Page 46 of An Offer of Marriage (Engaged to Mr Darcy #7)

THE UPPER CLASS DERANGED

T hey had a family dinner at Darcy House with Lord and Lady Matlock that evening, a dinner at which Lord Matlock acquainted them with the plans for Anne.

She was to go to a private sanatorium in Yorkshire called The Retreat.

“Man called Tuke runs the place,” Lord Matlock informed them all gruffly.

“Been sending him funding for years, but never thought I should have to send my own niece into his care.”

“It is a very reputable place,” Lady Matlock said. “And she will be among her own kind there.”

“What do you consider her kind?” Saye enquired. “The upper class deranged? Heiresses turned murderous? Or just any sort of lady who lacks a moral compass?”

Elizabeth laughed while Lady Matlock gave her son a frown. “I meant she was not to be tossed in amid fishwives who had taken a knife to their husbands.”

“Amid the fishwives is precisely where she should be,” Darcy muttered quietly.

Elizabeth could plainly see his distress, no matter how he strove to control it. His jaw was tight and his gaze dark. When he had entered the drawing room earlier, his fists had been clenched by his side, seemingly without him realising it.

“The fishwives are too good for her,” Fitzwilliam opined. “They at least acted from provocation. Anne was about to kill Elizabeth simply for the cause of not having had her own way of things.”

Lady Matlock closed her eyes a moment while Lord Matlock said, “Be that as it may, this is the decision we have made. A private sanatorium. Do comprehend that should word come out, it is a blight on all the family, not only the de Bourghs.”

Saye grumbled a bit about it, but his words were lost as Lord Matlock turned to Elizabeth. “Does that suit you, my dear? I cannot apologise more completely for my niece’s actions, and I wish that you would know that Anne will sign papers tomorrow for a legacy for your children.”

Elizabeth stared at him blankly for a moment. “My children?”

“Yours and Darcy’s, of course,” he said, cutting into a piece of meat with his fork. “Darcy, you should have the papers tomorrow.”

“I do not want my cousin’s money,” Darcy said bluntly.

“And so shall you not. It is for your children,” said Lord Matlock patiently. “And in exchange, Lady Catherine hopes she might depend upon you to agree never to prosecute Anne.”

“I make no such promise,” Darcy replied firmly.

“It has been an emotional day,” Lord Matlock replied to him. “Give yourself a bit of time to consider it and decide on the best course.”

It had been a tiring, exceedingly dramatic day, and Darcy and Elizabeth both expressed a wish to retire immediately when the family were gone.

They separated into their respective bedchambers to be tended by Beauregard and Fields, but when Fields was done with him, Darcy found he could not imagine lying down to sleep without talking to her at least a little.

Much would need to be discussed, and he did not think it all needed discussed tonight; that said, he did not wish for one more day to go by with her not understanding what she meant to him—his display in Gracechurch Street notwithstanding.

He went to her bedchamber, finding her standing by the window in her nightgown. His breath caught on beholding her, her luxurious hair cascading down her back, her figure concealed by nothing more than her thin muslin nightgown. “You are so beautiful,” he said softly.

She turned from the window, her lips curved into an uncertain smile. “Are you well?”

He shook his head, still awash in his admiration of her. “Am I well? It is you who has borne the largest part of all of this.”

“You seemed very upset at dinner. I confess it rather allowed me to indulge in the humour of it all—you seemed upset enough for us both.”

“Humour? Yes, I confess I find very little to laugh about in the matter.”

“It lends a certain distinction to a person to have been the object of a murder plot,” she said teasingly. “I will assure you that positively no one wished to kill the insignificant Miss Elizabeth Bennet. ”

He tried to smile in reply to her teasing but feared it came as more of a grimace. “Will you come with me? For just a little while.”

He knew not why he wished her to come to his room, save for the fact that scenes of her when racked with illness remained with him in hers.

She agreed and took his hand and followed him as he led her into his bedchamber and across the room to the chair by the fireplace.

There was just the one chair; it was a large chair, but nevertheless it fit only one person.

