Page 6 of Old Boots (Pride and Prejudice Variations #3)

CHAPTER SIX

N etherfield Park was a perfectly acceptable place to stay, but I became increasingly interested in my private sojourns down the road.

Mr Bennet satisfied my need for sparse and meaningful conversation in a way Bingley never could.

Miss Bennet provided a sharp counterpoint to all the panting, marriage-hungry ladies of my acquaintance, and I enjoyed the unique sensation of untroubling female company.

Some ladies could be amazingly restful creatures, I reflected with surprise, and yet I was not so entirely tamed that I wished to be lulled into a complacent stupor for the remainder of my life. I liked a challenge, and Longbourn housed the most challenging creature I had ever met.

I did not refer to Bandit. Though he, too, was a challenge, it was over Miss Elizabeth and her clever provocations I wished to prevail.

While visiting for the second time during my third week at Netherfield Park, the minx and I were again engaged in our private game.

Bandit had been put through his paces in the parlour on account of rain.

I had then ended his lesson by forcing him to lie down on his rug at Miss Bennet’s feet, and he did so in a state of total agony.

The beast squirmed and occasionally moaned as though pleading for mercy. His eyebrow whiskers twitched as he looked from me to his mistress in hopes of a reprieve.

“Stay,” I commanded in a low rumble, and after thumping his tail at me in apology and submission, he went back to the barely perceptible whines of the tortured.

The idiot dog was beginning to amuse me, and I suppose I was suppressing a reluctant smile when my eyes met Miss Elizabeth’s as she sat across from me.

My hostess had let the conversation lapse. We were none of us chatterboxes, and after becoming better acquainted as time passed, we sometimes collectively agreed to allow the comfortable entertainment of our own thoughts.

Miss Bennet sewed for the poor box, and Mr Bennet read a periodical I had brought from Netherfield.

Miss Mary also bent over a book, and Miss Elizabeth, who had been looking at a letter in her lap, ceased pretending to be occupied with it and was engaged in studying me as boldly as I had been studying her for the past quarter of an hour.

Her eyes sparkled in response to my wry smile, and with seemingly lazy intent, she directed her all-seeing, razor-sharp gaze slowly downward, fixing it pointedly and somewhat critically on my unprepossessing boots.

Every nerve and fibre of discipline under my command was required to stop me from shifting my legs in mortification, in striving to make the state of my mucking-about boots less obvious.

With resolution, I withstood her scrutiny, and when her eyes finally rose to meet mine, I hitched my right brow upward and silently dared her to comment aloud.

This apparently delighted Miss Elizabeth.

We were secretly sparring under the very noses of her family!

She pursed her lips forcefully to snuff out the chuckle that threatened to undo her.

Once she had conquered her amusement, she again met my eyes, glanced at my boots and back to my face, and this time, she pulled her lips downward in a pantomime of sympathy common to nursemaids who look upon some trifling bump on a child’s knee.

I rubbed my chin in vexation—in absolute frustration.

I could not conjure up any sort of expression on my face that would answer her mockery as completely as I wished.

I finally replied with the sort of scowl I used on Bandit when I admonished him for being a bad dog and in doing so, forced Miss Elizabeth to stifle a shout of laughter under a cough.

Because I was a merciful man, I offered the lady a reprieve by releasing Bandit from his forced stillness. He bounded towards me, poised to leap into my lap and lick my face, and so I ordered, “Sit!” before we went once again through sit-stay-come commands.

Eventually, I drank tea as I liked it and just as all three of the Miss Bennets had learnt to make it for me, without once evincing the sort of triumph over their accomplishment that I had seen from Miss Bingley. But I only took one cup, knowing that tea at Netherfield awaited my return.

Once back in Miss Bingley’s web, I continued my campaign of obstruction.

“Tea, Mr Darcy?” she asked, with only half her former assurance.

“Yes, I thank you,” I said, and then I waited expectantly, as any frequent guest would, for a perfectly stirred cup.

She floundered. “A lump of sugar, I believe.”

I let a slight frown flicker on my brow before I cleared it and said, graciously, “Plain, if you would be so kind.”

She sighed in defeat.

At dinner, she studied my plate, my face, and my every mannerism for some clue as to my pleasure or disapproval, but I had played cards for higher stakes and did not show my hand.

I shunned the carrots one night, only to relish them the next time they appeared, and so on.

In this, my valet assisted me by giving me a preview of the menu so I could think ahead on how to confound my hostess.

Later in the parlour, Miss Bingley sought to regain her footing, speaking in a sing-song, repetitive manner I have always found grating.

“I know, Mr Darcy, you will enjoy hearing Mozart. You have always appreciated Mozart.”

“What piece did you have in mind?”

“Why, the Rondo alla Turca, ” she said bravely, flipping her music to the page she had in mind to play.

“Do you perhaps know his sixteenth sonata? I hear the Turkish March everywhere I go,” I said pleasantly.

“I say, Darcy, so do I!” remarked Bingley. And it was all I could do to maintain my indifferent expression when the footman began to cough and had to leave the room.

By then, even the obtuse Mrs Hurst seemed to notice that her sister was not herself. After the lady fumbled ever so slightly through a composition that was equally if not more popular than the Rondo, Louisa Hurst gently suggested they play cards instead of listening to music.

I declined the invitation to ruffle Miss Bingley any further that night and thought instead of what I would next do to rile Miss Elizabeth Bennet.

But my visit the following day—yes, my calls had become habitual—did not go quite as planned.

Miss Elizabeth was nowhere in sight, and Miss Mary went with Miss Bennet as we put Bandit through his training.

