Richard turned. His hand, reaching for the plate, paused.
Jane stood beside the table, her posture straight, her sleeves pushed to her elbows, her hair pinned simply. She was thin. So thin that the bones of her wrists were visible. Her dress was clean, pressed, and had been mended at theshoulder. She was seven-and-twenty but had the gravity of a woman much older.
She was also, Elizabeth observed with the clarity of a sister who had spent a lifetime calibrating Jane’s effect on men, luminous. Not in the way she had been at the Meryton assembly—golden, radiant, a beauty that stopped breaths in a room. This was subtler and harder to name. It lived in the steadiness of her hands as she set down the plate, in the way her eyes met the Colonel’s without flinching, without flirtation, without expectation. It was the beauty of a lady who had stopped trying to be beautiful and had become, in the absence of effort, more striking than ever.
The Colonel noticed. The pause extended by a fraction of a second. His hand completed its reach for the biscuit, but his eyes stayed on Jane a beat longer than courtesy required. His expression did not change—he was a soldier and he controlled his face—but his shoulders shifted, an almost imperceptible squaring, drawing himself taller in the presence of a woman he wished to impress.
Jane noticed as well, and a faint warmth touched her cheeks, a softening, a fractional easing of the careful composure she wore at all times.
The moment lasted two seconds, three at most. Then Jane turned to refill her mother’s cup, the Colonel bit into the biscuit, and declared it improved by presentation.
Soon enough, they said their farewells and left for Mayfair.
The carriage swayed north through Bloomsbury. The streets were busy with afternoon traffic—carts, hackneys, a woman selling flowers at the corner of Russell Square.Elizabeth sat with her hands in her lap and her thoughts in Somers Town. Beside her, the Colonel occupied the opposite bench, his long legs stretched across the gap, his hat on the seat beside him.
He was quiet, which was unusual. His natural state was conversation, anecdote, the easy patter of a man who had never met a silence he could not fill. He had filled them all the way from Cheapside on their previous journey, and Elizabeth had been grateful for it—his talk was a bridge between the two worlds she inhabited, a buffer between The Polygon and Grosvenor Street.
Today, there was no bridge. He sat with his arms folded and his eyes on the passing streets. He broke the silence halfway through Marylebone.
“Miss Bennet... Your sister Jane.” He cleared his throat. “She is very—” He paused, his brow furrowed. He commanded words in four languages and had just misplaced every one of them. “Kind.”
Elizabeth kept her face neutral. “She is the best person I know.”
He nodded and turned back to the window. “Has she—that is to say—is there any—”
“She is not attached, Colonel.”
The words were out before she could weigh them. Direct, perhaps too direct—but the Colonel had a habit of circling a topic until it grew dizzy, and Elizabeth did not have the patience for it today. Not after the morning she had carried.
His ears reddened. “I was merely enquiring after her circumstances. Out of concern.”
“Of course.”
“She seemed—thin.”
“She is stronger than she seems.”
He nodded again and adjusted his cuffs, then recrossed his legs. He launched, with visible effort, into an observation about Georgiana’s wedding breakfast and whether the menu had been finalised. Elizabeth allowed the pivot, answering his questions about seating arrangements and flower selections. Neither mentioned Jane again.
If this was interest on the Colonel’s part, it must be real. If it was a passing fancy—a soldier’s idle admiration for a pretty face over biscuits—then it must go no further. Jane deserved certainty. She deserved a man who would stay.
The carriage pulled into Grosvenor Street at twenty minutes past five. The Colonel handed her down, tipped his hat, and strode off towards Matlock House with his hands in his pockets and his thoughts, Elizabeth suspected, still in Somers Town.
She climbed the front steps and Barton opened the door for her.
Mr Darcy was in the entrance hall. He stood by the side table, sorting through a stack of letters, his coat still on, his gloves discarded beside the post. He had been out and returned recently—the damp on his shoulders suggested rain in Mayfair that had not reached Somers Town.
“Miss Bennet.” He inclined his head, courteous and measured. The voice he had used at every encounter since the night she had fled his chamber—precise enough to convey civility, stripped of every register that might betray anything beneath it.
“Mr Darcy.”
“How was your visit?”
“Productive.” She pulled her gloves off, one finger at a time, and set them on the hall table beside his, noticing how well they aligned together. “My sister Lydia was downstairs this morning.”
His hands stilled on the letters and he looked at her, searching. “That is encouraging.”
“It is.” She untied her bonnet. “The Colonel was there. He had an errand in Cheapside and collected me in the carriage.”