“When were you in India, Darcy?” said Anne, looking confused.
“About five years ago,” said Darcy, who looked even more pleased that Elizabeth had made up this story. “Tell me, Miss Bennet, have you heard from Mr. Renward or his wife recently?”
“Oh, no,” she said, giving him a tiny wink. “It’s horrible, but Mrs. Renward took ill and died, and Mr. Renward followed her scarcely a fortnight later. Died of a broken heart. Had given up the will to live.”
Darcy put a hand over his mouth, obviously trying to hide his smirk. “Indeed? Well, that is awful.”
“I think it’s rather romantic,” said Elizabeth.”
“Yes, quite,” said Darcy. “I am very sad to hear of it.”
Anne looked back and forth between the two of them, her brow furrowed.
Darcy patted her on the shoulder. “Oh, don’t take on so. Tell the girls whatever you like, whatever will sound the most proper. It isn’t my intention to make you look bad, and you know it. I’m only happy that you’re out and about and looking so well.”
“Oh, Darcy.” Anne rolled her eyes.
Darcy turned to Elizabeth. “Anne was always kept from society by her mother. She was dreadfully sickly much of the time. Miraculously, upon her mother’s death, she made quite a recovery.”
Anne drew herself up. “Oh, must you speak of such things? You know that my mother only said that I was ill, when truly I was perfectly fine. She was very controlling, Mama. She wanted things to be a certain way, and if they were not that way, she took pains to make them that way.” She turned to Elizabeth. “I would rather not speak of such things with strangers.”
“Miss Bennet is not a stranger,” said Darcy. “Not by half.”
Blushing, Elizabeth looked away. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that Nancy was coming into the room holding tightly onto the arm of a young man, and one of her gloves was missing.
Elizabeth sighed. “That’s Nancy. She’s my charge, and I must go and see what’s become of her.”
“It was good to see you, Miss Bennet,” said Darcy.
“Yes,” she said, wanting to touch him, to kiss him, to run her hands through his hair.
Instead, she hurried over to Nancy. “Where is your glove?” she demanded.
“It fell into the wishing well,” said Nancy. “I didn’t mean for it to happen.”
“She almost fell in,” said the man whose arm she was clutching. “She was reaching for it, and she was toppling. Lucky I was there to catch her.”
Elizabeth sighed. “Nancy, you cannot go running off to wishing wells in the middle of the party, especially not all alone.”
“I wasn’t alone,” said Nancy. “I was with Mr. Martin, but he left when I told him I wasn’t the least bit interested in getting married this season, and that’s when I took my glove off to see how cold the water was, and then… well, you know the rest. I’m sorry if I scared you, Miss Bennet, but you worry too much.”
Elizabeth shut her eyes in fury. Sometimes, she thought she would strangle the girl. She really did.
* * *
“Well, I don’t think there’s any reason to talk about Nancy,” said Jane, “not when you were off speaking to a man with whom you’ve never even been introduced. Truly, what were you thinking?”
“I’ve been introduced to Darcy before,” Elizabeth said, folding her arms over her chest. They were in the drawing room of the Bingley townhouse in London. “Come, you remember him, don’t you? Back in Hertfordshire? The night you met Bingley?”
Jane furrowed her brow. “Wait, wait. Darcy. Yes, I remember him now. He is the one who went off to fight the duel, isn’t he? He and Bingley used to be close, but Bingley hasn’t heard from him in a decade.”
“Yes, that’s him,” said Elizabeth.
“But why didn’t you say that then? Everyone is saying that you met him in India. But everyone knows he’s never even been to India. He’s been off seeking his fortune in Camaland.”
“Camaland?” said Elizabeth. “Jane, dear, there’s no such place as Camaland.”
“There must be,” said Jane, “because that’s where he’s gotten his money. They say he has restored his estate and bought back one of his other houses in the north. He didn’t have money when he left, so he must have been in the Camaland place.”
“He made it up,” said Elizabeth. “He likes to do that. He thinks it’s funny.”
“Oh, so then where was he really? In India?”
