Deception
Page 50
“So what?” She moved closer to him, leaning over. “We do not care about that! We care about you!”
“It was my duty, my responsibility.”
“What are you speaking of? Your first duty is to me, Georgiana and the child I am carrying.” She cried, tears in her eyes. “And just because of your stupid pride, you almost made it half orphan before it was even born!” she added in a broken voice and fled the room.
Darcy wanted to stop her, to run after her. He tried to lift himself, but Georgiana stopped him, pushing him back to the pillows. “She will forgive you, Brother. She loves you very much, you know. She has barely left your side all this time. She is angry because she was so worried about you. We all were.”
Epilogue
In late April, Elizabeth Darcy, after a relatively easy labour, gave birth to a healthy strong boy. He was named Thomas after his maternal grandfather, and according to Mrs. Bennet, he bore great physical resemblance to her late husband. The rest of the family was not so much convinced of this, rightly thinking that the boy’s features were not yet fully established at the mature age of three days when his grandmother first saw him. It was rather agreed that the infant could easily favour both his mother and father, having very large, dark eyes and thick black hair when he was born.
However, in the years to come, Mrs. Bennet’s first impression of her grandson proved to be quite accurate. Thomas Darcy, though, inherited his father’s calm character and rather reserved disposition (the traits which for certain allowed him a great deal of patience when dealing with his four younger, most lively little sisters) was called more than once Mr. Bennet’s mirror image by people who knew his grandfather in person.
Over the years, all of the Bennet sisters married, and all of them in the end left Hertfordshire. Mr. and Mrs. Bingley moved to Derbyshire in the second year of their marriage, buying a good estate with the help of Mr. Darcy. Catherine Bennet married Mr. Wakefield, her brother-in-law’s old university friend, whom she met during one of her stays at Pemberley. They spent most of the year in his estate in Yorkshire. Mary Bennet married Mr. Ashton, who was the parson at Kympton, the vicarage which had been once designed for George Wickham. She found that the life of a parson’s wife suited her very well indeed, and the rumour had that the excellent sermons delivered by her husband were of her authorship. This way, all four sisters came to live close together, within a day’s travel from each other.
The author would wish to say that the youngest Bennet sister, Lydia, after the past experiences with her elopement and all the sorrow which this decision brought to the entire family, had undergone a groundbreaking change of her character, which would make her less self-centred and egoistic.
Unfortunately, though she confessed to her mother and sisters her late husband to be a common drunkard and brute, her general view of the world did not alter much. At the age of nineteen, she was introduced to a retired Admiral, who managed to collect a great fortune serving for over thirty years at sea. The man was convinced to be in love with the young widow, and married her just three months after they first met, despite the fact that Mrs. Wickham was exactly the age of his eldest granddaughter.
The Admiral passed away in matter of few years, leaving all his fortune to his dearest Lydia, but at the same time disinheriting his own children. Lydia refused to share, in her opinion, her rightly earned fortune with her husband’s sons, and the whole affair ended in court, causing a great scandal among the elegant circles in London. At last, when Lydia, at the age of four and thirty, entered the state of Holy matrimony for the third time, this time choosing for a spouse an extremely handsome, much younger than herself, jobless actor, the elder sisters decided, for the peacefulness of their own families and the happiness of their respectable marriages, to break relations with their youngest sister almost entirely.
Mrs. Bennet moved north as well to see more of her daughters and take care of her grandchildren, of which she had twelve before reaching five and fifty years of age. Mr. Darcy built for his mother-in-law a pleasant cottage on the outskirts of Pemberley Park, which she decorated according to her own taste.
Her grandchildren ran to her from Pemberley every day, where she could spoil them as much as she wanted. Not wanting to favour the children of her second daughter, she often visited her daughter Jane, residing thirty miles from Pemberley for a prolonged stay, as well as her younger daughters Kitty and Mary. Her son-in-law Mr. Darcy always acclaimed those visits, offering Mrs. Bennet his most elegant and comfortable carriage for her travels. He many times suggested that Mrs. Bennet should not deprive her other grandchildren of her excellent guidance and should see them as often as could be.
When moving from Hertfordshire to the north, Mrs. Bennet tried to persuade her second daughter that it was a sheer madness to transport her father’s library from Purvis Lodge to Pemberley. She even called to her son-in-law’s common sense in this matter, but Mr. Darcy agreed readily to fulfil his wife’s wish, knowing very well how very precious those books were to his beloved. Servants from Pemberley were sent to Purvis Lodge to pack all the volumes and bring them safely to Derbyshire. Together with the books, the richly incrusted cabinet was brought, which had been locked since the days when Mr. Bennet yet had been Master of Longbourn. While carrying the piece into the manor, it was accidentally dropped on the staircase and fell open.
The inside of the cabinet, which had once so much intrigued Miss Elizabeth Bennet, amazed the entire family. There were the old jewellery, stock papers of great value, and Mr. Bennet’s, or rather Lord Wharton’s, last will. Apparently Mr. Bennet inherited the title of baron after his mother, when her only brother died childless. He found it to be a great joke, never mentioning this tiny little detail of being rich and titled to his daughters or wife.
The only person who did not severely judge the old gentleman’s peculiar sense of humour was his son-in-law Mr. Darcy. How relived he felt that the cabinet happened to be opened in the year 1820, when his beloved Lizzy had been safely his for the past eight years, pregnant with their third child. The situation might not have been so advantageous for him had she had found the key that afternoon when they sat together on the floor in the library at Purvis Lodge, looking through Mr. Bennet’s books moved that had been from Longbourn after his death.
According to the documents which were found, the special rule of this particular title, which passed on Mr. Bennet, stated that the title of Baron of Wharton could be inherited through the female line, which itself was a rare thing, but not impossible. In cases where there were no living male descendants of the baron, including male cousins and their heirs (which was proved to be true in this case), the title went to the eldest son of the eldest daughter of the baron. As Lady Elizabeth Bennet was the only living sibling of the last Baron Wharton, her only son, in consequence, inherited the title.
Mr. Bennet’s last will stated that the whole fortune, around one hundred thousand pounds placed at a bank in London, was to be divided amongst his family. Each of his daughters was to receive fifteen thousand pounds, and his wife, to her sole use, twenty thousand. His sister-in-law, Mrs. Gardiner, for her kindness bestowed towards his two eldest daughters was to receive five thousand pounds, and her husband, the stock papers, which in the year when the testament was found were estimated at twenty thousand pounds. The title, together with the family estate in Hampshire and townhouse, which at that time had both managed to go slightly into ruin, were to pass, as it happened before, on the eldest son of the eldest daughter of Lord Wharton, meaning Mr. Thomas Bennet.
Mrs. Bingley, when interrogated, admitted that their father, just before death, had been saying something about looking for the papers and money in the library, but she thought he meant only the two hundred pounds they had found in the drawer of his desk.
Miss Caroline Bingley, who in the course of years, being seriously disappointed with her brother’s, in her opinion, inferior marriage, largely severed her relations with his family. She did not visit his new home in Derbyshire even
once. Perhaps contributing to her decision of not venturing north was the added fact that she had been told in no uncertain terms that she would be never admitted at Pemberley, as her presence had a very bad effect on Mrs. Darcy’s poor nerves. We can imagine her surprise when one day, while reading her brother-in-law’s abandoned newspaper, she encountered the most sensational news. The new Lord Wharton, of a previously thought to be deceased family, was now found in the person of five year-old Mr. James Bingley from Derbyshire, who inherited his title after his grandfather from the mother’s side.
The End