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Sally, having delivered a message about another bundle Martha was to send to the house, asked leave to return. Elizabeth assured the maid that the path would be easy enough to follow, and Martha began laying out the clean cloths meant for Mrs. Reynolds.
They had fallen into comfortable conversation when a man’s step sounded outside.
Anna turned so suddenly toward the door that Elizabeth tightened her arm about her.
“You are expecting someone, I think,” Elizabeth told Anna.
Mr. Darcy stooped beneath the lintel and stopped just inside. “Miss Bennet.”
Elizabeth had been preparing to greet him easily, but his evident surprise checked her. His gaze went from her face to the baby and then to Martha.
“My sister sent some linen,” Elizabeth explained. “I wished for a walk and offered to bring it.”
“Mrs. Bingley is very kind.” Darcy drew off his gloves.
“They belonged to the young ladies themselves, sir,” Martha said. She lifted the gown from the table. “Their mother kept them. Miss Bennet has been mending this one for Anna.”
Darcy looked at the little sleeve, then at Elizabeth. “Your own clothes?”
“I have very little prospect of wanting them again. Jane assures me there is enough left for her baby.”
He did not smile at her answer. He touched the edge of the sleeve with a care that made her wish she had answered him more seriously.
“Will you thank your sister for me?” he asked. “And allow me to thank you.”
“It was only a little sewing.”
His eyes rested upon hers a moment longer. Anna interrupted with a demanding sound and a movement of both arms toward him.
The change in his expression was immediate.
“You will have to excuse me,” Elizabeth told the child. “I had no notion our acquaintance was so easily surpassed.”
Darcy came forward, and she rose to place Anna in his arms. He took her without the least uncertainty, supporting her against his shoulder while she fastened upon the edge of his coat. The movement was familiar to them both. Elizabeth had never seen him look so entirely occupied with another person.
“Have you been troublesome?” he asked the baby.
“She has behaved beautifully, sir,” Martha said.
“Then this is a reward,” Darcy said.
He took a small case from his pocket and offered it to Martha to open. Inside lay a silver rattle, its polished bells moving against one another as she lifted it. Anna stretched toward the sound. Darcy let her close her fingers about the handle, keeping his own beneath it until she had a proper hold.
“There. Is that preferable to my neckcloth?”
The child struck the rattle against his lapel and looked delighted.
Elizabeth smiled before she could help it. His tone was so different from the grave civility she had heard in the house that she felt she had come upon something private. The gentleman who had sounded so grave over arrangements for tea was prepared to be struck repeatedly with a silver toy and call it good conduct.
Darcy looked up and found Elizabeth watching. His smile faded.
Elizabeth became aware of the shutters, the repaired roof, the nurse quietly folding linen at the table. None of these things ought to have required an explanation. Yet taken together with his surprise at finding her there, they made her wonder whose child she had just been holding.
Her Aunt Phillips had once told a story, over tea and with a great many injunctions against repeating it, of a gentleman who maintained a child with the wife of one of his tenants. Elizabeth had objected chiefly to the pleasure her aunt took in telling it. She had not supposed she would ever have occasion to recall the arrangement herself.
“You are an old friend of Anna’s,” Elizabeth said.
“I have known her from her birth,” Darcy replied.
