A Gershwin Touch
"Lizzie, are you telling me you've never heard Will sing before?" Gigi asked incredulously. Then, glaring at her brother: "How could you have let this happen?"
"There wasn't any opportunity," Darcy responded, eyes studiously trained on the coffee table in front of them. "And anyway, I was without your expert accompanying skills." Here, he cautiously raised his eyes to meet his sister's.
"Compliments will only get you so far, dear brother," Gigi countered, though she looked flattered anyway.
Lizzie still wasn't quite sure how this had happened, but she now found herself sitting in the lounge at Darcy's home (another ridiculously large house with a name, this one called Pemberley) along with Fitz, Darcy, and Darcy's sister Gigi who called him Will and had just revealed that Darcy could sing, apparently quite well. And if the conspiratorial glint in Gigi's eye was any indication, Lizzie was about to hear proof of this rumored singing talent.
"I think a trip to the music parlor is in order, don't you, Fitz?" Gigi proposed.
"Definitely. What do you think, Lizzie?"
"I—um… okay?"
"Great!" Gigi bubbled, jumping up from the couch she had been sharing with her brother. She traveled halfway across the room before anyone else had entirely lifted themselves from their seats, but she suddenly stopped mid-stride and spun around to face Lizzie in a flurry of golden curls. "I have an idea!" she exclaimed, "We can record this for your video blog!"
Lizzie was dumbstruck and slightly terrified. Darcy had informed her when he invited her to dinner at his house that his younger sister Gigi had discovered her videos, completely of her own accord (Darcy was very clear that he himself had said nothing about them to Gigi, which Lizzie supposed was comforting). But this new proposition was completely unexpected. Lizzie was not sure how much Darcy would like being put on the spot like this, given that, in the past, his reaction to being on camera resembled nothing so much as a skittish deer about to be mauled by a humvee.
But then (thankfully) she remembered, "Oh, I'm sorry, I don't have any of my equipment with me."
Gigi just grinned. "No worries, Lizzie! You're in the Darcy household. Will's got about twenty different cameras that he's always taking apart and putting back together."
"Oh," Lizzie responded, still a little dazed. "Well, I hope they still work?" she said uncertainly.
"Of course they work," Darcy said shortly, approaching them. Gigi nudged him in the ribs and gave him a look that clearly said, Careful, your social ineptitude is showing.
"I-I mean," he corrected himself, "I always make sure my electronic equipment is in… proper working order." He looked to his sister for confirmation, and she gave him an encouraging smile.
"Wonderful!" Gigi said with finality. "So you'll go get a camera and I'll lead our guests to the music parlor. Sound like a plan, big brother?"
Darcy nodded. Lizzie got the feeling that he would agree to anything so long as it was what his sister wanted, which was sweet, but also slightly troubling.
"Are you sure you want to humiliate yourself on my video blog?" she asked him, trying to strike the right balance between sarcasm and genuine concern. (She wasn't sure her pride would allow unalloyed genuine concern just yet.)
To her surprise, Darcy smiled. (Had she ever seen him smile before?) "On the contrary," he said, "this will be my first appearance on your video blog in which I will not be humiliating myself. I look forward to the opportunity."
Lizzie nodded vaguely, trying to figure out why she still had reservations about all of this.
"Hey, Lizzie B!" Fitz called from halfway down the hallway. "You coming?" He was several paces behind Gigi, who was about to round a corner. Lizzie smiled and jogged to catch up, leaving Darcy to his assigned task. Lizzie's accelerated pace made her very aware of the depth of the plush carpet. She rued her decision to wear heels, as the slim heels sunk more heavily into the depths of the carpet than the wider toes, throwing off her balance and injecting an ungainly wobble into her gait.
"So what do you think?" Fitz asked as Lizzie finally found her stride next to him and they both followed a few paces behind Gigi's quick, purposeful step. "Is he starting to grow on you?"
"Darcy?"
"No, Horace the butler."
"Well, I wasn't too impressed with the way he took my jacket," Lizzie joked, "but by the time he served dessert, I liked Horace pretty well."
Fitz's obligatory smirk was short lived. He was obviously not impressed by this stalling tactic.
