by Jessie Lewis
He did not look to be faring any better. “Forgive me, Miss Darcy,” he murmured, shaking his head, “I cannot—Oh God, I must get some air.” With which he turned and stumbled towards the front door.
Less than a heartbeat later another door flew open, and Hughes rushed past her, followed closely by a man who must have been the apothecary.
Then the house was quiet once again. Georgiana remained where she was, halfway up the stairs, shaken, alone, and terrified.
***
“She is dead.”
“No, she is bloody not!” Darcy snarled, ramming Bingley against the wall again. “I did not give her leave to die again!”
He was vaguely aware that Bingley dropped to the ground once he released him but spared it no further thought as he wrenched the front door open and stormed into the house, bellowing for Maltravers. He was not there, but Georgiana was, weeping hysterically on the stairs. He ran to her, resisting the pull of despair with all his strength. “Where is she?”
His sister only sobbed and shook her head.
“Mr. Darcy?”
He spun around. Barnaby and Maltravers had both materialised at the foot of the stairs.
“Mrs. Darcy is in the laying-in chamber, sir.”
“The laying-in chamber? Is she—good God!” Bingley’s words and Georgiana’s tears rendered that news the most terrifying Darcy had ever received. He turned and ran. Yet, the nearer he got to the corner of the house where every mistress of Pemberley had birthed its heirs, the more fearful he became, for there was no crying out to be heard, either from Elizabeth or an infant. There was only silence.
He had not time to consider what he might find within the chamber. All he knew was his visceral need to be with Elizabeth, and no sooner had he reached the door than it was open and he was inside.
“Fitzwilliam!”
There she was—pale, evidently exhausted but, in stark contrast to all his deepest fears, alive and incandescent with joy, a child, his child, in her arms.
“Elizabeth! Thank God!” He was at her side before he knew how he got there, cradling her beautiful face and scrutinising every inch of it for blessed proof of life. “Are you well?”
“Aye, now that you are both here, I am.” She smiled the most transcendent smile he had ever seen grace her countenance. “Meet your son, Fitzwilliam.”
My son. He tore his eyes from her and looked down. It was apparent he had only just missed the birth, for what little could be seen of the child in the folds of bloodied linens was still covered with gore. But his eyes were open, and he was looking directly at him. He was the most wondrous sight Darcy had ever beheld.
“Perfect, is he not?” Elizabeth whispered.
Darcy looked up at her. Never in his life had he known a love such as he felt for Elizabeth and now their child. He nodded. “Without defect.”
“He is a credit to you, Lizzy,” someone else said.
Darcy looked up in surprise. He had not noticed Jane Bingley was there. Indeed, he had not noticed anyone was there—not Mrs. Sinclair, not Mrs. Reynolds, not the several maids—and certainly not the man, whom he seriously hoped was a physician of some sort, doing something alarming to his wife under a sheet at the foot of the bed.
“He is,” Mrs. Sinclair agreed. “Promisingly troublesome from the off.”
“Oh, tsk! We thought he was not breathing at first,” Mrs. Reynolds hastily explained, “but it was only that he did not cry as most babies do.”
Darcy turned back to look at the child in alarm. “Is he well?”
Elizabeth grinned and nodded. “He simply had nothing to say that would amaze the whole room.”
Still, she had the ability to fell him with one utterance. He leant forward to rest his forehead reverently against hers. “God, I love you, woman.”
She pressed a gentle kiss to his scar. “And I you.”
Immeasurable though his relief and elation were, Darcy could not long overlook the events that brought him racing home nor the traitor awaiting him downstairs. He sobered as he considered the magnitude of what he had almost lost.
“Did Bingley hurt you, love?” He regretted that his question made her smile falter. He could not have cared less that it made Jane gasp. Elizabeth whispered that he had not. His relief was profound but short-lived, for in the next instant, she winced and gave a little gasp. “Are you in pain?”
The man cleared his throat. “Mr. Darcy, I presume? It is perfectly normal. Parturition is a many-staged process. You might prefer to step outside for a short time until Mrs. Darcy is ready.”
“And who are you, sir?” he demanded, standing to his full height.
“He is the only available apothecary in all of Derbyshire,” Mrs. Sinclair piped up. “And it took a good long while to find him. For heaven’s sake, do not scare him off now.”
Elizabeth huffed a tired little laugh and reached for Darcy’s hand. “Do not go too far.”
“No fear of that, woman. I shall never go far from you again. Every time I do, you die.”
***
Bingley had never given much thought to how he would meet his maker. Now that the moment was upon him, the only uncertainty remaining was at whose hands it would be, for there presently seemed every chance Colonel Fitzwilliam might beat Darcy to it.
He sat as still as he could, mostly so as not to further aggravate his glowering sentry but also to minimise his discomfort. His throat and head were bruised from being flung against the wall, and he thought his arm might be broken from being hauled to his feet and manhandled into this antechamber. His ribs were almost definitely cracked from the blows Fitzwilliam had already dealt him, and his heart was broken for Elizabeth.
The door banged open. His innards liquefied. Darcy completely filled the aperture. The turn of his countenance was awful.
