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It had already been a tiring day, and Darcy was not quite in the best sorts. He wanted to be at home already — to change out of his riding gear, have some tea or a glass of water, turn in as early as he possibly could and bury his face in a pillow. Tomorrow there would be guests to wrangle, and support to give Georgiana, and estate business to catch up on, but for right now he just wanted to do nothing and feel exhausted.
This was not, perhaps, the safest mood to ride a horse in, but Pemberley was in sight and this was not a new horse, or a new horseman. Both mount and rider knew the way, no matter whether the rider's mind was focused more on blankets than the road.
It was in this sort of haze, moving only because he was already in motion, that (the horse dismounted and put back in the stable, his gloves removed, though he couldn't quite remember doing either thing) he found himself thudding into someone he had not noticed in his path.
A surprised squalk, the nose that briefly squished into his chest falling backwards — he caught a hand, to stop whoever he'd knocked over from hitting the ground.
He was suspended, eyes facing the sky, held up by a hand — the one he'd grabbed? No, grabbing his, fingers squashed together — letting out a breath he hadn't taken.
Other things were strange, past the first surprise. Every thing was a little bit louder, the leaves he could see more clearly delineated than they ought to be. Something was pulling his hair — not painfully, but somewhat strangely. It did not — and this startled him somewhat to his senses — feel as though he were wearing any breeches.
Darcy lifted his head, looked forward, saw his own face. Jaw slack, eyes wide. Brow furrowing, now — head tilting — mouth never closing, but moving from an opening of shock towards a confused, voiceless question. He really could not answer.
"Lizzy!" Came a voice, not one he knew, and there were people helping him properly onto his feet. Onto someone else's feet, rather — onto 'Lizzy's. And if only he could banish the part of himself that hoped that that somehow meant Elizabeth Bennet were here, and would be disappointed when it turned out it was one of the innumerable other Elizabeths in the country who got called 'Lizzy'. Even were it rational, now was really not the time. "Lizzy are you all right?"
"Yes," responded Darcy's face, before 'Lizzy' recollected herself, "that is, she seems to be — are you not?"
It was not, somehow, quite Darcy's voice. A little too high, just a bit off — it sounded strikingly like his father, far more than like himself.
"No —" it was not Miss Elizabeth, or not the woman he meant by 'Miss Elizabeth'. Her voice was higher than this, it sounded different, "no, no, I am quite well. Thank you."
"I am very sorry — I was not looking where I was going."
It was unclear, to Darcy, whether what was not a cover in this was meant as a genuine apology or a subtle critique, but in any case his own was required. "I must second your apology, as I was not either."
"Then with both of us at fault neither one of us can be, and we must both be forgiven."
There was a grin across his cheeks (hers, rather, this was all so dreadfully odd!) before it registered that there was going to be. Darcy thought such an expression required more nudging, normally, but could not be quite sure.
"Your logic," he caught a 'madam' before it left her lips, corrected course, "sir, is impeccable."
'Lizzy' made an awkward, aborted attempt to curtsy in breeches. It must be hoped that Darcy was the only one to notice.
It was here that Mr Parker, Pemberley's gardener (who Darcy had not noticed, in all the bustle, but who must have been conducting the tour), stepped into the scene. He was quite surprised to see Mr Darcy (who hoped that he had imagined the flash of horror on his own face, and that it had passed unnoticed by everybody else) home so soon, and was there anything wrong?
'Lizzy' shot him a subtle, questioning look. He shook her head. She looked relieved, and replied "No, all is well, I was simply a little overtired."
Mr Parker nodded, welcomed him home, stepped away.
"Well," she laughed, looking entirely unlike him, "you now know my name, may I have yours? Of course," a glance Darcy's way. Apologetic? "I have met Miss Elizabeth already."
This concession was a good thing. It allowed Darcy to let other people speak (Mr and Mrs Gardiner, apparently — the brother and sister-in-law of Mrs Bennet) while his brain exploded.
Elizabeth was here. Elizabeth was in his body. He was in hers. It was somewhere around obscene and masochistic to be glad to see her in these circumstances. He was anyway, and could not pretend not to be.
She had said 'have met', rather than 'know'.
Pleasure, pain and perplexity engaged in a fast and silent battle for dominance, which the last was winning but had not won when Darcy was next called upon to speak.
"You have been well, since last we met, I hope?"
Whether her question was at all an honest query of himself, or only her acting a role and requesting the same of him, he could not know. He replied as if it were the former.
"Well enough, and you?"
"Likewise."
What was there to say? In front of her relations, and his gardener, almost nothing. He could not ask about her trip, because that would look bizarre. She could not ask about her trip, because he knew nothing about it beyond what roads would be taken between Meryton (or London, maybe) and here.