Not for the first time, Lizzie suspected Fitz of trying to set her up with Darcy. Come to think of it, Gigi was probably in on it too. Why else would she have suggested this scheme? Maybe this was what made Lizzie so uncomfortable with the whole situation, and particularly with airing this upcoming performance on her video blog. Many of her viewers already shipped her with Darcy pretty fanatically (yes, she had shippers) and Lizzie might have an all-out mutiny on her hands if she posted a video of him singing to her and she came out on the other side of it not acting like a lovesick puppy. People (Fitz, Gigi, the shippers) were expecting her to fall in love, and she resented it because that shouldn't be anyone's decision but her own.
Still, if she had to answer Fitz's question truthfully, "Yes," she admitted, "he's grown on me a little."
Fitz gave her a quizzical look. "Just a little?"
"Just a little," Lizzie responded, her voice taking on an edge of annoyance.
At that point, they reached the music parlor. The plush carpet gave way to a highly polished wood floor on which Lizzie's shoes made a reverberant clack, clack and she found she could balance again. The room was dominated by a glossy black grand piano standing close to the back wall. There were ten or twelve chairs scattered around, as if impromptu concerts were a normal occurrence here, which Lizzie supposed they might very well be. The walls of the room were weirdly uneven, but upon closer inspection, Lizzie found that they weren't walls at all, but wide panels set a few inches away from the walls.
"That's adjustable acoustic paneling," Gigi explained, noting Lizzie's interest. "Will had it installed. You could have a fourth grader play Mary Had a Little Lamb on a recorder in here, and it would still sound gorgeous."
Lizzie tried to be aware of how things sounded in here and how weird slabs of some silvery-gray-colored material she didn't recognize could make a difference, but she had to give up and take Gigi's word for it. After all, Lizzie hadn't really done anything with music since she herself was a fourth grader playing Mary Had a Little Lamb on a recorder. God, she'd hated that class.
Gigi hefted the piano lid in the air a few feet, raised a long black peg from inside the piano, and balanced the lid on it. Then she sat at the piano bench, twiddled the knobs at the sides of the bench for a few moments, and once seemingly satisfied with that, began improvising something that sounded like the tinkly jazz you hear some guy in a tuxedo playing at a fancy restaurant.
Lizzie was still trying to decide what to think of Gigi. In some ways, she was sort of like Jane, sweet and friendly and inclined to think well of everyone, but she was also hyperactively, almost Lydia-ish-ly excited about everything she did or talked about. One thing she definitely wasn't, though, was the smaller female version of Darcy she'd been expecting.
She was tall like her brother, but that was about where the physical similarities ended. She had a large mass of blonde curls that fell helter-skelter down her back and shoulders, a thin, willowy frame, and a fashion sense that was more hippie than hipster, wearing as she did an orange peasant top with a subtle paisley pattern, a flowy brown skirt, and flip-flops with silky, burgundy-colored straps.
Fitz approached Gigi at the piano, observed her playing for a bit, then whispered something in her ear that must have been a shared joke, because they both broke into easy laughter. It was then that Lizzie was suddenly hit by a striking similarity between the two Darcy siblings that she wouldn't have noticed had Darcy not smiled at her so recently—they had precisely the same dimples on both cheeks when they smiled. Somehow, Lizzie couldn't keep from smiling herself at this discovery.
"The man with the camera has arrived!" Fitz announced. Lizzie turned to see Darcy standing in the doorway with a canvas camera bag slung over one shoulder, gripping a tripod in his free hand. His face had returned to its customary impassivity. He walked to a spot in the middle of the room that would afford a good medium-distance view of the piano, and sat down on a nearby chair to begin set-up.
As Darcy began to loosen the legs of the tripod, Lizzie walked over to him and, just as much out of curiosity as a desire to help, reached for the camera bag. Darcy quickly grabbed the bag out of her reach and slid it across the floor to his other side.
Taken aback, Lizzie stammered, "I-I'm sorry, I was just thinking I might be able to help…"
He looked up at her for a moment, seeming to vaguely register that he'd committed a faux pas. "Why don't you finish setting up the tripod?" he asked, handing the apparatus over to her, as if it counted as an appeasement.