“Yes,” said Elizabeth.
Bingley appeared in the door to the drawing room, yawning. “David is still awake, darling. Will you go up to kiss him goodnight? I don’t think he’ll sleep otherwise.”
“Still up?” said Jane, shaking her head. “I don’t believe that child. Yes, I’ll be up directly. Did you know that your friend Darcy was at the party this evening?”
“Darcy?” said Bingley, smiling. “Well, that’s a name I haven’t heard in some time.”
Elizabeth turned to him. “Mr. Bingley, have you ever heard of a place called Camaland?”
“I confess I have not,” he said.
“Thank you,” said Elizabeth.
“But,” said Bingley, “they are discovering new islands every day now, and there very well may be some place called Camaland, I cannot be sure.”
Jane got up, yawning herself. “Lizzy says that Mr. Darcy is a liar, that he likes to spin tall tales. Is that true?”
“Not when I knew him,” said Bingley. “But he changed a good deal after his sister died. Became a a shell of himself. All the drinking and gambling and bad behavior… I couldn’t say that he didn’t take up lying.”
“Why didn’t you ever say that you spoke to him in India, Lizzy?” said Jane. “Since he was such a dear friend of Bingley’s?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I saw so many people in India,” said Elizabeth. “I suppose it slipped my mind.”
“And what did you do with him when you were there?” said Jane. “You seem to have gotten to know him quite well.”
Elizabeth shrugged. “Nothing out of the ordinary. Dinner parties. Dancing. That sort of thing.”
Jane sighed. “Well…” She turned to her husband. “Dearest, we are going to have to do something about Nancy. Did you hear what happened?”
“Oh, Nancy is simply spirited,” said Bingley. “You worry too much.
“She was outside,” said Jane. “With not one man, but two. And she lost her glove.”
“Heavens,” said Bingley, chuckling. “A lost glove is a problem indeed.”
“It is improper, love,” said Jane. “And it’s not fair for poor Lizzy. She is being run ragged.”
“I will have a talk with Nancy,” said Bingley, giving Jane an indulgent smile.
“Oh, thank you,” said Jane.
Elizabeth didn’t think this talk would matter much to Nancy. Bingley had already given her several talks, but Nancy paid them no mind.
“Come now, dear, it’s late. Can we not all go to bed?”
“I should like that,” said Jane, going to him. She and her husband started out of the drawing room.
Elizabeth followed behind them.
They walked up a flight of stairs in this manner, but at the top, Bingley and Jane went off to the left, and Elizabeth went to the other side of the house, where her bedroom was.
Arriving there, Elizabeth sat down on her bed, her mind reeling.
Darcy.
He was back in England, and he had smiled at her and said that she was fresh as the spring air or something ridiculous. It made her feel strange. She wanted to be angry with him, because he had hurt her, and it seemed only natural to have a reaction of dislike toward someone who had made her life miserable.
But he was Darcy, and she found she couldn’t hate him. She was only stupidly grateful that he had spoken to her, that he had been kind to her, that he hadn’t been horrible the way he had been all those years ago.
When she looked back on it now, she wasn’t sure that he ha
d been as horrible as she remembered. It seemed such a long time ago, now, and she remembered that he’d apologized a lot and seemed to have had a rather low opinion of himself, and maybe he hadn’t meant it to go as badly as it had.
At any rate, it was her fault that they’d been intimate the way that they had. She had initiated all of their encounter, and he had tried to stop her.
Maybe she didn’t blame him at all.
And she knew that too much time had passed for him to consider marrying her. She was not yet two and thirty, but that was coming soon, and she was an old maid by every reckoning she knew. Someone like Darcy, even though he was older than the typical bachelor, would still want a young woman to bear his heirs.
She didn’t mind that. She didn’t hope for marriage anymore. Too much time had passed for her to even think about it in regards to herself. No, she only wanted to be close to him in some way. She didn’t know how, and she was sure it wouldn’t be proper, but she didn’t care.