Even the details of Matlock and Dove dale were off-limits — he knew that she had been, and something in the area of when. He knew the areas themselves like the back of his hand, but he did not currently have his hands. Precise dates, opinions, what had been seen and what had not, the Gardiners knew and he did not.
"Nice weather, today."
Eventually — after, perhaps, two centuries and a decade or so of talking about the weather, and the solidity of the ground from not too much rain lately, and what some plant by the water might be — Mr Parker had left to attend other duties (figuring that his master could take over the tour, and lucky that one of his guests actually could), Elizabeth's aunt and uncle had paired up and fallen behind, and she and Mr Darcy were freed to talk.
It should surprise no one that they took a while to get going.
Mr Darcy stiffly offered an arm, Elizabeth took it, the fact that she had to lean over to do it alerted them both that they had gone about things backwards.
They fixed it.
She laughed.
Mr Darcy, with her face, looked deeply uncomfortable.
She composed herself as best she could.
"So."
"So."
Someone cleared the other's throat.
"What do you think happened?"
From Mr Darcy's expression (much easier to read, on her own face) he had to work himself up to say it. Like reading out a stiff line from a very silly novel. "We appear to have exchanged bodies."
Elizabeth did not snipe that she could see that. Under the circumstances, she was not sure what else could have been said. She certainly had no proper theories.
He looked up at her, confused and maybe frightened. "What do you think we ought to do about it?"
She shrugged, quite as expressively as she could, with the arm Mr Darcy was not holding. "I have not the faintest clue how to raise the subject with my aunt and uncle — I, certainly, would not believe it if I were not living it myself, and they do not know you well enough to be confident you would not make this up with me for a prank."
This, evidently, was too interesting a statement to leave be. "And you, who they do know, they would not put such past?"
"Oh, far less so because they know me, I assure you. I would and have," Elizabeth considered, for a moment, whether what she said next was too personal a thing to say to him. Then the mixture of what he had told her about his sister and the fact that he was currently literally inside her body made her decide that — if such a line still existed — it had been crossed before and was now sure to be so again, "Before my first ball I was nervous and Kitty — my sister Catherine — was envious, so we did our best for half a day to impersonate one another so she could go in my stead. I was playing about and distracting myself from my nerves, but she was truly disappointed when it did not work."
He laughed. Not more than twice, but Elizabeth did not know if she had ever heard Mr Darcy laugh before. Probably she had, and in a sense she was not now — it was, after all, her voice, her mannerisms, her laugh in every sense but who was doing it — but she really was not sure.
"In any case," she soldiered on, "we cannot assume that a solution will present itself within the next few days, and even if we think of a way to explain this to my aunt and uncle I do not think we can explain it to everyone."
"No. Most likely not. Mrs Reynolds, I think, would believe us if you asked her to, but I have guests coming tomorrow, and am quite sure Mrs Hurst would not."
"Why Mrs Hurst specifically?"
Mr Darcy furrowed her brow. "Pardon me — I ought not to have said — I cannot think of a way to express this that does not come off rather terribly."
"Unfortunately, sir, you have now made me curious, and an analysis may be useful, in deciding how to proceed. Do not be worse than you must, of course, but circumstances are dire."
"Well… Her husband would likely go along with it regardless, such that his belief or disbelief does not matter. Her brother —" a pause of awkwardness; a look, perhaps, of shame, "Believes me far too easily, and since he also views you as a trustworthy source I think us agreeing on almost anything has a fair chance of convincing him of it. Her sister would agree without too much trouble to nearly anything I (rather, at present, you) said, whether she believed it or not. If you have met any of my other guests, it is by coincidence and I do not know it, so it would be strange for me to reference them so. Mrs Hurst, though, would think me mad — and thus unfit for her sister — if we explained this situation to her, and without a goal of attaching me to her would be the most willing to contradict me about it."
"What I am hearing, here, is that most of your friends would believe us, or behave as though they did, surprisingly easily."
"This is extrapolation, from how they normally behave — perhaps my saying what oughtn't be possible would push them to act in ways I do not expect, perhaps Mrs Hurst swapped bodies with someone years before I met her and would believe us at once, perhaps any number of things. It is really too strange a circumstance to speculate about, with any accuracy."
That was very true, and adding more uncertainty, just at the minute, seemed rather unwise. All was so confusing as it was, without attempting to explain past others' confusion. Besides which, how was such a conversation supposed to be begun?
"If it lasts until the trip is due to end," she said, after all this had been canvassed, "Then we must tell someone — my aunt at the least, but probably more. We can have a bit of time to think it through ourselves, but we can hardly be living one another's lives so many miles away from one another. Besides, a week should give us time enough to think through some way to explain."