"Sure, I know how to do that…" Lizzie tried not to feel insulted, but she had a successful video blog, much of which she shot and edited herself, and she was on the brink of earning an MA in Mass Communications (assuming—fingers crossed—she could get through this thesis project), and Darcy was giving her the complex and technical task of setting up a tripod.
Darcy carefully opened the flap of the camera bag, shooting a surreptitious glance back at Lizzie as he did so. He looked suspiciously like he was hiding something in that bag, though what it might be, Lizzie couldn't guess. He drew out a camera that, by the looks of it, couldn't be more than a month out of the factory, and several times more expensive than her own (which she'd gotten used on eBay a few years back). Her YouTube viewers were in for a high-quality installment of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, that was for sure.
Darcy uncovered the lens, opened the viewfinder, pressed the power button, and began fiddling with the brightness and contrast and other specifics while keeping the lens pointed at the piano. He then mutely handed the camera to Lizzie so she could affix it to the now-assembled tripod. So he's obviously fine with me touching his precious electronics, Lizzie concluded. There must be something in that bag.
Lizzie decided not to be nosy (it had landed her in trouble before), and busied herself with attaching the camera to the tripod. Once she thought the set-up was stable enough, she fiddled with some of the dials and menus herself, though she found that in just about every instance, Darcy's settings were exactly what they needed to be.
"So what do you think of the camera?" Darcy asked as he approached carrying a microphone.
"Oh! It's… impressive." Lizzie said truthfully. This thing was ridiculously sleek and streamlined and had a touch screen viewfinder—definitely fancier than anything she'd ever worked with before. Not that she should expect anything less from something belonging to Darcy.
Darcy began attaching the mic to the camera, and Lizzie took a step back to allow him space to do his work. "It can record at a resolution of 1920 by 1080," Darcy said as if reciting from a user manual, "and its 1/3 in. image sensor allows for a more balanced level of exposure and higher degree of sharpness than a lot of similar cameras."
"Well," Lizzie laughed, "I am appropriately jealous."
"Do you want to have it?" Darcy made the offer without so much as the blink of an eye.
"What?" Lizzie had apparently spoken loudly enough to distract Gigi and Fitz from their playful banter. They stared. Lizzie almost couldn't breathe. This was too much.
After a pause, Darcy ventured to speak again, "I mean, like Gigi said, I've got about twenty cameras… twenty-three to be exact."
For five dizzying seconds, Lizzie almost convinced herself to take this unexpected and far too extravagant gift, but then she remembered several reasons why this would be a bad idea: it would give Darcy the wrong impression of her feelings and intentions, she didn't want to be a freeloader, she didn't want to try to explain to Charlotte why the vlog content she was sending was suddenly crazy high-quality…
"No," she answered at length. "No, I like my own camera. I'm used to it." That wasn't one of the reasons.
Darcy nodded and didn't argue. "Well, I think it's all set up. Gigi, could we do a quick sound test?"
Gigi grinned and headed for the piano. "Sure thing, big brother!" She punctuated her statement with a musical flourish.
Lizzie, still slightly dazed from the events of the past minute or so, made her way over to Fitz and sat down in a chair next to where he was standing.
"Did Darcy seriously just offer to give you his camera?" Fitz asked incredulously.
Lizzie nodded mutely.
Fitz laughed. "That's something he would do, too. He's just really generous like that, you know…" he said with a nudge and a smile.
Lizzie was not in the mood to tolerate this kind of prodding. "Yeah, but did he even think about the fact that there are about a thousand reasons why I could never accept a gift like that?"
"No. This is Darcy we're talking about," Fitz reasoned. "But it's not like he did it to buy your favor or anything. He just likes you."
Lizzie sighed and rubbed the bridge of her nose. "Fitz, I know he's your friend and everything, but just… please stop."
Fitz looked mutinous for a moment, but then nodded his capitulation.
At that moment Gigi approached them. "It's all ready!" she announced. "Oh, and Lizzie, would you mind taking off your shoes? They're kind of loud."
