Free The True Darcy Spirit by Elizabeth Aston Page A

have the pleasure of her own company for a while. She had a small sketchbook tucked in her reticule, and after a stroll along the Broad Walk, she sat herself on a bench and became absorbed in drawing the details of the scene around her.
    She felt, rather than saw, a hovering presence, and looked up. Ayoung man was standing a few feet away, watching her intently. As she saw him, he bowed, and apologised for disturbing her.
    “You do not do so, and you will not do so if you walk on,” she said. He was a gentleman, by his voices and clothes. A good-looking man, with dark red hair and a pale complexion that spoke of Celtic ancestry. She wondered if he were going to make a nuisance of himself, try to scrape her acquaintance, but he took off his hat, bowed once more, and apologised again for disturbing her, then strode away.
    Her work interrupted, she made an impromptu sketch of the redheaded man she had just encountered, for there was a liveliness about him that she liked. Then she returned to her earlier sketch, working diligently and, as so often when absorbed in a picture, losing all sense of time.
    She was jolted out of her work by Petifer’s indignant voice sounding in her ears: “I knew how it would be, once you sat down and took out that sketchbook. The service finished a good while ago, everyone is out of church now.”
    “We were to meet in the lower part of town,” said Cassandra, as she tucked away her sketchbook and pencil.
    “I knew I would still be there waiting for you an hour hence, so I came to find you.”
    “What time does Mrs. Cathcart return from church, do you suppose?” Cassandra asked as they set off down the hill and back towards Laura Place.
    “It’s a long service at that chapel she goes to, from what the servants say, and I think they talk together afterwards.”
    “If we hurry, we shall be home before her,” Cassandra said, and quickened her pace.
    Which they were, by a few moments, but that was enough for Petifer to vanish into the basement, and for Cassandra to run upstairs and whisk off her hat. As they ate a nuncheon of cold meats, Mrs. Cathcart interrogated Cassandra on the sermon she had heard, which questions Cassandra was hard put to answer, falling back in the end on memories of one of the Hunsford parson’s less dull sermons. However, Mrs. Cathcart wasn’t really interested in what passed for asermon in the Church of England, and instead bored Cassandra with a detailed account of the excellent sermon that the Reverend Snook had preached.
    Cassandra was startled by Mrs. Cathcart’s enthusiasm for fire and brimstone and the tortures of the damned, and she wondered whether her aunt felt that she was numbered among the sinners and likely to pay for those sins in the world to come.
    “Tomorrow,” Mrs. Cathcart informed her, “I have arranged a treat for you.”
    Cassandra’s heart sank.
    “We are to go for a picnic, on Lansdowne. Bath is very stuffy just now, and it will do us good to breathe a fresher air for a few hours. Mrs. Quail and her daughter will accompany us, and some others. We shall be quite a little party.”

Chapter Eight
    Mr. Northcott, who was engaged to Miss Quail, was a stolid young man with a large nose and an air of self-consequence. Miss Quail hung upon his arm and simpered and smirked, while Mrs. Quail beamed her approval: “Such a handsome young couple, don’t you think? And”—in a whisper—“an income of at least two thousand a year.”
    They went in an open carriage, with the young ladies sitting forward, and Mr. Northcott trotting alongside on horseback. It was a slow haul up the steep hills, but the air became noticeably better as they made the ascent, and Cassandra was, after all, glad that she had come.
    Mrs. Quail had arranged a meeting place, a shady spot beneath some trees, and they were the first to arrive. “We are waiting for Mrs. Lawson and her daughter, a most amiable creature, very young, only just out of the schoolroom,” Mrs.