“Darcy,” Fitzwilliam said, coming to his feet and putting a hand on his cousin’s shoulder. “I am truly sorry—”
“No need,” Darcy interrupted, never taking his eyes off Bingley. “Elizabeth is well. A little tired after delivering my son but in fine health.”
Elizabeth was not dead! Bingley breathed a vast sigh of relief then wished profoundly he had not. Both men puffed up even further with affront and surged forward to loom over him.
“I am this close to running you through,” Fitzwilliam growled, holding his finger and thumb half an inch apart to demonstrate Bingley’s precarious mortality. “You have no right to be relieved. She is not yours!”
“I should be relieved under any circumstances at such happy news,” Bingley mumbled.
Darcy’s lip curled contemptuously. “Would you leave us, Fitzwilliam?”
It was decided then. The Titan would be his executioner. The door closed behind the colonel. Bingley flinched when Darcy moved, but he came no closer, only turned his back and stalked to the window. There he remained, ominously still.
Unsure of what exactly he was presumed guilty, Bingley thought it safest to say nothing at first. Yet, the longer Darcy remained silent, the more anxious he grew until he could stand it no more. “Darcy, I—”
“How long?”
“Pardon?”
“How long have you been planning to take her from me?”
“That is not how it was.”
“No? Then pray explain this!” He whirled around and slammed his hand on a nearby table.
Bingley’s ribs protested when he leant sideways to read the crumpled letter Darcy had slapped down, but that was nothing to the horror that settled in his stomach as it dawned on him what the letter contained. Imprecise memories floated back—of a bawdy tavern song, an argument with Louisa, and an instruction to Peabody to post the letter professing his love for Elizabeth to the man she would go on to wed.
“Do you still deny you have admired her
since before I even returned to Hertfordshire?”
“Well, it—”
Darcy’s hands landed on the arms of Bingley’s chair, bringing their faces nose-to-nose. “I ask you again. How long have you been planning to take her from me?”
“No time at all, for I did not plan it!” he answered, scraping his chair backwards and scrambling out of it.
“Of all the depraved, incestuous schemes,” Darcy snarled, circling on the spot to follow his progress. “To make off with your wife’s expectant sister! How did you ever think such a plan would succeed?”
“I swear to you. I never planned it!” He edged away along the wall. “It was but a stupid suggestion made on the impulse of the moment!”
“Was it? Then how is it that my cousin’s wife received a letter from Jane begging her to thwart your plan to take Elizabeth away?”
Bingley banged his head against a wall sconce. “Ow!” He ducked under it. “I have no idea!”
“Enough with your damned lies!” The manner in which Darcy clenched and unclenched his fists was frankly terrifying.
“I am not lying! I truly cannot explain it. No, wait—it is possible that Jane wrote to her about Amel—” He stopped but not soon enough.
“About what?” Darcy demanded in a tone that brooked no objection.
Bingley swallowed—or tried to. Curse his reckless tongue! “Amelia.”
“Damn it, I am in no humour for equivocation, Bingley! Who the bloody hell is Amelia?”
“She was a maid at Netherfield.” He prayed to God Darcy would not recall which maid. “I, er…we had a dalliance of sorts. It was reprehensible, I know. I would never usually…with the…only she was more than commonly willing—most determined, in fact.”
“Jane’s letter mentioned a woman with child.”
“Er, yes. There was that small complication. I only found out about that after arriving home from my wedding tour. She came to the house while we were away. But I dealt with it! Well, I thought I had. I was not aware anybody else knew. Indeed, it might never have been discovered had I not decided to send her away, but Lizzy gave me hope that Jane might yet love me, and I thought, to stand a chance of keeping it that way, it would be best to ensure that she never found out. So I wrote to Amelia and…offered to send her…to…”
He ran out of words. He rather wished he had run out of them sooner. The force of Darcy’s glare had begun to actually hurt. His tone, when he spoke, was glacial.
“You laid with the maid who looked like Elizabeth.”
It was a statement, not a question. He remembered. Oh, God! A bead of sweat trickled between Bingley’s shoulder blades. “It was not such a remarkable likeness—” He was sliding down the wall, blinking away a blinding flash of white light before he comprehended that Darcy had hit him. Then came the pain. Then, worse still, came the Titan’s rage.
“Did you imagine it was Elizabeth?” he roared. “Is that what was in your head whenever you were in her company?
Bloody hell, his face hurt. He rolled onto his hands and knees. His head swam, and his ribs screamed. “No, I—”
“As you sat at my table and slept under my roof, whenever you danced a reel with her, were you pretending to yourself that you had laid with her?”
Darcy loomed over him, his raised voice fearsome, but nothing to the murderous look in his eye. Much like a cornered cat, Bingley struck out. “Yes, then! Is that what you wish to hear? There were times I imagined an intimacy that was not mine to envisage.” And he instantly regretted it.
Darcy slammed his palm into the wall above his head. “She is my wife, for God’s sake! Does that mean nothing to you?”