"Oh, I'm sorry!" Lizzie reached for the buckle on her right shoe, once again regretting her decision to wear heels.
"Don't be! It's not like you came here planning to record music," Gigi shrugged. "Anyway, we need you to be in charge of the camera, if you would be so kind." Gigi offered a hand to help Lizzie up, which she happily accepted. Somehow, it was difficult to hold on to a sour mood when Gigi was around.
"I was thinking I could start the video off with an introduction… you know, introduce me and Will and welcome him on stage like a real mini-recital."
"Yeah, okay," Lizzie said.
"I mean, I know it's your vlog and everything, and you have the final say." Gigi suddenly looked tense and nervous. "I realize I kinda sprung this whole thing on you and I don't want to step on any toes—"
"No, really, it'll be great," Lizzie reassured her. "The viewers will love it. And I have to admit, I'm pretty curious myself." She directed this last statement partially toward Darcy as they approached him and his camera.
"Well, I promise, you won't be disappointed," Gigi declared, smiling proudly up at her brother.
Darcy looked down and directed a small, shy smile at the feet of the tripod. It was kind of adorable.
"It's all set up," Darcy said, looking up at Lizzie. "I assume you know how to press record?"
"I think I can manage that," Lizzie answered with a smirk. "Places?" Gigi dutifully took her place standing in front of the curve of the piano, while Darcy hovered off-camera on stage right. Lizzie noted that Darcy, for some reason only he knew about, was still wearing the camera bag over his shoulder.
"Ooh! Can I yell 'action'?" Fitz asked, assuming the expression of a five-year-old asking for a pony ride.
Lizzie rolled her eyes, "Yeah, fine," she conceded as she pressed record. "Go ahead."
Fitz held out his hands in front of the camera in imitation of a clapperboard. "And… ACTION!" he cried as he clapped his two hands together.
Gigi smiled at the camera. "Hi! I'm Gigi Darcy, younger sister to Will Darcy (but I'm the only one who's allowed to call him Will). It has come to my attention that the internet in general, and Lizzie Bennet in particular, is unaware of my brother's truly exceptional singing skills. I have decided that this must be remedied. So, for your viewing and listening pleasure, please welcome to the stage of the Pemberley music parlor… William Darcy!"
As Darcy approached the piano, Fitz clapped loudly from his seat next to the camera. "Yeah, Darcy! Wooo!" he cheered, completely unselfconscious of the fact that he was the only one cheering. Lizzie politely joined in at the tail end of his clapping.
Darcy whispered something to Gigi who smiled and nodded and took her seat at the piano. She played a few soft, rolling chords, pausing to let the final chord hang in the air for a moment as she looked to her brother expectantly. Darcy, taking his cue, began to sing:
"Our romance won't end on a sorrowful note,
Though by tomorrow, you're gone.
The song is ended, but as the songwriter wrote,
The melody lingers on."
After hearing Darcy's singing talent praised so effusively by his sister, Lizzie was glad to learn that Gigi was by no means exaggerating. His voice carried over the easy, loping strains of Gigi's accompaniment in a bright, clear tenor. It was so unexpected, so different from low, gruff speaking voice. It reminded Lizzie of the difference between his dimpled smiling face and his habitual emotionless expression.
"They may take you from me—
I'll miss your fond caress—
But though they'll take you from me,
I'll still possess…"
Here, Lizzie discovered why Darcy continued to wear the camera bag over his shoulder, even on camera, and why he'd been so defensive against her looking inside it while they were setting up, because now he withdrew from its depths—the hat. The newsie hat. He flipped it onto his head with a suave motion as he continued to sing:
"The way you wear MY hat,"
At this line, Fitz let out a loud guffaw, Gigi giggled (though, of course, she didn't miss a note of her accompaniment), and even Lizzie couldn't hold back smirk. Darcy's own expression betrayed just a hint of a smile.
"The way you sip your tea,
The mem'ry of all that,
No, no, they can't take that away from me…"
His singing, like his manner in general, was more formal than what Lizzie was used to. In fact, it sounded similar to the old recordings where the singers seemed unsure of how far they were allowed to depart from classical tone and diction for a jazz number. It was the kind of singing that made his newsie hat seem like less of a joke… as if, despite the smart phone in his pocket and his encyclopedic knowledge of audio-visual equipment, he really belonged in the 1920s or something.
