Page 2 of An Offer of Marriage (Engaged to Mr Darcy #7)

A FINE JOKE

S olitude and perhaps an immediate removal from Kent were her dearest wishes, but neither was to be. Minutes after she saw Mr Darcy’s departure, there came a light rapping at her bedchamber door.

“What happened here tonight?” Charlotte asked as she came in. “Oh dear, you were so pale before and now your cheeks are scarlet! Do you feel a fever coming on?”

“No, no, it is not a fever.” I am almost certain. Elizabeth sat up, but Charlotte was already leaving the room. Elizabeth heard her friend call to Mrs Davis that she needed a long rag and the headache poultice which were brought with good haste.

“This will help,” Charlotte announced, pressing on Elizabeth’s shoulders to encourage her to lie down. Elizabeth did, and with deft hands, Charlotte tied the rag around her head. It smelt like camphorated animal carcass, but Elizabeth endured it. Truthfully, it was somehow relieving .

At last satisfied, Charlotte took a seat on the edge of the bed. “Why was Mr Darcy here?”

Elizabeth sat up, the wrap, a credit to Charlotte’s nursing, remaining tightly bound to her. “You cannot believe it. In fact, I cannot believe it and I was made to live through it!” After a brief pause, Elizabeth said, “He declared himself.”

“Declared himself?” Charlotte gave her a knowing smile. “See there? I told you he must have had feelings?—”

“Oh, he had feelings all right,” Elizabeth retorted with a huff, then went on to explain the many insulting things he had said about her family, her inferiority, and how fervently he had struggled to not like her.

Even recollecting it set her blood to boiling; her voice shook with anger as she recounted to Charlotte what Mr Darcy had done to poor Jane.

Charlotte listened with increasing astonishment until Elizabeth was finished telling her what Mr Darcy had said. Then, shaking her head, she said, “I cannot credit that any man would believe such things could be spoken of in a proposal of marriage!”

“Evidently we Bennets are so low that aspersion is our due, no matter the circumstance.”

“Do tell me you were gentle in refusing him? No matter how beastly he was, it would not do to insult him.”

“I started to refuse him…” she began. “But then…things took a turn.”

“Took a turn? Do you mean to tell me you are engaged to Mr Darcy?”

Elizabeth quickly rose from the bed and went to sit on the wooden chair by the dressing table.

That unfortunately gave her a view of herself that was decidedly unflattering—she was wild-eyed, with frizzled hair sticking out from Charlotte’s headache rag—so she leapt up again.

The chair slid back with a sharp squawk and just avoided toppling.

Elizabeth ignored it and began to pace the length of the room.

“It was positively infuriating! The things he said to me, Charlotte! Have you ever had anyone deliberately poke at your worst vulnerabilities? And been forced to sit there, quietly accepting it, because you were unable to refute a single word they said? I was so…so…angry that I thought I might hit him or kick him, or burst out crying. Has that ever happened to you? That you get so angry, you want to cry?”

Charlotte nodded, her eyes wide.

“That was how it was, anger and the threat of tears almost overcoming me, and I thought, ‘Lizzy, you cannot cry in front of Mr Darcy. You must not allow him to get the better of you.’ And then as is oftentimes the case, an amusing thought just…just popped into my head, in time to chase those tears away.”

“An amusing thought?”

“I have always preferred to laugh rather than cry,” Elizabeth said, still pacing to and fro.

“I started thinking about what I could say that would, on later reflection, be a laugh for me. A joke, or some little quip to soothe the wounds of my heart. But somehow in the midst of thinking of that, I had the most perverse notion.”

“Which was?”

“How odd it is that he should wish to be connected with such a family—my family—who are so very abhorrent to him. Would he call my mother his own? Lydia, an equal to his own sister? That Jane, whose heart is yet broken due to his actions against her, would be his family too? And that was when it came to me, the most hilarious thought of all.”

Charlotte swallowed heavily. “Which was?”

“That the best, most complete revenge I could have on Mr Darcy would be to accept him!” Elizabeth laughed. It sounded a bit hysterical even to her own ears. “Fancy that, Charlotte! A finer punishment does not exist than if I were to accept him.”

“So you accepted him for the purpose of vengeance? Forgive me, Eliza, but I am not seeing the humour in that.”

“I did not accept him at all, in fact, and it is you whom I may thank. I heard you enter the house, I panicked, and shooed him out of the room.”

“Which is when I came upon you. But he thinks he is engaged to you?”

Elizabeth waved her hand dismissively. “Who knows what a man like that thinks?”

What she was thinking of was how humorous it all really was.

Imagine Lydia and Kitty at Pemberley! She had never seen it of course, so her imaginings were limited, but it was sure to be much like Rosings.

Imagine them scampering around such a place, bickering and yelling and knocking over priceless family heirlooms! She giggled.

“Eliza? My dear, you cannot think any of this is funny?”

“No, no…I only had a vision in my mind of my sisters misbehaving in Mr Darcy’s home. You saw how he was at Netherfield—it could only be ten times worse in his own home! Only imagine it!” Elizabeth’s giggle was just short of a cackle.

It seemed Charlotte was now the one whose head ached, for she rubbed at her forehead, wincing. “You cannot speak in earnest.”

“See if I am not,” Elizabeth retorted, imagining how it would be the day that she told him why she disliked his family. How she considered a permanent alliance with Lady Catherine a degradation to anyone who valued good sense and manners over presumption and pompousness!

“I must return to Lady Catherine’s drawing room,” Charlotte said. “Mr Darcy, I believe, has preceded me, but Elizabeth, pray do nothing at present. Do not see him more tonight, for your spirits are too…unsettled.”

“Of course,” Elizabeth said, her mind still whirling with all the many things she wished she had said or might someday say to Mr Darcy, to give him the set down he so richly deserved.