by Jessie Lewis
“And, um, who will Mary have?”
Mary would have to wait, it seemed. Her mother had stormed away in a cloud of smelling salt vapours without nominating a beau for her.
***
After her mother’s third instruction to leave Mr. Bingley alone, Elizabeth stole away from the main party in search of solitude. She had only spoken to him in an effort to disguise Jane’s reluctance to do so—an increasingly difficult endeavour. She comprehended her sister’s unwillingness to surrender her heart too easily, but Jane’s present guardedness was beginning to look like indifference. At this rate, there was a real danger she would frighten Mr. Bingley off before her mother had the chance.
Elizabeth settled herself beneath a tree and took out the letter she had received that morning from Mrs. Gardiner. She had not long been reading it when Mr. Bingley himself came upon her, breathing heavily and looking excessively hot.
“I beg your pardon,” he panted, bending forward with his hands on his knees to catch his breath.
“It is I who must beg your pardon. I did not think anybody would notice if I slipped away for a short time.”
“Do not make yourself uneasy. I am not part of a search party.” He straightened, put his hands on his hips, and grimaced, no less short of breath. “Well, I am, but you are not the quarry. I am after our cricket ball.”
“Oh, you are playing cricket? You were speaking with Jane when I left you.”
“I was, but…” He coloured slightly and looked at his feet. “I do not think your sister much cared for my talk of Nova Scotia. Goulding saw me standing idle and press-ganged me into the game.”
Elizabeth attempted not to allow her frustration to show. “Pray do not mistake Jane’s serenity for indifference, sir. She often prefers to listen to other people’s opinions on a subject before forming her own.” At least, that used to be true.
Several bellows of “OUT!” from beyond the crest of the rise confirmed someone else had found the ball.
“Excellent, that saves me a job,” Mr. Bingley said, puffing out his cheeks. He took out his handkerchief and mopped his brow. Then, with a quizzical look, added, “May I be so bold as to enquire what that is?”
Elizabeth followed his gaze to the crayon sketch in her lap. “Oh, ’tis me!” she said, laughing. “My cousin drew it. She is but four years old. I have not seen her for nearly a month. I think it a very good attempt from memory.”
He agreed it was, enquiring afterwards whether she saw her relatives in London often.
“Not as often as I should like,” she answered, refolding the pages of her letter. “And my aunt writes with news of another delay. I am to accompany her and my uncle on a tour of the northern counties in the summer, but it seems my uncle’s business will prevent us leaving as soon as we had planned or staying away as long. We will no longer be able to travel as far as Yorkshire.”
“That is a great shame.” He perched farther down the same root upon which she was sitting. “I was raised there. It is a wonderful part of the country.”
“I hope to still see it one day, but for now, I shall have to content myself with Derbyshire.”
“That is no great hardship. Derbyshire is delightful. You will enjoy walking in the Peak, I think. And you could visit Pemberley while you are there.”
The mention of Mr. Darcy’s home so thoroughly unsettled Elizabeth that she stumbled over her reply but managed to make it known she thought it unlikely he would appreciate her visiting.
“Nonsense! Darcy takes great pleasure in entertaining his friends at Pemberley. I daresay he would be delighted were you to visit.”
Something tugged inside her to think of the extent to which she and Mr. Darcy must now be removed from friends. Then she rallied indignantly with the remembrance of his avowed disdain for her connections. He would not be delighted to receive her at Pemberley with her relations from Cheapside in tow.
“You ought to go,” Mr. Bingley said, a sly grin overtaking his countenance, “if only to hear Mrs. Reynolds’ panegyric on him.”
“Mrs. Reynolds?”
“His housekeeper. She is a delightful lady—most amenable, very intelligent—but excessively fond of Darcy.”
“Does she not have good reason to be so?”
“Oh, certainly. Only she does rather like to boast of his virtues. She has a sort of paean to which all tourists and visitors are subjected.” To her vast amusement, he affected a falsetto voice and screeched, “The best landlord, the best master that ever lived! Never had a cross word from him in my life, and I have known him since he was four! He is sweet-tempered, generous-hearted, good-natured!” With each accolade, he flopped his head from side to side. “Affable to the poor, revered by his tenants and servants, the most wonderful brother, and”—he put the heels of his palms together under his chin and splayed his fingers—“I am sure I know none so handsome!”
It was too much. Elizabeth burst into laughter. “I have no need to go there now since you have acted her part so faithfully!”
“As I said, it is quite something.”
“It is a very fine account,” she observed, for notwithstanding the silliness of his performance, every commendation he attributed to the housekeeper was favourable to Mr. Darcy’s character, and what praise could be more valuable than the praise of an intelligent servant?
“And justly given,” he assured her.
“You are very good to speak so highly of him.”
He shrugged lightly. “It is no effort to speak highly of good friends. Which brings me full circle: Darcy speaks very highly of you. He would be very well pleased if you were to visit Pemberley.”
Elizabeth scarcely knew what she said in response but nodded gratefully when he suggested they join the other guests.
