No chaperone. No Collins. No Charlotte pretending not to watch. Just the two of them on a woodland path with bluebells at their feet and a thrush singing its unfinished song, and no one within shouting distance who might overhear what was said or done.
"Mr. Darcy." She did not curtsy. It seemed absurd to curtsy in a wood. "You are abroad early."
"I ride every morning. The paths around Rosings are agreeable."
"All thirty miles of them belong to your aunt, I understand."
That almost-smile again — the faintest suggestion of a crack in the marble. "Only twenty-seven. The remaining three are the Crown's. My aunt has yet to negotiate their acquisition."
Elizabeth looked at him. "Did you just make a joke, Mr. Darcy?"
"I am capable of humour, Miss Bennet. I simply ration it."
"One wonders what you are saving it for."
He stepped closer. Not aggressively — there was nothing sudden about the movement — but with a deliberation that made the distance between them feel newly significant. He was close enough now that she could see a small scar above his left eyebrow, white and thin, and smell the horse on him, warm animal and leather and the sharp green scent of crushed grass. Close enough that if she extended her hand she would touch the front of his coat.
She did not extend her hand.
"You are very far from the parsonage," he said.
"I walk every morning. Your aunt's paths are agreeable."
"They are also isolated. You should not walk alone."
"I have been walking alone since I was twelve years old, Mr. Darcy. Hertfordshire did not produce many wolves."
"Hertfordshire did not contain what Kent contains."
She looked at him sharply. The words had an edge to them that went beyond mere caution, and his face — his face was doing something she had not seen before. The mask of cold composure had slipped, just fractionally, and what lay beneath was not arrogance or contempt but something tighter, something that looked almost like concern.
"And what, precisely, does Kent contain that I should fear?" she asked.
He held her gaze. The morning light was behind him, which put his face in shadow and made his eyes darker than they were. She could see his jaw tighten — that small, involuntary movement that she was beginning to recognize as the outward sign ofan internal struggle, a man deciding what to say and what to withhold.
"Men who notice what I have noticed," he said quietly.
Elizabeth's breath caught. Not from fear — not exactly — but from the sudden comprehension that Mr. Darcy was not speaking in generalities. He was speaking about himself. About what he had noticed. About her.
"And what have you noticed, sir?"
He was silent for a moment that stretched long enough to become uncomfortable. A branch cracked somewhere in the wood — an animal, a falling limb — and they both startled, the shared flinch breaking the tension like a hand struck through a spider's web.
"That you play the pianoforte with more passion than accuracy," he said, and his voice had changed, drawn back behind the wall. "And that you walk too far alone. Good morning, Miss Bennet."
He turned and strode back down the path, and Elizabeth watched him go — the straight line of his back, the controlled force of his stride — and pressed her hand flat against her sternum where her heart was doing something rapid and unwelcome.
He had been about to say something else. She was certain of it. Something that lived in the space betweenmen who noticeand the careful deflection that had followed. She had seen it in his face before the mask went back on — a raw, complicated thing that did not belong to the cold Mr. Darcy of Meryton, the proud Mr. Darcy of Netherfield, the man who found her merelytolerable.
She stood on the path until his figure disappeared around the bend, and then she stood a while longer, listening to the thrush, which had abandoned its melody for a different one entirely.
The second dinnerat Rosings came three days later.
Elizabeth had spent the intervening time avoiding the woodland paths in the early morning, which was either wisdom or cowardice, and she could not determine which. She saw Darcy twice — once at church, where he sat in the Rosings pew with his spine rigid and his eyes forward, and once through the window of the parsonage when he rode past on a black horse that matched his temperament. Both times her body did something she disliked — a quickening of pulse, a sharpening of attention — and both times she told herself it was merely the biological response to the proximity of a potential threat. Nothing more.
Collins, predictably, was beside himself with joy at the second invitation. He spent the afternoon composing compliments for Lady Catherine, trying them aloud in his study while Charlotte and Elizabeth sat in the parlour and attempted not to listen.
"Do you think," Charlotte said, her needle pausing over her embroidery, "that it is possible to die of secondhand embarrassment?"