They reached the field together, where Lady Carstairs pressed a quoit into Elizabeth’s hand, and Richard, with great solemnity, offered Darcy another.
“Take care,” Richard said. “She can smell weakness.”
Elizabeth turned, brows raised. “Colonel, I should think such complete weakness could be smelled from the bridge.”
Richard gave a wounded cry and pressed a hand to his breast. “Madam, you mistake strategy for incapacity. I have been lulling Lady Carstairs into a false sense of conquest.”
Lady Carstairs snorted. “You have been losing.”
“With unusual grace,” said Richard. “That is the point everyone persists in overlooking.”
Darcy glanced at Miss Elizabeth, who gave him an amused little nod. She saw it too, then. Richard was enjoying himself enormously and, if Darcy was any judge, had been missing with intent. He was too good a soldier not to know precisely where he was throwing.
Miss Elizabeth took up her quoit. “Do take care, Colonel. There is such a thing as losingtooprettily.”
Richard waggled his eyebrows. “I shall endeavour to obey, madam.”
Darcy took his place beside Miss Elizabeth.
Lady Carstairs lifted her arm. “Now, Miss Bennet. Show the colonel how it is done.”
Elizabeth glanced once at Darcy, weighed the quoit in her hand, and tossed it. The ring landed on one edge and promptly fell, perfectly circling the peg.
Lady Carstairs cried out in triumph while Richard groaned.
The reverend applauded. “Well done, Miss Bennet!”
Miss Elizabeth almost bounced on her toes, delighted and disbelieving. “I shall become impossible to live with,” she said to him, “and it will all be your fault.”
Darcy took in her bright eyes, her wind-stirred curls, the laughter she was making no effort to hide, and found himself in no fit state to argue.
“Yes,” he said gravely, his eyes drifting down to her lips before snapping back up again. “I begin to see the danger.”
She gave him a long, strange stare and opened her mouth, but before she could speak, Lady Carstairs demanded another throw, and the day, which had so nearly gone wrong, carried on.
CHAPTER 6
The quoits had at last been abandoned, though not before Lady Carstairs had secured a victory so complete that Colonel Fitzwilliam declared himself permanently altered by the defeat.
Elizabeth, who had laughed more than she had intended and thrown better than she ever had, returned to the rugs in excellent spirits. She had barely taken up her plate again when Miss Pelham settled beside her and offered up an apricot tart.
They had fallen into talk without difficulty. Miss Pelham was the elder of the rector’s two daughters, sixteen or thereabouts, and the talk had travelled, as talk will at a picnic, from the weather, to the parish, to the people of the parish, and so at last to Miss Darcy, of whom she spoke with the ease that long affection affords.
“Oh, Georgiana has always been good at secrets,” Miss Pelham said, smiling down at her plate. “Not alarming secrets, of course. Charitable ones. When we were little, we used to make lavenderbags from the flowers along the south wall, and she would insist upon leaving hers on the doorsteps of anyone who was ill or cross or very old. She never would put her name to them, though once she tied so much ribbon round hers that Mrs. Harris knew at once it could only have come from the great house.”
Elizabeth laughed. “Was Miss Darcy mortified?”
“Dreadfully. She hid behind the yew tree until Mrs. Harris went in again.” Miss Pelham’s smile deepened. “And once, when my youngest brother had the measles and was perfectly miserable, Georgiana sent him a basket with mittens for his hands, a little wooden horse, an orange, and a note saying that brave soldiers did not scratch.”
“Where is your brother today?”
“He is visiting our uncle in Shropshire.”
“And did the mittens work?”
“They did not stop him scratching, but the horse did distract him for a time.”
“That seems a very reasonable compromise.”