There had only been one period of time in her life when she’d felt truly alive and that was when she’d been on that ship with Darcy. She needed to be near him again.
Seeing him again had awakened her, lit up something inside her. She lay back on her bed, staring up at the ceiling, thinking about the way he had looked, thinking of the way he had smiled at her.
And then she called back the past, the way she did sometimes, remembering his fingers on her body.
She closed her eyes, her hands on her own thighs, remembering, imagining… him.
And she was lost in bliss.
* * *
“Is it your first Season too?” Nancy asked Miss Anne de Bourgh. “Because I would have thought that you…” She trailed off, realizing she was about to say something rather rude.
Elizabeth wanted to clobber Nancy over the head. She had packed up Nancy that afternoon and taken her to call on Anne, Darcy’s cousin. It had been a gamble of a move, considering she had no real friendship with Anne. When she had the butler take in Nancy’s and her calling cards, she fully expected him to return and say that Miss de Bourgh wasn’t in, which—as everyone knew—was code for saying that she simply didn’t want them to call on her.
But Anne had welcomed them into the house, and now they all sat in her parlor, eating bread and butter and cucumber sandwiches.
“Yes,” said Anne, “I’m well aware that I’m much too old to be having my first Season. Most would consider me on the shelf. But as I was explaining to Miss Bennet last night, my mother kept me out of society because she was controlling. She had an idea that I would marry Darcy.”
“What?” said Elizabeth, her heart pounding. She sputtered. “That is, I mean, Miss Fairchild didn’t mean to speak of unpleasantness.”
“Well, it is done now,” said Anne. “After Darcy made an awful mess of himself, gambling everything away, my mother changed her tune. She would not allow him to marry me and get his hands on my fortune.”
“And now?” Elizabeth found herself saying, “when you are both free?”
“Oh, Darcy is wretched,” said Anne.
“Yes, he looked sickly to me,” piped up Nancy.
“Quite ill,” said Anne. “Always at the laudanum. Makes him sleepy. He almost never rouses until late in the day.”
Elizabeth’s heart sank. She had put together this whole ruse in order to see Darcy. He wasn’t awake, and she had wasted the trip. Still, she couldn’t very well get up and leave now, so she must find some way to be polite and keep the conversation going.
It was quiet.
Elizabeth wracked her brain, trying to think of something to say, but all she could think of was Darcy and how much she had wanted to see him.
“Well, are you enjoying being out in society?” said Nancy. “I certainly am. I think it’s rather lovely.”
Anne smiled. “Indeed. It has been rather exciting, all the men tripping over themselves to dance with me. I have enjoyed myself.”
“Indeed,” murmured Elizabeth.
“Oh, dear, I am sorry,” said Anne, although her smile deepened. “You must think me quite unfeeling, going on about how sought after I am when you had no success finding a husband yourself, Miss Bennet.”
“Oh,” Elizabeth laughed, “that is all so long ago, I do not care a jot. Tell me about this illness that Darcy has.”
“I don’t know that he has an illness other than an overfondness for laudanum,” said Anne offhandedly.
Elizabeth knew that opiates could cause dependence if overused, and Darcy had been smoking opium on the ship when she knew him. She wondered if he had taken it a bit too far. It wasn’t unheard of. Why, she remembered once chatting with a girl named Miss Dixon, whose governess was snoozing over in a corner, apparently under the influence of laudanum. Miss Dixon said that her governess used it daily and couldn’t seem to stop. And she was hardly the only person in England to have troubles with it. Most people only took a small amount if they sustained some injury, but if the hurt went on a long time, the user might become in danger of becoming dependent.
“Whatever the case, he is usually awful company,” said Anne. “I grow bored of speaking of Darcy. Surely there is some other subject we can turn to?”
Elizabeth turned away, feeling a bit embarrassed at her transparency.
* * *
Jane was pacing looked very, very concerned. “How many days have you gone to call on Miss de Bourgh, dragging Nancy along?”
Elizabeth wouldn’t meet her sister’s gaze. “Not that many.”