"The way your smile just beams,
The way you sing off-key,
The way you haunt my dreams,
No, no, they can't take that away from me."
Here, Darcy glanced back at Gigi, who joined in singing backup harmonies. Their voices blended perfectly, as if they were made to sing together. The easy companionship Lizzie had seen evidence of throughout the evening was communicated all the more clearly through the music.
"We may never, never meet again on the bumpy road to love,
Still I'll always, always keep the mem'ry of…"
Darcy's gaze, which until now had been directed anywhere and everywhere else (on Gigi, on the camera, on the floor), now focused directly on Lizzie. For the first time, she fully understood that this was a man in love. Of course, he'd said as much to her before, but the look in his eyes at that time, while intense, had also held a certain measure of anger and frustration. Now, all of that had long since passed, and Lizzie felt the full impact of the admiration, longing, and sadness in his expression.
"The way you hold your knife,
The way we danced 'til three,
The way you changed my life,
No, no, they can't take that away from me,
No, they can't take that away from me."
He continued to hold her gaze as he finished singing and Gigi's accompaniment floated up to a soft and dreamlike conclusion. There was silence for a few moments. Lizzie felt instinctively that she should not be the first to break eye contact. After a moment, she smiled and began clapping. Fitz joined in enthusiastically, pausing only to whistle loudly on his fingers. Darcy smiled broadly, dimples and all, and gave a bow. Then he acknowledged his sister with a wave of his hand. She stood and they bowed together.
And that was the end of the recording.
—
"The song is ended, but as the songwriter wrote,
The melody lingers on…"
It was nearly one in the morning when Lizzie gave up on sleeping. She slipped out of her aunt's guest bed and padded over to the armchair that sat by the window overlooking the back yard. Random snatches of Darcy's song kept tumbling around in her head as she watched the palm trees swaying in the breeze.
She had long since stopped hating Darcy. Those feelings had gone pretty quickly after reading his letter. She had since learned to respect him. And now, seeing him in his own home with his own sister where he was more comfortable (more himself?), she could even say that she liked him. But he was obviously still in love with her, and that was quite a different matter.
If she wanted, all she had to do was say a word, and she'd be dating a rich, successful, handsome man who was hopelessly in love with her. He probably wouldn't hesitate to give her expensive gifts like that camera every day if she'd let him. Now that she liked him well enough, she had to admit it was tempting.
But it wasn't fair. She could never in good conscience enter into a relationship with him unless she knew that she loved him every bit as much as he loved her. Anything less would be an insult to them both. She had to admit that she was warming up to him more. When she thought of his smooth singing voice, his unexpectedly bright smile, she had to wonder if she might be able to come to love him some day, but then she remembered just how rare a pleasure it was to see this side of him—she'd seen nothing of it in her entire acquaintance with him before today.
She would have to wait and observe the development of her own feelings. She still had a few weeks left in this leg of her internship. Perhaps she would know what to think of all of this by the end of it.
—-
A/N: A huge thanks to smooshless ( ) for the technical help. I really have no knowledge of cameras, but agree that this one ( . /reviews/photo-video/3353670/canon-xa10-review/) looks pretty mouthwatering.
A/N2: Yes, this story is in response to my discovery of this video ( watch?v=84qBOpgtTyc). Because who could possibly watch that and not end up with a head canon in which Darcy has a gorgeous voice and he sings to Lizzie to try to get her to fall in love with him? I ran into a slight snag because I don't think Darcy would sing like Daniel does in the video, but I ended up visualizing (audiating?) a combination of Daniel's vocal timbre with Fred Astaire's style in the recording linked below.
A/N3: The song I have Darcy singing here is They Can't Take That Away from Me by George Gershwin ( watch?v=LKxAae-WJEM). I changed one word. Guess which one it is. ;) The title of the story is a line from Prelude to a Kiss by Duke Ellington ( watch?v=4263-0_wzLU). So yay for classic Jazz standards! (How's that for a vintage gramophone sound?)