This was agreed to, details were hashed out — that Elizabeth ought to invite her uncle fishing, when the others caught up; that Miss Darcy wished to meet her, and thus arranging for Mr Darcy to visit his own house and be introduced to his own sister ought to be easy enough; all the details of his guests that Elizabeth did not know, which were crucial to the story only in that not knowing them would cause her issues, which knowing them averted.
They discussed how to ensure each received what mail was sent them. Mr Darcy gave directions to his quarters, and the name of his valet. The Gardiners reached them, were invited inside, accepted.
"…And there is something about his mouth, when he speaks, et cetera…"
The blush, at that, was quite involuntary. There was something particularly odd about overhearing things not meant for one's ears said to one's face.
A pair of stockings were pulled from amongst their brethren without much thought, unfolded, stared at. It was almost as much darned as knit, with half what was not darned grown thin enough to need it. Comparing one stocking's size to that of Elizabeth's calf, he could not even think it would comfortably fit.
Why would she pack this? To be sure, the Bennets' financial situation was not great, but there could be no cause for Elizabeth to need to wear something like this. Especially with how much she walked; Longbourn to Oakham Mount and back in these would give her blisters. A glance at her heels confirmed there were none.
None of her other stockings were like this. There was the occasional darn on a pair or two, but never somewhere uncomfortable and never such as made the garment ugly, which these certainly were.
Deciding he had spent far too much time thinking about Elizabeth's stockings, Darcy was flattening them out to fold them again when he noticed an odd lump in one. A moment's shaking revealed a letter.
He only picked it up to put it back. Darcy would by no means read her post, and absolutely not anything she had deliberately hidden. The situation involved so much involuntary invasion of privacy, to infringe upon what remained would be an even worse act than to read someone else's letters in the first place.
He recognised his own handwriting.
Instantly the thought of his self-decieved bitterness in writing the letter, the conviction that he had said things he ought not in a way designed to hurt, flooded him with mortification. After four months, he could not say precisely what wording he had used.
It could not be an invasion of privacy to read a letter he himself had written.
All the letter served to do, in one so remorseful already, was to enrage Darcy against himself. He spotted every flaw, every sour phrase, every flimsy excuse. He missed all that Elizabeth had eventually seen of his consideration, his inability to retain that bitterness against herself, his good motivations. Those remained, while the bitterness and excuses did not, and so they were invisible to him.
He ended the letter tense, determined to apologise, certain any apology would only make her hate him more than she must already, and then he saw the smudge beside the 'God bless you' he had ended with.
A tap with Elizabeth's thumb confirmed what had instantly been guessed — the size and shape matched perfectly.
The trembling in her lower lip was rather harshly stilled with a bite, hard enough to hurt. Darcy released it in a moment — this was not his body and he would not, by any means, harm her.
Had he his own lip to work with, he'd have bitten to blood.
Certainly, very certainly, Elizabeth had read the letter — read it quite a bit, by the state of the paper. And to carry it with her, so many months after the fact — not only to keep it, still, but to bring it along in her luggage… it seemed to mean that it had value to her. That it mattered. That he —
Darcy was not going to think that. There could be any number of reasons to carry the letter about that did not speak of any sort of tenderness towards him. And the stockings were atrocious; it might have been packed when she left Kent and simply never unpacked between one trip and another.
He fitted her thumb in the print beside his adieu again, and almost smiled.
In the absence of lip biting, it took a great deal of blinking and deep swallows to be presentable for breakfast.
Elizabeth had never really thought of herself as looking like Jane. Their appearances were so often contrasted by (Mrs Bennet) other people, and there was quite a bit to set them apart. Jane's hair was curlier, and darker. Her eyes were lighter, and further apart. Her nose was straighter, and did not have freckles.
Mr Darcy, certainly, did not look like Jane. His hair was darker and curlier still, his face a quite different shape, and if anyone had ever had cause to compare their appearances they would have found them no more alike than two random gentle folk from different parts of England with no mutual relatives in at least the last century were likely to be.
Even in these last few days where he'd been wearing Elizabeth's face, Darcy (the 'Mister' started feeling weird, when one was being called by it) had not looked particularly Jane-like. His expressions were not, she thought, always quite like her own, but while there were sometimes flashes of other Bennets (and a somewhat surprising amount of her uncle Gardiner) Jane was not a particularly frequent visitor.
But this face, now, was entirely her. Specifically, the rather green and shaky Jane of when Elizabeth was twelve, explaining as gently as she could (and it was Jane, so that was very) that her nose was going to need to be set, and what that meant, and that it was definitely going to hurt. The 'this is scary and unpleasant, and seeing you in pain is the worst thing in the world, but I am going to be right here holding your hand because it's worse for you than me and I love you' kind of Jane face.
Elizabeth was not at all sure she wanted to know what was in that letter. Almost as sure as she was going to find out.