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Chapter Four

E lizabeth should have known it would be dreadful when the footman announced the reading would begin promptly at half-six. Nothing good had ever come from literary punctuality.

She was seated two rows from the hearth in the drawing room of Mrs. Pennington—Mrs. Gardiner’s cousin, and the kind of woman who wore spectacles even when she was not reading.

The parlor was overflowing with bookish sorts: poets with ink-stained fingers, ladies with notebooks tucked into reticules, and a few gentlemen who clearly thought this gathering might earn them a mistress or a muse.

Elizabeth had been promised conversation. Instead, she was enduring The Siege of Tyre , a poem in thirty-seven stanzas, most of which seemed to be about cliffs.

“Do you suppose it ever ends?” Elizabeth muttered under her breath, wishing Jane were there to hear it.

But Jane had sensibly declined the invitation and was likely back at the Gardiners’ townhouse by now, sipping tea and reading a far better story.

Elizabeth shifted in her chair and tried to catch the eye of an elderly man two seats away who appeared to be dozing. Sensible.

She pulled out her small notebook—carefully, carefully—and made a note:

The poem is like a poor dinner guest. Long-winded, difficult to interrupt, and certain he is owed applause.

It helped, the writing. Not just for mischief’s sake, but to hold herself together. Always had.

The next stanza featured a woman named Leucadia who wept into the sea and was possibly also a metaphor. Elizabeth made another note:

She drowns. One hopes intentionally.

There was a faint sound—someone shifting just behind her—and she had only just scribbled a third line (a scandalous one, which involved the poet’s hair and possibly a lobster) when a voice spoke over her shoulder, low and dry.

“I wonder if Miss Leucadia would have lasted longer had she been permitted an editor.”

Elizabeth froze mid-word.

She glanced sideways—just enough to catch him from the corner of her eye. Mr. Darcy. Seated directly behind her.

She had not seen him since last July, and she had certainly had no notion she ever would again. And yet here he was—close enough to read over her shoulder, apparently, and certainly close enough to deserve a good solid stab from a hairpin.

He was not looking at her. His eyes remained trained on the hearth, expression carved from marble.

But he had read it. The lobster. Everything.

Her pulse did a strange thing.

“Perhaps,” she said just as quietly, turning just enough to be heard but not seen, “if she had a better rhyme for ‘tide,’ she might not have died at all.”

Darcy made a noise in his throat that might have been a chuckle. Or it might have been the onset of consumption.

The reading droned on. At the end of the stanza, the hostess asked for responses. Polite clapping followed. A few murmured “Moving.” One man said “Haunting” and then attempted to clarify the metaphor using a handkerchief.

Mrs. Pennington turned to Elizabeth. “Miss Bennet, you looked thoughtful.”

She had not been. She had been wicked. But there was no escaping now.

She rose, composed her face, and said, “The work is certainly passionate.”

Murmurs of agreement.

“Though I did wonder whether Leucadia’s weeping might have been avoided entirely if she had not chosen a man named—” she glanced at her notes, “—Tirion, who, as far as I could tell, spoke only in nautical metaphors and seemed unable to express emotion without invoking a gale.”

Several people laughed. Mrs. Pennington made a face like she had bitten a cherry stone. Elizabeth sat again, triumphant.

And then—Darcy stood behind her.

Her stomach dropped.

He did not look at her as he spoke. “While I appreciate Miss Bennet’s… spirited dissection, I do wonder if we must dismiss intensity of feeling simply because it is delivered in poor taste.”

A pause. The room held its breath.

Elizabeth smiled, slow and sharp. “Intensity of feeling,” she said, “should never require one to suffer through nine rhymes for ‘surge.’”

Scattered laughter. The tide turned back toward her.

But Darcy was not finished. “Poetry, Miss Bennet, is not an exercise in restraint. It is a declaration. The subject may be ridiculous, the imagery overwrought—but the effort to name an unnameable grief still deserves respect.”

That caught her. Not because it was wrong—but because he sounded like he meant it.

She tilted her head. “Respect is not a blank cheque. One might also argue that excessive grief, however sincerely felt, is not improved by metaphorical shipwrecks and unnecessary alliteration.”

He looked at her now—directly. “And one might argue that sarcasm is a poor substitute for insight.”

That struck deeper than it should have. The smile on Elizabeth’s lips thinned.

“Oh, I see,” she said lightly, but her tone no longer sparkled. “You prefer we feel deeply—quietly—and write poorly. That does sound like a masculine prescription.”

