Page 71 of The Briar Bargain
Miss Bingley picked up her wineglass. “To have produced five suchaccomplisheddaughters. I was under the impression that painting was preferable to pastry. How delightful to be proven wrong." She took a sip.
The silence that followed was immediate and uncomfortable. Miss Bennet's cheeks flushed pink, while Miss Elizabeth grew very still.
Hurst, who had been beginning his second bowl of soup while the conversation flowed around him, suddenly leaned forward in his chair to reach for the bread. His elbow caught the edge of his wine glass, sending it toppling directly into Miss Bingley's lap.
"Mr. Hurst!" Miss Bingley shrieked, leaping to her feet. "You absolute—"
"Terribly sorry," Hurst interrupted to apologise, though in Darcy’s estimation it did not sound sincere. "Did not see it there."
Mrs. Hurst immediately rang for the servants while Miss Bingley stood to dab at her gown, her face flushed with mortification.
Darcy found himself rising instinctively with his hostess, though there was little he could do to assist. Bingley was a single beat behind him. Hurst looked at them both, then grudgingly hauled himself up.
The wine had sprinkled the top of her gown, and she held up her napkin over the spots before regaining her temper. “I shall return as soon as may be,” she told them all. “Please, gentlemen, be seated.” Darcy met Bingley’sgaze, and his friend merely lifted his shoulders. They sat as Miss Bingley strode from the room.
“Ought to be more careful, I suppose,” Hurst grunted, before dropping three more pieces of bread on his plate.
Darcy was not sure to whom Hurst referred, himself or Miss Bingley. He studied Hurst with interest. The man had already returned his attention to his soup.
In Miss Bingley’s absence, the meat course arrived. The roast itself was admirably prepared, though Darcy found his attention somewhat divided between the proper appreciation of Cook's efforts and the curious way Miss Elizabeth approached her meal.
She wielded her knife and fork with a fluidity that verged on artistry, every movement swift, deliberate, and economical. It was neither hurried nor coarse, but rather the manner of someone who had mastered the rhythm of a task and no longer had to think about it. He laughed at himself. His attraction to this woman was bordering on the ridiculous—he was noticing the way in which she conveyed her meal to her mouth and finding it almost lyrical. If Fitzwilliam ever learned of this, he would never hear the end of it.
Which was why Darcy would never, ever confess that he had done such a thing. He returned to his own meal and stopped watching Miss Elizabeth consume hers.
The subject of masters had somehow arisen, and Miss Elizabeth had just finished describing her youngest sister’s intentional habit of misquoting Virgil. Bingley, already halfway through his second glass of claret, leaned back in his chair and grinned.
“Oh, you must ask Darcy about how we firstproperlymet,” he said, with the careless delight of a man about to reveal something not to his friend’s benefit. “It was when I was still at Eton. I was just fourteen, and he—well,he was nineteen and already nearly finished at Cambridge. You only had the Lent term remaining, I think, Darcy?”
“I completed my Tripos in Lent Term.” He hoped Bingley would finish this story and move on.
“So young?” Miss Elizabeth asked.
“He has always been a rather clever chap,” Bingley replied.
Darcy, fork poised halfway to his mouth, fixed Bingley with a look. But Bingley only smiled in a way that Darcy knew from experience meant he would be ignored.
Bingley turned to the ladies. “He had been invited back by the masters as ‘a credit to the school,’ to show the rest of us what attention to our studies might do for us. I daresay half of Eton loathed him on sight.”
“I was one of them,” Hurst muttered around a mouthful of partridge. “Darcy was a year above me, and the way he used to walk across the quad, all tall and superior—”
“I was shorter then,” Darcy said mildly.
“Not by much,” Bingley replied.
“And shy,” Hurst said at the same time. “Could not get a word out of you.”
“Mr. Darcy? Shy?” Elizabeth’s brow lifted in disbelief, but her eyes sparkled with interest.
“No,” Darcy replied. “I was quiet, but never shy.”
“Indeed,” said Bingley. “I believe it was because he had so many thoughts that would not be polite to express.”
“I beg your pardon?” Bingley would make Miss Elizabeth think that he walked about thinking ill of everyone, precisely the image he was working to dispel.
“But as discerning as he was, he only corrected a master’s Latin once. In public, at least.”
“I never heard that story,” Hurst said, putting his cutlery down for the first time since they had been served.
