“She is a credit to her own determination, Mr Darcy. I merely provided the instruction.”
“You provided considerably more than instruction.” His eyes remained fixed on Anne, who had spotted him and broken into a run—decorum abandoned, the lesson forgotten, her face alight with uncomplicated joy.
“Papa!”
He caught her as she launched herself at his legs. He lifted her easily, and Anne wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her cheek to his shoulder. The gesture was artless, instinctive—a child seeking her father’s warmth with the absolute confidence that it would be given.
Mr Darcy’s face transformed.
The severity vanished. The guarded composure, the careful blankness he wore in company, the reserve that kept the world at arm’s length, all of it dissolved. In its place was a softness Elizabeth had glimpsed only in fragments: a smile at Anne’s pronouncements, a gentleness in his voice when he bid her goodnight, the way his hand lingered on her curls when he thought no one observed.
Now she observed. Now she saw the whole of it—the tenderness, the fierce and unguarded love, the way he held his daughter as though she were the axis around which his entire world turned.
Anne whispered in his ear. He listened with grave attention, nodded, whispered back. Anne giggled—a bright, bubbling sound that belonged to the child she was, rather than the composed miniature adult she had been practising.
Elizabeth’s unease about Anne’s maturity faded. Not answered, not resolved, but set aside. Whatever had shaped this girl into gravity beyond her years, it had also given her this: a father who adored her without reservation. A father who would soften his entire countenance for the privilege of holding her.
Anne wriggled to be set down and Mr Darcy obliged. She spotted a butterfly with white wings edged in orange, dancing above the roses, and gave chase.
Elizabeth and Mr Darcy stood side by side, watching her.
Neither spoke. The silence stretched, but it was not the taut silence of the dining room or the hush of a corridor at midnight. It was the quiet of two people who had shared a table for a long time and no longer required words to fill every pause.
Anne darted between the rose beds. The butterfly evaded her with lazy grace. The sun warmed Elizabeth’s face, and beside her, Mr Darcy breathed, steady and present, close enough that she could smell the faint trace of sandalwood and clean linen.
It pained her.
This ease, this rightness. Standing beside him in the late afternoon light, watching his daughter laugh, feeling the warmth of his shoulder inches from her own. It felt like she was made for it, for a space she had been designed to occupy, a shape that matched the shape of her exactly.
And she could not have it. She was his governess, paid to stand in this garden. The ease between them was an illusion built on proximity and circumstance, and when the circumstances changed—when he married, when the household shifted, when he remembered that she was staff and he was master—the ease would dissolve. She would be left with nothing but the memory of how it had felt to stand beside him and pretend.
Anne caught the butterfly. Or rather, the butterfly permitted itself to be caught. It landed on her outstretchedfinger and rested there, wings folding and unfolding, while Anne held utterly still and stared at it with reverent wonder.
“She is very patient.”
“Miss Darcy has many admirable qualities,” she agreed. “Patience among them.”
He turned to her then, with the focused attention that always undid her. He studied her face as though searching for a sign, a signal, some indication of what she was thinking.
She kept her expression neutral.
“Miss Bennet—”
“Papa! The butterfly flew away!”
Anne’s voice broke the moment. Mr Darcy blinked, turned, and smiled at his daughter. The conversation, whatever it might have become, dissolved into the ordinary business of consoling a child whose captive had escaped.
Elizabeth stepped back and she smoothed her skirts. She reminded herself, firmly, that she was a governess in a garden, and that the ache in her chest was not relevant to her duties.
Elizabeth and Anne spent a quiet day. But at half past five, the summons came. Alice appeared in the nursery doorway, breathless from the stairs.
“Begging your pardon, Miss Bennet. The master requests that you bring Miss Anne to the drawing room to greet the guests.”
Anne, who had been building a fortress from blocks next to Muffin, raised her head with interest. “Are there guests, Alice?”
“Yes, miss. Grand ones.”
“How grand?”