Great was her confusion! Mr. Bingley had been in company with Mr. Darcy more recently than she. What could possibly have been said—or not said—to make him think his friend still held her in high esteem? And what did it matter? For if, despite everything, Mr. Darcy still felt some lingering regard for her, it only made both their situations more pitiable. No man so savagely rejected could ever concede to rekindling such a disastrous acquaintance. Knowing that did not prevent her from examining endlessly every new morsel of information about him she had gleaned.
***
It was true. Darcy did speak highly of Miss Elizabeth. He wondered that such an endorsement had not occurred to him sooner. Unsure why he did so and deliberately giving it as little thought as possible, Bingley slipped the piece of folded paper she had dropped into his inside coat pocket and went to re-join the cricket.
***
Tuesday, 19 May 1812: London
Though he had intended to call at a more acceptable hour, a brawl at the barracks had waylaid all his plans. It was, therefore, gone seven in the evening before Colonel Fitzwilliam arrived at Darcy House. A frequent visitor and one of a very few with the privilege of doing so, he declined any attendant and made his way to the study alone. He found his cousin in a chair before a banked fire, coat and cravat discarded, elbows on his knees, staring into the glass he held in his hands.
“Fitzwilliam.” It was a cursory greeting, and Darcy did not look up as he gave it though it gave a fair idea of how the interview was to go. If Fitzwilliam was to deal with him in that state, he thought he ought at least to be on a level footing. He went first to the sideboard, filled his glass, drained it, refilled it, and only then claimed the other fireside seat.
“Must I beg?” he enquired after a full ten minutes of silence.
For the first time, Darcy glanced up. He looked awful. Apart from the obvious gash and bruising to his cheek, his pallor was ashen, his expression grim, and it would seem he had not slept for days. He uttered not a word, only sipped his drink and returned to staring at it.
Fitzwilliam
leant forward in his chair, mirroring his cousin’s pose with his elbows on his knees. “Who did that?” he enquired, gesturing to Darcy’s cheek with his glass.
“No idea. I was not taking note of their names.”
“You were not taking note of much yesterday, it seems. You completely overlooked Georgiana’s distress.”
Darcy winced but held his tongue.
“How many did you fight?”
“Not enough.”
“And whatever it is that troubles you, has it been put to rights by the addition of a bloody great gash to your face?”
Darcy almost spoke several times before throwing back the remainder of his drink and clamping his lips shut. It was deeply unsettling. Fitzwilliam was not sure he had ever before seen Darcy as discomposed as this. He stood to retrieve the decanter from the sideboard, refilled both their glasses and set it down within arm’s reach of his chair. “You know I will assist in any way I can.”
Darcy’s eyes slid closed, and he grimaced as though pained. “You cannot.”
Silence reigned, the daylight ebbed, and the fire dwindled.
“Come, man, you are disconcerting me. This is not at all like you.”
Darcy’s lip curled. “Thank God for that.”
“Bloody hell! Darcy, what has got into you?”
Silence.
“Tell me.”
“Go away, Fitzwilliam.”
He leant forwards. “Tell me.”
Darcy snapped his head up, his eyes savage. “What exactly would you have me tell you?”
“Look at you! I would have you tell me what has you sitting in a chair with your face cut up and pissing self-pity into your boots!”
Darcy held his gaze for a moment but then, in a move destined to disturb Fitzwilliam far more than a raised voice or hint of aggression, merely looked away, tilted his head forward, and pinched the bridge of his nose.
Fitzwilliam waited. He watched Darcy’s jaw working as he clenched and unclenched it, and still he waited. The clock struck eight, and still he waited. When Darcy finally spoke, his voice was almost inaudible.
“I love her.”
A woman was the cause of all this? Of all the possible circumstances Fitzwilliam imagined, Darcy fancying himself in love had definitely not been one. If the man had not looked so damned wretched, he might have thought him in jest. “Who?”
“Miss Elizabeth Bennet.”
Miss Bennet? Cousin to Lady Catherine’s parson? “And you love her, you say?”
Darcy levelled a glare at him. “Since you found your way in, I assume you can find your way out just as easily.”
Fitzwilliam held up his hands. “I beg your pardon. It is only, after so patchy an acquaintance, I must admit to some surprise at hearing you speak of love. Are you sure it is not merely a fascination that will pass in time?”
“How long do you propose I wait to find out? A month? Six? Eight months, Fitzwilliam—eight—and still I am in as deep as the first day. I have never felt aught akin to this before. It consumes me.”
Fitzwilliam knew not what to make of such talk. It was not that either of them had ever explicitly disdained the notion of love, but it had never occurred to him—and he was damned sure it had never occurred to Darcy—that they would ever be troubled by it. Of course, he knew people who claimed to be in love. Some of them were even married, though none of them to each other. But that Darcy, who never caught a cold but that he planned it in advance, should be thus afflicted was…incredible.
He could not be satisfied until he had an account of how it came about. As he listened to Darcy’s rather halting depiction of his association with Miss Bennet, it became clear that there was even more to admire in the lady than he had observed for himself in Kent—aside, that was, from those most fundamental of virtues: connections and fortune. No wonder the old chap was languishing in despair. “Are you distressed, then, because you cannot have her?”
