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My heart swelled despite my every inclination not to rejoice. We turned back to the parsonage and after a quarter of a mile I said, “Mr Collins speaks of your engagement as an acknowledged fact.”

“Does he?” he asked sharply.

I nodded and he subsided into silence as though pondering. “My aunt’s doing, I am sure. I suppose she has told anyone and everyone we are promised.”

“What will you do?”

“Disabuse her of her fancies. But not until I am poised to leave. There will be an uproar, to be sure.”

“Dear me! I hope to be long gone.”

He gave me a queer little look and we arrived back at the parsonage. Mr Darcy made himself oddly agreeable to Sir William, spoke lightly to Charlotte, and frittered away the half an hour remaining before we left to take tea at Rosings.

He accompanied us in an unprecedented show of gentlemanly behaviour.

We went in pairs. Mr Collins and Charlotte led the way, followed by Sir William and Maria, with Mary and me bringing up the rear.

Mr Darcy began with the Collinses, but as we walked, he drifted back to Sir William, and then to us.

I nearly jumped when he spoke to my sister Mary for the first time in our acquaintance.

“Miss Mary, how have you found Kent?”

“Enjoyable, sir, thank you.”

“And your family? Are all well at Longbourn?”

“Yes, sir. We prepare for a wedding in June.”

“Do you?”

“My sister Jane will marry Mr Bromley, a doctor from London. Do you know him, sir?”

I smiled at Mary’s na?ve idea that society in London was so small everyone would likely have met, but at the same time, I braced for Mr Darcy to make some cutting remark for which I would have to throttle him.

He glanced once at me and said, with surprising gentleness, “I have not had that pleasure. Have you met my aunt, Miss Mary?”

“No sir. We are to be introduced to her this afternoon.”

“You will, I hope, overlook her worst manners.”

Mary looked at him in surprise. “Of course, sir!”

Mr Darcy gave me a sidelong look. “I only hope your sister does not decide to take her on. She is a bit of a gorgon.”

“I am perfectly capable of sitting still as a mouse while the lioness roars at us,” I said firmly.

“Then I shall have seen something I would not have thought possible,” he said with the ghost of a grin, “for I have been under the impression that the only lioness hereabouts is the one from Hertfordshire.”

Darcy

I had gone totally mad.

Not only had I flown to the parsonage in a red-eyed rage, I floated back to my aunt’s dismal mansion in a giddy haze. The urge to release a whoop of joy and to dance a jig around the room nearly overwhelmed me.

Sitting still was impossible. I paced to and fro in front of the window while I struggled for supremacy over surges of undirected energy that strained for release.

Lady Catherine did not notice me at first. She was in her element, lording over poor Sir William Lucas and his frightened youngest daughter Maria. Her efforts to overpower the Bennet sisters, however, fell flat.

The ladies said everything perfectly but without inflections of awe.

Their curtseys were respectful but hardly deep, and they looked around the rooms appraisingly but were visibly unimpressed by all the gilt and crystal.

Elizabeth, I noticed, was careful to speak sparingly, and Mary, well, I could hardly credit she was the same girl known to me in Hertfordshire.

They were ladylike, I concluded, the both of them.

Finally, the tea tray arrived. “Mrs Collins, pour the tea,” my aunt commanded.

Mr Collins jumped to his feet as though he meant to stand behind his wife and hurry her along in this duty, and unequal to watching a pantomime of inanity, I turned away. Behind me, I could hear Richard approach the Bennet sisters.

“My cousin Darcy was recently in Hertfordshire,” he said in a conversational gambit. “Did you happen to meet him there?”

“We had that pleasure, yes,” Elizabeth said in a soft voice.

“And what did you make of him, Miss Bennet?” Richard pressed with a hint of laughter in his voice. He enjoys teasing me when he can.

I held my breath to better hear her speak, but alas, I shall never know what she would have said of me.

“Fitzwilliam, of what are you talking? If you are in conversation, you must speak louder. I must have my share of what you are saying! Well, Miss Bennet? Miss Mary? What is my nephew telling you?”

