This Disconcerting Happiness: A Pride and Prejudice Variation

by Christina Morland

  *

  She had never before dreaded his coming into her bedchamber. Indeed, it was often (if she could be so bold as to admit it to anyone other than herself) a moment she eagerly anticipated. Yet on this evening, she stared at the door between their rooms and waited with something akin to fear. It was not fear of him, but of his disappointment. She had seen enough disappointment in his eyes during that most wretched of dinner parties to last her all the rest of her days.

  Elizabeth supposed the only thing she feared more was not seeing him at all. And who could blame him if he went to his bed, too exhausted and depressed to face the cause of his unhappiness?

  With a groan of frustration, Elizabeth fell back onto her bed and gazed unseeingly at the canopy above her. She tried castigating herself: she had been the very worst of hostesses; she had humiliated her husband and herself; and she had materially harmed their chances of convincing the Earl of Matlock that she was someone worthy of overseeing Georgiana’s entrance into society.

  Yet the truth was, she could not feel sorry for the words she had spoken to Caroline Bingley—and the only true regret she had was that she had not insulted the woman more often and more thoroughly. Such uncharitable thoughts were surely proof of her incompetence as a proper guardian for Georgiana—and, ironically, evidence that she would have fit into Darcy’s social circle quite well, had she been born, rather than married, into the situation.

  Elizabeth had suffered so many insults herself this past fortnight in London that she had lost count, or would have, if she had been the sort of person to keep track of these kinds of things. She was not—or had not been, at least not in Meryton where the snubs and meanness of others had been laughing matters and not the source of those surface wounds that, one by one seemed so minor as to warrant no mention, and yet when accumulated over time led to an infection of some bitter malady she could not name.

  If only she could have followed Mrs. Annesley’s gentle counsel and smiled serenely at the nonsense and abuse she had experienced these past weeks. Had she been representing only herself, she might have succeeded—or might at least have treated the social calls like some great joke she would have laughingly shared with her father. But she was not acting for herself alone; she had no father, and apparently no wit, left to call upon. Elizabeth felt utterly unmoored.

  She sat up, looked at the door (it remained closed), and said out loud, “I am not so weak as this.”

  As if by magic, the door opened, and the man who came through the doorway offered a tender smile.

  She jumped to her feet, ready to fling herself into his arms, but caught sight of the lines on his face. Yes, her Mr. Darcy smiled at her, but he was in fact tired and depressed, and there, behind his eyes and along the sides of that mouth she loved so well, were all the signs of the disappointment that she so desperately feared.

  Closing her eyes, she said, “Fitzwilliam, I am so very—”

  “No.”

  She heard him move toward her, and opened her eyes to find him just in front of her. She waited for him to caress her face, or tuck a stray bit of hair behind her ear, or even take her by the shoulders and shake her a little, but he kept that thin barrier of air between them.

  “For God’s sake, do not apologize any more,” he said.

  So she closed her mouth and gazed at her feet.

  “And why do you look away, as if you are ashamed?”

  His voice was as harsh as she had ever heard it, and she was tempted to take a step backward. But his behavior had the more pronounced effect of making her angry, and so contrariness rather than timidity won out.

  Crossing her arms, she said, “Would you perhaps care to tell me how I am to act, then, so as to gain your approval? If I am not to apologize or be ashamed of my performance tonight, perhaps I ought to call for some wine so that we may celebrate?”

  She went to her vanity, where there remained a tea cup from earlier in the day, and lifted it in his direction. “A toast to your wife’s utter failure as a hostess!”

  Her rejoinder might have been more satisfying if there had been any tea left in the cup to drink.

  Darcy pinched the bridge of his nose. “Elizabeth, I do not know what you and I are to say to each other at this moment.”

  “Why not speak the truth? You are disappointed in me.”

  She spoke the words as a challenge, and she waited with little hope (but just enough to have some small expectation) that he would disagree with her.

  “Yes.”

  She felt the tears prick her eyes and spun away. “Good.” She spoke with enough force to dispel the tremor in the voice that inevitably accompanied her bouts of crying. “You have come to say what you wanted to say, and now we may both retire.”

  “Do you suppose I came here to scold you?” he asked, his voice softening. She could hear his feet padding on the carpet as he came up behind her. God, how she longed for him to wrap his arms about her waist and bury his face into her hair. She would turn in his arms, kiss his neck, and they would be done with this—at least until the morning, when they could not avoid another day of calls made worse by her behavior tonight.

  But he did not touch her, and she was beginning to think, even as she heard his breath so close behind her, that the barrier between them was no longer merely metaphorical.

  She turned around and stared at his chest. “If you came not to scold, then there can be only one other reason you came.” She reached for the buttons on his shirt, and he breathed in sharply, grabbing at her hands and looking down at her with something much worse than the disappointment she had initially dreaded.

  “For God’s sake, Elizabeth, what is the matter with you?”