Darcy gave a bark of bitter laughter. “In a nutshell, yes.”
“Well, admittedly, there is little to be done about her relations, but you could surely afford the want of fortune.”
Darcy exhaled heavily. “I am somewhat comforted to know your assumptions mirror what my own have been.”
“Pardon?”
“It is not her circumstances that hamper me.”
“What then stands in your way? Marry the girl!”
“She will not have me.”
“Pardon?”
“You heard. I offered for her. She refused. Emphatically.”
“But why?”
No answer was forthcoming.
“Does she favour another?”
Darcy grimaced and lifted a hand to run over his face, only to catch the slash on his cheek, ripping a harsh curse from his lips.
“Pardon me. That was impolitic.”
Darcy dismissed his apology with a grunt. Dabbing blood from his cheek with the back of his hand, he murmured, “She does not love me.”
“She does not what? She turned you down—Pemberley, for God’s sake—for a want of love?”
“That was the gist of her reasoning.”
“Singular. I have not been used to consider love as high on most women’s list of criteria for a husband.”
Darcy sighed. “Elizabeth is not most women.”
That much was becoming clear. “But you are friends. Was that not enough for her?”
“We were never friends,” he said stiffly. “In that, as in so much else, I was mistaken. She despises me.”
“Surely not!” Yet apparently, it was true. Darcy’s expression said it all.
“I gave her no reason to like me. I slighted her. I ignored her. I quarrelled with her.”
Fitzwilliam raised his eyebrows. “An interesting approach to courtship.”
Darcy paused, drank, and sneered. “I all but laid the path for Wickham’s damned lies.”
In this new light, his insistence upon revealing Georgiana’s misadventure with the miscreant back in Kent made eminently more sense. “Devil take the scheming bastard! I ought to have known he could not be in the same town as you without causing some manner of difficulty. Would that I had insisted you lean on him when first we learnt he was there!”
“It would have made no difference, Fitzwilliam. Her sympathy for him only made for a more heated rejection. She made it perfectly clear she would have refused me anyway.”
“Your manner offended her that much?”
Darcy returned to staring at his drink, shadows once more obscuring his downcast face. “You may as well know the whole of it. Last year I took steps to discourage an alliance between Bingley and Elizabeth’s eldest sister. She somehow got wind of it. As you might imagine, she took a dim view.”
Fitzwilliam’s stomach dropped like a stone. “Gads, Darcy, I think that might have been my doing.” His cousin looked up sharply. “Well it came up in conversation, you see—the whole Bingley fix. I could not be more sorry. Had I but known it was her sister, I—”
Darcy shook his head. “What’s done is done. In any case, it was wrong of me to intervene as I did. Elizabeth had every right to be angry.”
“But it is easily rectified. Surely, you could—”
“I have already spoken to Bingley. He returned to Hertfordshire a fortnight ago.”
“Well, then, I do not see that you could not also.”
“He has the advantage of not having proposed as I did.”
“Granted, but now that you have corrected Miss Elizabeth’s misapprehensions about Wickham and sent Bingley back to her sister, she might be willing to reconsider.”
“No, I mean, he has not offended her as I did with my proposal.”
“Upon my life, how did she contrive to take offence from a pr
oposal of marriage?”
“Because, in the course of my address, I catalogued the countless reasons why I should not marry her,” he said, his voice dripping with bitterness. “I scorned her situation—waxed eloquent on the degradation such a connection would afford me.” He gestured wildly as he spoke, heedless of the drink splashing from his glass, his voice rapidly gaining volume. “I made damned sure she understood how hard I had fought to repress my feelings and accused her of pride when she took offence. I might, at one point, have mentioned that I loved her, but only to exemplify my generosity, because regardless of the diminution of my fortune, society’s contempt, and my family’s abhorrence, I would take her anyway because I am that gracious!” He bellowed the last and pounded his fist on the arm of the chair. Then, all was still but for the sound of him breathing heavily through his nose.
“Good God,” Fitzwilliam said quietly. “What the devil possessed you to express yourself thusly?”
“Would that I knew!” He threw back the contents of his glass and thrust it out for more, which Fitzwilliam moved hastily to provide. “I am the greatest fool that ever was. It never even occurred to me that she might say no!”
“I really think that is the part you ought least to regret! It is not unnatural that you should expect a lady of lesser consequence to accept your offer of marriage.”
“That does not excuse the way I vilified her family’s condition in life. I cannot think on it without abhorrence. It is insupportable that I have occasioned her such pain—any pain! She wept, Fitzwilliam. I brought her to tears.”
“Women cry all the time.”
“Not by my hand.” He leant forward to stare into his drink again. “What have I become?”
“There is naught wrong with what you have become! One poorly handled courtship does not make you a bad sort of person.”
“Would that were the extent of my mistakes,” he mumbled, his words now distinctly slurred. “But she held a mirror to me, and I did not know myself. She has properly humbled me.”