I decided that such a half-wit animal should probably be trained to good behaviour no matter with whom he went, and so I began to initiate Miss Mary into the astringent tone and lead pressure required to force him to heel.

Mary Bennet seemed a closed book to me. She was circumspect almost to the point of incivility, and she could not possibly shine when positioned next to the beauty of one sister and the outright brilliance of the other.

But to my way of thinking, modesty was never a fault, and rather than resent her place in the constellation, Miss Mary simply shone in her subdued way.

It was to her advantage that she was just as intelligent as Miss Elizabeth. She took direction with instant understanding but did not trouble me with expressions on her face of scepticism, or of droll, quizzical, or even risible ideas when attending to my instructions.

After my lesson, Miss Bennet and I walked companionably along behind Miss Mary as she learnt to hold Bandit’s lead.

Jane Bennet was perhaps my ideal woman, and I might have begun to consider her in another light altogether but for the fact that I could never quite bring my attention fully to her qualities. My mind was forever leaping around to locate, to engage, and simply to look at her devilish counterpart.

“Where is Miss Elizabeth today?” I asked with laudable disinterest.

“Lizzy? Today is her day to spend with the cottagers. She is teaching the youngsters who are not working the harvest their letters. And today, she has a special errand which has satisfied my sisters and me quite completely.”

“Oh?”

“We have sewn all the children new flannels for the coming cold,” Miss Bennet said, gracing me with a look of pleasure.

“That is thoughtful. Do you do so every year?”

She paused. “This is our first, sir,” she said with a modest, downcast look.

Again, I felt as though there was a fact related to this family I knew nothing about. “Then your sister will be met with double the excitement if this is not a traditional gift.”

She rallied and said, “Just so. We drew straws to decide who would have the pleasure.”

“And Miss Elizabeth won?”

“Well, no. Mary won, but she conceded that walking the entire estate with such a bundle was perhaps more than she could manage. Lizzy, you see, is a strong walker.”

I did not doubt it. We paused at the little wilderness area behind the house.

Bandit was made to sit like a gentleman, which he would never do as long as he wiggled like a puppy and shifted his weight from paw to paw as though bitten by ants.

Still, he was making progress, and I thought perhaps we should begin to give him a little trial of heeling off leash as we went back to the house.

I began to feel quite satisfied with myself as the mongrel, thick-skulled and excitable as he was, walked sedately beside us. His good behaviour came to an end, however, when upon nearing the house, Bandit first smelled and then spotted Miss Elizabeth in the distance, returning from her errand.

He bounded away from us and nearly knocked her down.

After a second’s hesitation, I kicked into a run after him, bellowing at him to stay, but to no purpose, since the lady was forced to drop her depleted bundle of flannels in order to fend him off.

Amidst her objections and attempts to dissuade him otherwise, Bandit joyfully leapt in the air to slurp at her chin.

When I reached them, I grasped the scruff of his neck and wrestled him into submission.

“Forgive me,” I said, panting. “I thought he was ready for a trial off his lead. Apparently,” I said sternly, eyeing the miscreant, “he is incapable of anything but jumping on people and yelping as though he is being murdered.” I then shook his scruff to emphasise my displeasure.

She swiped at her sticky chin with her handkerchief and brought her eyes up to mine. They sparkled and shone, and I felt slightly disoriented.

“You are forgiven,” Miss Elizabeth said archly.

“Am I?” I asked, in the style of a dazzled fool.

“Well,” she said drily, “there is always tomorrow if you would rather be at daggers drawn with me.”

“A difficult choice.”

“You like vexing me, do you?”

“Very much. Yet, I have not earned a single word of approbation from you, and perhaps I would, for the sake of novelty, rather be in your good graces for once.”

“Dull but vaguely possible. You have made Mary smile, and for that, I suppose I can be as docile as a lamb where you are concerned.”

I took her bundle, and she allowed it, though not without a hint of impatience. “You resent assistance, I presume?”

“By no means. Only your assistance, Mr Darcy.”

Why this vile statement thrilled me, I cannot explain. “How so?” I asked, feigning boredom with the topic. “Why am I to be singled out for your displeasure?”

“Why indeed,” she said, with a most alluring toss of her dark curls. And then, in yet another mercurial shift, the lady said, “But I must ask you, sir, if I have yet been forgiven?”

“Forgiven for what? For the lingering scent of musky hound in my carriage, for four days of a stuffed head?”

“Of all my sins against you, I suspect my lack of worshipful gratitude has been the worst,” she said sweetly. “But somehow, I cannot find it in me to thank you sincerely for scaring the life out of me, plunging me underwater, and for nearly knocking loose my hold on my sister’s drowning dog.”

“There you are wrong, miss,” I said crisply.

“Am I? What have I done that is worse than failing to truckle to your superior self?”

“You have ruined my best boots,” I said gravely, “and for that, you are months away from absolution.”

Her laugh pierced me. “Oh? I suppose that upon receipt of new boots, the loss of the old ones will be forgotten.”

“With Herculean effort, yes.”

I could have gone along in this way for another five miles, but we approached the door of the manor house, and Miss Elizabeth excused herself.

I rode away bewildered and lightly singed.

Playing pranks on Miss Bingley required an entirely different skill level than seeking to discompose the lightning bolt at Longbourn.

In fact, Longbourn in general, began to trouble me.

It was a refuge on the one hand—a welcome respite from the constant threat of entrapment at Netherfield Park.

But I was becoming—what was I becoming? I suppose the word was entangled .

I was becoming attached to the Bennets, and unsure whether this was warranted or even wise.