  This time, she could not turn away; her hands were trapped between his. So she glared up at him and said, “Oh, whatever could be the matter with me, Fitzwilliam? I have made a fool of us both in front of those few people in London I should have been able to impress—or at the very least, manage. Instead, I found myself at the mercy of Caroline Bingley’s snide remarks about Lydia and Mr. Wickham—”

  Darcy dropped her hands. “You ought to have told me that your sister was spending so much time with him. I tried to warn your father…” He stopped, winced, and turned away so that she could see only his profile, which appeared hard and cold in the dying light of the fire.

  “Oh, yes, I am so grateful to you for having warned him during that time when he had only the matter of his own impending death on his mind!”

  Darcy’s face darkened. “What more could I have done?”

  “You might have warned others in Meryton! They would have listened to you!”

  “Not without particulars, and what could I say without risking my sister’s reputation?”

  The words spilled out before she could stop herself: “Indeed, as your sister’s reputation is most certainly more important than my sister’s.”

  Darcy spun away. “I had no idea that your sister’s reputation was at risk—at least, any more than she herself puts it at risk nearly every time she is in some public setting.”

  This stung, all the more so because it was the truth.

  “Besides,” he said, his voice suddenly tired, “if you knew she was in any danger of falling under Wickham’s power, you ought to have told me.”

  She opened her mouth to protest—and then thought of all the evidence she herself had gathered in the past months indicating Lydia’s attachment to Wickham: her mother’s hints, her sister Jane’s anxious letter, and even her own experience that day in Meryton, soon after her engagement to Darcy, when Lydia and Wickham had been walking together from Aunt Philip’s.

  Yes, she had known that Lydia had formed an attachment to Wickham, and she had done nothing more than her husband had: she had asked her father to speak to Lydia, and then pushed the matter out of her mind.

  The words that tumbled out her mouth were more sob than speech: “I am going to fail you both!”

  “Oh God, Elizabeth.” Spinning around, he pulled
her to him with such force that her nose collided rather painfully with his shoulder, but she hardly cared. She wanted only to hear his heart beat against her ear.

  Suddenly, he pulled back and lifted her chin so that their eyes met. “What do you mean, fail us both?”

  She shook her head, not ready to speak, and laid her ear back against his chest. He rubbed her hair for a long moment before finally saying, “Elizabeth…” in such a way that she almost laughed.

  “Do you realize,” she said, tilting her head up at him and smiling, “that you positively rumble when you speak in that tone? I have decided to begin a catalog of sounds you make, and this one will be called, ‘Darcy, the impatient bear.’”

  She saw how he struggled, and was grateful when he gave up on holding back his own smile. “Do not try to distract me, Elizabeth.”

  “Why ever not? It is a good deal more amusing than arguing with you.”

  He frowned, and she sighed.

  “I am going to fail you and your sister, just as I have failed my own. I have given none of my sisters much thought these past months, and now Lydia…” She shook her head. “I can only write to Mama and hope that she can gain some control over her. At least Miss Bingley is no longer in Meryton to witness my sister’s behavior. But I do not know what is worse: Lydia’s silliness or my own.”

  “Elizabeth.”

  “To think that our futures rest so squarely on my ability to curb my impertinent tongue! Goodness knows I should deeply regret the pain I might cause you, but when I think of being the source of your sister’s pain—she, who did not even have a choice in this matter…” Elizabeth shook her head. “The whole course of her life may be altered because of how I speak or what I do during some silly drawing room call!”

  He released his hold on her and went, as he always did in these kinds of moments, to the window. She did not know whether to be insulted or amused that he had to find refuge in the darkness of a London night, but she knew him well enough by now to accept that this kind of retreat was as comforting to him as escapes into witty banter were for her.

  “There is nothing about this situation that is fair,” he said eventually, turning back to face her. “I can only tell you, Elizabeth, how grateful I am that you would put yourself through these kinds of calls and dinner parties for my sake—and hers.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “I wish I could say, with complete sincerity and confidence, that I would do anything I could to ensure your happiness, Fitzwilliam—and yet, I suppose tonight is proof that in fact I will not always act in your best interest, no matter my intentions.”

  He strode toward her, took her face in his hands, and kissed her deeply.

  “Do you know,” he said eventually, “how many times I wished you would have given Miss Bingley the set down she deserved?”

  Elizabeth laughed. “I think Mrs. Annesley might have given her notice, if I had.” Then she sighed. “She still might.”

  “If Mrs. Annesley is making you unhappy…”

  “No! She is a lovely woman, and her advice is much needed—as must be obvious to you and Miss Bingley alike.”

  “I want to talk no more of Miss Bingley.”

  Elizabeth arched a brow. “She would be devastated to hear of your disinterest, Mr. Darcy.”

  “I thought I said,” he replied in his most rumbling voice, “that I had no interest in discussing Miss Bingley?”

  As he backed her toward the bed, she said, “Then you must wish to continue our discussion of Mrs. Annesley. Do you suppose she would approve…”

  He growled, she laughed, and they neither spoke nor thought of anyone but each other for the rest of the evening.

  Chapter Twenty

  Matlock House possessed some of the most sought after vases in all London—a fact Elizabeth would learn only near the end of their call when one lay shattered at the feet of Lord Matlock. Before that, when she and Darcy sat alone in the drawing room, waiting to be received, she had only the sense that the vases were elegant and expensive, quite like the rest of the furnishings in the house. At least they provided, with their busy designs in white and blue, a welcome distraction to the knot of fear settled somewhere between her throat and her stomach.