Lady Catherine’s strident demand grated on my stretched nerves like Black Annis’s iron nails, and I barked at her in anger.

“They were speaking of having made my acquaintance while in Hertfordshire. Richard wished to know if we had met.”

“And did you? Did you meet my nephew, Miss Bennet?”

“Indeed, ma’am. He visited an estate not three miles from my father’s property. I saw him at Sir William Lucas’s home and at a ball at Netherfield.” The tone of Elizabeth’s voice was pitched to betray nothing but the most casual introduction between unrelated persons.

Sir William, hearing an opportunity to be amiable, then interjected with a rambling observation of my general excellence.

I glanced at the Bennet sisters with reddened ears while the man shovelled heaps of unearned praise on my head, and when Elizabeth met my eyes just once with a twinkle of pure irony, I settled.

She and I were in perfect accord. Her look told me so.

I took a breath, pushed away from the window and found a seat near Anne.

Lady Catherine, thrown successfully off the scent of the only real danger in the room, then turned away from the Bennet sisters and ignored them entirely for the rest of the visit.

Richard too seemed to know that he ought not to expose them to the scrutiny of our aunt by his attention, and he moved away to speak to Sir William.

Elizabeth sat back and shared a look with Miss Mary fulsome of affection, support, and strength.

Then and there, under the watchful gaze of Black Annis herself, what had been mere passion for Elizabeth Bennet solidified into unyielding devotion.

How Georgiana would thrive under the umbrella of such a woman’s affection! Lord, how I would thrive in the sphere of her influence! Determined to have her, I began to think of securing her the very first minute of opportunity.

The afternoon progressed at a glacial pace.

The company departed with an invitation to dine in three days, Richard left to write letters, and I went to the steward’s room to make sense of his account books.

Dinner, held at the fashionable hour of town rather than country, subjected us to Lady Catherine’s unrelenting opinions on every subject known to man.

“Kill me,” I mouthed to Richard from across the table.

He caught the butler’s attention and had him pour me another glass of claret.

“I see you are enjoying the wine, Fitzwilliam,” Lady Catherine said.

She called me Fitzwilliam, my given name.

She called Richard by his surname, also Fitzwilliam.

It served as an economy for her because she could speak to us in the manner of scatter-shot from a cannon.

We could assume we were being addressed no matter to which one of us she spoke.

Neither of us replied because long experience had told us no reply was needed.

“My cellar is considered to be the best in Kent. I have always had excellent taste in these things. Sir Lewis used to compliment me for my selections, did he not, Benson?”

Lewis de Bourgh was a drunkard which explained both his ability to be married to my aunt and his early escape from her on account of dropsy.

“I have a large collection of French wine from before the war,” she droned on. “Speaking of the war, why have you not won it yet, Fitzwilliam? If I could but get Wellington’s ear for half an hour, I would tell him what should be done about it.”

By the time she took her sullen daughter and Mrs Jenkinson away, I sank my head on the back rail of my chair in exhaustion. Richard too fell back in his chair and sprawled out his legs. We sat for three quarters of an hour in blessed, stupefied silence.

“We had better go to the parlour,” I mumbled eventually.

“I cannot do it, Darcy. I cannot. If she says one more word about Wellington, I am afraid I shall knock her down. When do we leave?”

Leave Kent? No! I sat straight up in my chair as though doused by a bucket of cold water. “Come,” I said bracingly. “We are only unused to her ways. In no time we shall listen to her as one does a stream burbling over stones. Is that not how we have managed year upon year?”

“I can only do it if I am dead drunk. Pass me the port.”

“Well, drink that and tell Benson to put brandy in your coffee. I need you to steel yourself for my sake.”

Midway through his tall measure of port my cousin looked at me and put his glass down. “Need me?”

“Never mind,” I said. “Can you walk without staggering?”

“I am a soldier, Darcy. I can sleep while marching. If we must go, then let us go at it.”