“Nancy says that you are obsessed, but that when you get there, you have nothing to say, and Nancy is obliged to carry the conversation.”
Elizabeth hunched in her shoulders, trying to make herself smaller. “I thought Nancy and Miss de Bourgh got on well.”
“Oh, Nancy adores her, but that is not the point.” Jane shook her head. “To be honest, I am completely at a loss. I don’t know what to say. What is going on with you, Lizzy? You are not yourself. It has something to do with that Darcy, does it not? You have not told me everything about him.”
“Oh, Jane, I…” Elizabeth sighed.
“You are trying to see him, I think,” said Jane. “That is why you are going to the house where he is staying?”
“Well, I can’t very well call on a man myself,” said Elizabeth.
“Lizzy!” Jane was shocked. “Why would you even think such a thing?” She sat down and looked earnestly at her sister. “What went on between you in India? Is he an old flame of yours?”
“You know that I have no old flames. No man has ever been interested in me.”
“If he did want to rekindle something, he would call on you. You know that. He must not be interested. I would not see you hurt, that is all.”
“Are you forbidding me from going to see Miss de Bourgh?”
“You know I cannot forbid you anything, Lizzy. I only wish that you would confide in me. We used to tell each other everything.”
Yes, thought Elizabeth. But that was before you got married, and I became a spinster who had once been a wanton woman on a pirate ship. Jane would never understand.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“And where is Miss Fairchild today?” said Anne, sipping at her tea.
“Oh, I had thought it more proper not to come alone, but I have dispensed with all of that,” said Elizabeth. Generally, that wasn’t something she would have said aloud, just as she generally would not have come alone to call on someone. But the truth was, she was a spinster, it hardly mattered what she did, and no one could tell her what to do. She had been coming to call every other day for nearly a fortnight, and yet she always seemed to miss Darcy. Either he wasn’t there, or he was still abed, even late in the afternoon. It wouldn’t have been proper for her to call specifically on him, so she couldn’t do that, but she was getting frustrated, and she found she hardly cared about propriety.
Since seeing him that one night, she found she thought of little else but him. She wanted to look upon him, wanted
to touch him, wanted him to touch her. She was growing frenzied inside.
Anne looked shocked. “Dispensed with it? What are you saying?”
“I think it might be embarrassing for Miss Fairchild, because she may sense that you are growing rather annoyed by my constant visits. I decided not to subject her to that. I am a spinster. I belong to no one. I shall simply come alone.
Anne choked. “Why, that is ridiculous, Miss Bennet. Of course I am pleased to see you. I so rarely get any other callers, and I welcome anyone who does come by.”
“It’s all right, Miss de Bourgh,” said Elizabeth. “If you are annoyed, you may tell me. In all honesty, I am only coming by so persistently because—”
“Miss Bennet?” said another voice, a male voice.
She looked up to see that Darcy had walked into the room. Her heart stopped. Her lips parted, and she took him in. He still seemed a bit pale and thin, but he looked beautiful just the same, and she wished she could throw herself across the room and into his arms. She didn’t move though. She just gazed at him.
He smiled. “I’m pleased to see you. Miss de Bourgh told me that you visit often, and I’m sorry I haven’t managed to be available to see you before.”
“It’s all right.” Elizabeth was breathless. “I’m pleased to see you as well.”
He sauntered into the room and sat down on a couch opposite her. “Have you been well?”
“I have been…” She laughed a little. “It hardly matters. I feel quite excellent at this very moment.”
“You look well.” He didn’t seem to take his eyes off her. “You are indeed a pleasant addition to my day.”
Anne looked back and forth between them. “Well, I must say that I am glad to see you up and about, Darcy. If I had known mentioning Miss Bennet’s frequent visits would get you out of bed, I might have tried it a week ago.”
Darcy chuckled. “Oh, now, Anne, saying things like that will have Miss Bennet thinking I changed my day just to see her.” He raised his eyebrows at her.
Elizabeth’s heart stuttered. Oh, she wanted him. She wanted him badly.
The Dread Mr. Darcy Page 11