Flinching against a blow that did not come, Bingley got a foot underneath him and hauled himself to his feet with a grunt. “But I never acted on it!”
“You tried to abduct her, for Christ’s sake!”
“Abduct her?” he cried, clutching at his ribs and sidling away. “Blast it, Darcy, what do you take me for?”
“I heard no word from Pemberley for two weeks before reports of your reprehensible actions reached me. If I discover that you hurt one hair on her head in that time, I swe—”
“Good God, I did not, and I would not!” He pushed away from the wall, taking a wide berth around and away from the Titan. “You received no word because I took her letter, not because I tried to take her!”
Had he a needle and thread to hand, he would gladly have sewn his own mouth shut, for nothing that came out of it did him any good, and Darcy looked about ready to tear him in two. “It was not my design to cause you any anxiety. I took it on a whim. It was left out for posting. I saw it as I left the house, and I knew Lizzy must have written of what I said to her, and then I—well, I thought that if you read it, you would kill me.”
“I might.”
That, at least, would stop his damned runaway tongue! “I am sorry, Darcy! I took the letter. It was wrong, and I should not have done it, but I did not attempt to abduct Lizzy! I thought she wanted to go!”
“You thought what?”
“I thought she was miserable!”
Darcy stared at him with much the same expression of incredulity as Elizabeth had when he suggested the same to her. “And you claim to love her? You do not even know her.”
“I fully comprehend that now. She made it perfectly clear that I was mistaken. But it is not so very difficult for somebody to misjudge a woman’s feelings, is it Darcy? Had you not done the same with Jane, none of this would have happened!”
He took several hasty steps backwards when Darcy lunged towards him, bellowing furiously. “Was this retribution enough for you? Taking my wife and child from me? I suppose, given the indifference with which you have just parcelled your unborn child off to another life, I ought not to be surprised that you did not blink an eye at the prospect of stealing mine.”
The backs of Bingley’s legs hit a chair; he could retreat no farther. Darcy stepped close, his eyes savage. “My son, Bingley, my heir!”
Bingley recoiled. ’Til that moment, there had seemed a world of difference between a swollen belly under a travelling cloak in a public house in Liverpool and a living, breathing child of such import as to make the Titan spit and rage. Amelia’s remark about forsaking his child became suddenly the most heartrending thing in the world. With what callous disregard had he sent his own child away! With what unspeakable indifference had he almost taken Darcy’s! He collapsed into the chair and looked up at his friend, who was all but panting with emotion. Yet to Bingley’s dismay, it was no longer fury suffusing his countenance, but profound anguish.
“They are the two most precious things to me in all the world,” Darcy said in a voice low and hard. “Have you any idea what it would do to me were I to lose either of them? I would rather see Pemberley razed to the ground.”
Something turned over in Bingley’s gut. Never before had he seen his friend thus, and therein lay the rub to all his senseless presumptions. In his very own words, “If one were to dub inscrutability the harbinger of indifference, Darcy could be labelled the most unfeeling of all men.” He did not disdain Elizabeth. He loved her!
A nauseating torrent of remorse overtook him. How could he have thought so ill of this man, whose rectitude he had ever aspired to emulate—who had ever been the most stalwart of friends? How could he have been so wilfully blind to his own iniquity? “Forgive me, Darcy. I have been an absolute cur, but none of it has been consciously done. It is as you once said. I am impetuous. I do not think of consequences when I act.”
“And now you have been careless with my family, and I will not tolerate it.”
Bingley’s heart reared up into his throat. He gulped it down and pressed himself back into his chair as far away from Darcy as possible. “Do you mean to call me out?”
“I suppose you would a
sk that,” Darcy spat out. “I ought to, for you have used me in the most despicable way imaginable. But I do not share your recklessness. I shall not risk my family’s interests to gratify my abhorrence of you.”
Bingley could not recall a single time when Darcy had spoken severely of him. It wounded him grievously to hear it now—not because it was untrue but because Darcy was the very best of men, and in treating him thus, he had carelessly, foolishly, irrevocably squandered his friendship. “What would you have me do?”
Darcy sneered. “Still, you are asking me that?” He stalked to the door. “Leave. After that, I care not as long as I never see you again.”
He left the room, and just as Bingley thought his day could get no worse, Jane appeared in the doorway.
***
Fitzwilliam ceased talking when the door was pulled violently open. Mrs. Sinclair, Jane, Georgiana, and he all looked at Darcy as he exited the antechamber.
Darcy looked at him. “Get him out.”
He nodded, but it was his grandmother who spoke.
“Oh, you have not killed him then? How disappointing. Young men nowadays never seem to want to do anything properly.”
“Have at him,” Darcy replied. “I have better things to do.” He turned, offering Georgiana his arm. “Come. There is somebody I should like you to meet.” He left without a backward glance at either of the Bingleys.
Fitzwilliam turned to do Darcy’s bidding, only to discover that Jane had anticipated him. He made to stop her, but Mrs. Sinclair laid a hand on his arm. “This I should like to see.”
He grinned by way of assent and leant against the outside of the open door to observe how the encounter would go.
“Good day, Charles,” Jane began.