Several listeners shifted in their chairs. Someone inhaled audibly.

Darcy’s eyes narrowed. “Not poorly. Honestly. But I understand that distinction might be difficult for someone who takes notes in the middle of a eulogy.”

Gasps. A ripple moved across the room like a breeze before a storm.

Elizabeth’s cheeks flamed. He had seen the notebook. And read it. And now, thrown it back at her.

She stood. “Then it is fortunate, Mr. Darcy, that I am not in the business of delivering eulogies. Only honest opinions. And it seems I am not the only one who thought the poem could do with fewer metaphors and fewer stanzas.”

Mrs. Pennington gave a nervous little laugh. Someone at the back of the room applauded, absurdly.

Darcy bowed his head—stiffly—and resumed his seat without a word.

Elizabeth remained standing just long enough to make her composure clear, then sank back down and opened her notebook again.

She did not write anything.

Not yet.

But her hand clenched faintly around the pencil, and the ache behind her pride had a familiar shape to it: fury, not at being corrected, but at being misunderstood—and made to look petty when she had only meant to be sharp. When she had only meant to stay… composed.

She had spent most of her life dressing her feelings in wit and ink. It was safer that way. Easier to hold. But now it felt as if he had reached past the ink to press something raw.

When the salon broke for wine, she did not rise immediately.

But she felt his presence behind her still—like the echo of a song that refused to leave the air.

D arcy had not forgiven his grandmother.

It had, after all, been her doing. Her devilish sense of intrigue that had prompted her to fund his humiliation last July.

He had intended to. There had been time. Eight months since the garden fête, during which he had firmly catalogued Miss Elizabeth Bennet as a momentary aberration—irreverent, impulsive, and very nearly forgettable.

And then he saw her again. Not across a lawn, not flinging ribbons and laughter with sisters in tow, but seated just ahead of him in a narrow chair with a notebook tucked cunningly beneath her shawl. Her bonnet was different. Her posture the same. And her wit—if anything—sharper.

It was absurd.

He had come to this salon reluctantly. At his grandmother’s urging, naturally. For the sake of appearances and “to be among people who can read for once.”

He had not expected a girl with seven pounds’ worth of ribbon history and a laugh like a dropped teacup to appear in the row ahead of him, scrawling insults about metaphor into the margins of her program.

And now, as the room broke apart for refreshments, he found himself drifting—not deliberately—toward the sideboard.

She was there, already in conversation with a woman whose vocabulary had been almost entirely adjectives during the reading.

Darcy intended to retreat.

But then Miss Elizabeth turned slightly, reached for a glass, and saw him.

She did not blink.

“Mr. Darcy,” she said. “We meet again.”

He bowed, stiffly. “Miss Bennet.”

“You look terribly cornered. Have you been ambushed by pastry?”

“I am only reconnoitering the punch.”

“Ah. And if it proves hostile?”

“I shall negotiate terms.”

She offered him a glass, filled neatly to the rim. “Your courage is an inspiration.”

He took it, though he did not smile. She was watching him too closely for that.

“Tell me,” she said, “have you begun dressing for literary engagements in mourning as well? Or is this merely a consistent aesthetic?”

He lifted his brow. “Must I wear white to be deemed cheerful?”

“I think you could wear saffron and still look like a thundercloud.”

“I shall make a note.”

“Oh no,” she said, drawing out her notebook with theatrical flair, “I make the notes. That is how this works.”

Darcy glanced at the little volume.

Of course she carried it still. The same careless, deliberate ease with which she had scribbled in Derbyshire. But now, there was something else—something habitual in the way her fingers curved around it, like someone gripping a railing in high wind.

“Do I feature?” he asked.

“Only in the most flattering context.”

“I doubt that.”

“Would you prefer infamy? It sells better.”

“Surely you would not trade in scandal, Miss Bennet.”

She grinned. “Only the most anonymous kind. I have standards.”

“Is that what we are calling them?”

“They are very high,” she said gravely. “Just low enough to trip people.”

He almost smiled—dangerously close—but instead took a sip of his punch, gaze flicking toward her mouth and away again.

“I imagine I am catalogued somewhere between a storm cloud and a cautionary tale,” he said.

She looked him over, critically. “Rather, somewhere between a brooding Byronic cliché and a very solemn Greek statue. If you would only look slightly more disapproving, someone might knit a tragic novel out of you.”

Darcy’s mouth twitched. “And what would you be, Miss Bennet? A provincial menace in bonnet and ink?”

“Certainly not. I am very much à la mode .”

“A troubling trend.”