  Elizabeth Bennet would never have found a drawing room frightening, but then, there had been many elements of her life these past few months that would have confounded Elizabeth Bennet. They confounded Elizabeth Darcy, too—and yet London dressmakers (“They cannot be so very different from Meryton dressmakers!”), French verbs (“I know a bit of Latin, Mrs. Annesley; surely that is enough?”), and China porcelain (“Must I really spend so much money on dishes when we already have such lovely ones?”) had become regular topics of conversation in the Darcy household.

  Oh, there were many ways in which Elizabeth Bennet would have felt quite at home in Darcy’s world. Certainly at Pemberley, even when riding Milly, the poor chestnut mare tasked with carrying her, she was not ashamed to be a country miss with an unconventional wit and education. There she might read what she like, with her legs curled under her, as she sat next to Darcy in the library, and if she chose to wear a day gown with a color more fashionable five years ago than today, nobody gave it a second thought. Certainly Darcy didn’t mind; he seemed more intent on getting her out of her clothing than making certain it met the current standards of the Ton.

  But the last two months in London had been—well, disconcerting, to say the least. There had been moments of great happiness: she and Darcy had gone to see each of the two Shakespeare productions in town, and she had spent several afternoons (sometimes with Darcy, sometimes with Mrs. Annesley), roaming through the British Museum. Never had she had so much access to the dazzling cultural opportunities London offered, for even when she had visited her aunt and uncle Gardiner, she had spent more time playing with her cousins than exploring the landmarks and libraries of London.

  There were moments—unspoken, and barely acknowledged even by herself—when she might have wished to have spent more of her day in Cheapside with the joyous squeals of the three young Gardiner children. Darcy never forbade her to go, of course, and had even accompanied her on several occasions, but the visits were less frequent than she might have hoped. Dinner with the Gardiners became one of her favorite activities in London, besting even Shakespeare plays, for at least in the privacy of the Gardiner residence, Darcy allowed himself to be the man she loved so dearly. In public—at the theater, the museum, or even along a walk in Hyde Park—he wore a mien she had not seen since those very early days of their acquaintance: haughty, aloof, even arrogant—a man not to be questioned.

  “A soldier going into battle,” she had called him on one of their first London outings, her tone teasing and her smile warm. He had met her gaze, and for the briefest of moments, the mask had slipped: his lips turned up ever so slightly, and the lines around his mouth and eyes had softened. This reprieve lasted but a second; the mask was soon back, and she knew that her version of Fitzwilliam Darcy would not return until they were safely behind the closed doors of Darcy House.

  Even at home, Darcy became increasingly reserved. He was unfailingly kind, and at night, passionate (almost desperately so), yet their conversations felt stilted, as if he were afraid of stumbling onto a subject that might lead to a quarrel.There had been no more arguments like one at Pemberley or the even more painful disagreement in London. In a perverse way, she almost wished they had argued again, for then he would have discarded his mask, and she could have given voice to the anxiety that clawed at her each moment they were in public together.

  The nearer the date of their invitation to Matlock House—“You may pay a brief call on the ___th of April at two o’clock”—the less often the Darcys traveled to Cheapside, or anywhere. Darcy stayed holed up in his study most days, poring over correspondence and ledgers as if they were on the verge of bankruptcy. They were not, of course; it seemed Darcy’s investments, not to mention Pemberley’s autumn harvest, had brought even more income tha
n expected. Elizabeth knew this because, for all her husband’s reserve, he was quite forthcoming in his study, where he seemed to delight in sharing the news of his work with her. Had she not had so many duties of her own, she might have remained at his side half the day, listening and learning the business of the Darcy finances.

  And yet, there was Mrs. Annesley—a lovely woman. Kind, modest, and in possession of a subtle sense of humor, the widow would have made a wonderful friend to Elizabeth, if only she were not tasked with turning her into an accomplished lady.

  It was not just dressmakers and French verbs that weighed down her days; Elizabeth had so many calls to make, and sat in the drawing rooms of so many people she did not really wish to know.

  “It is good practice,” Mrs. Annesley reminded her, on almost a daily basis. And she supposed it was, particularly after that disastrous dinner party with the Bingleys and Hursts. She had, after that evening, reigned in her fears and been the very best of students. In the drawing rooms of the lesser gentry, she had learned when it was acceptable to make a joke (never on the first or second call, perhaps on the third if the hostess was of an advanced age, with no daughters of her own to be corrupted) and how not to squirm under the undisguised examination of people who wondered (often aloud) how it was that a country miss had snared Fitzwilliam Darcy.

  Perhaps the only good to come of the calls (for Elizabeth was not so foolish as to believe that sitting with stranger after stranger for a quarter of an hour had in fact made her any more refined than she had been before this exercise) was that they had lessened her dread of the Matlock household. Oh, she still feared the power they held over Darcy’s happiness; they still had Georgiana. Yet after nearly two months of chit chat, Elizabeth was more than ready to put her skills to the test; she would convince Lord Matlock that she was worthy of the Darcy family name.