennet has been a considerable improvement on her predecessors.”
“I should say so,” Richard interjected. “The child had me court-martialled. Asked me to justify the existence of the entire British Army using only words she could understand. I failed comprehensively.”
The Earl chuckled. “The girl is sharp. She has the Fitzwilliam mind.”
Darcy took a slow sip of port and said nothing to this. Anne did have the Fitzwilliam mind on her mother’s side. But she had the Darcy name by acquisition rather thaninheritance. However, that was a door he did not open, as the Earl did not know it existed, and it would stay that way.
“She does look older than her years, though,” the Earl added, studying his glass. “Last time your aunt brought her to Matlock House, I remarked on it. She carries herself with a gravity one does not expect in a child of six.”