He knew not if he dared to sit with her as he wished to, but his longing for her overcame his uncertainty.

He kept hold of her hand as he sat and then, in one fluid motion, pulled her onto his lap.

She fell in a somewhat ungainly fashion but, after a moment, settled herself into him.

He closed his eyes a moment against the softness of her in his lap, the curves of her moulded into him. “Are you comfortable?”

“Very much so,” she said softly.

“If you dislike sitting…like this, we could always?—”

She twisted to see him and said, “I like it.” She then turned back and resettled in his arms. The feel of her back rising and falling with her respirations was heady, and he recognised, quickly, his danger.

“What do you say to this offer of my cousin’s?” he forced out.

“You should sign and accept it,” she said very assuredly.

“Do you think so?”

She paused. “I surely would not wish to see her…prosecuted. Perhaps sentenced to… No. To say nothing of the embarrassment to the family. If she wishes us to decline furthering the prosecution of her crime for a benefit to our futu re children, I am wholly prepared to agree.” She looked over her shoulder at him. “Do you approve?”

He slowly ran his hand down her arm. “I am not the one who was nearly killed, who suffered such agonies, but I shall admit that for the crime of seeing you almost taken away from me, I think I could easily see her swing.”

“She is not well. She cannot be; a sane person does not have such thoughts.”

Darcy made a little scoffing sound at that. “I shall defer to your mercy and compassion for her.”

“The quality of mercy is twice blessed, if I might paraphrase the Bard,” she said lightly. “For the one who gives more than the one that receives.”

He moved his hand into her hair, playing with a long strand of it. “I am glad you think so, for I daresay I will need a great deal of your mercy myself.”

“And I, yours.”

“No,” he said. “No, you did nothing wrong?—”

“Do not say so. I did, I allowed you to believe?—”

“My pride, my selfishness led me to believe you loved me—or so they would have if I had thought of your feelings at all. I never did. I thought only of having you, of you being mine. I had forgotten all my own dreadful behaviour in Hertfordshire. I did not even recall my terrible insult of you. No, I had completely laid aside all of my own mistakes and thought only of yours as I tossed about in fury all these weeks.”

For a moment there was no sound but his own pulse roaring through his veins. “It was my arrogance which made a fool of me, not you, never you.”

“I never saw you as a fool,” she said quickly. “I believed you to be haughty, yes, but?—”

“Haughty, rude, ridiculous,” he said. “If I knew someone who acted to me as I did to you, I should think them positively absurd. And yet I did not see it in my own actions. Even as I fell in love with you?—”

“When was that?”

“When I began to fall in love with you?” He contemplated that for a moment, then threw back his head and laughed. “That night. The assembly.”

She turned to look at him, appearing adorably baffled for a moment. “Not the one?—”

“The very one. Your response was one I should never forget! Had you turned angry, or tearful—those things I would have understood. But you rose and went by me to go to your friends, and it simply enchanted me. I could not stop thinking of it in the days following which was why I always stared at you in company. I would catch myself doing it, make myself turn away…and find myself doing it again, each time finding something new to admire in you.”

She looked down and he saw, by the light of the lamp, her colour rising.

“I have to say, my feelings…terrified me.”

“Terrified you?”

He nodded. “I have not much success in loving people. My parents, whom I loved very much, are both dead. George Wickham was my first and dearest friend for so long, and that attachment ended in pain. My sister…well. I would be a liar if I did not admit that I have been angry at her, very angry in the beginning. What was worse, however, was the fact that I could not ever tell her so. It was necessary for me to help prevent her from descending into melancholia; I could not indulge my own misery.”

Deciding he would indulge himself now, he put his nose into her curls and inhaled. The scent was wonderfully maddening. “And then I fell in love with you. It was difficult for me to permit myself to love you, to trust that someone in my life would not again injure me.”

There were a few moments of silence, then Elizabeth added, “Until I did.”

“I should not like to be held to account for the things I have said in anger, particularly if I believed myself alone or speaking to someone in confidence.”

“But the other things I said, thinking myself so clever?—”

“Were all deserved. If I made myself ridiculous, then I was meant to be ridiculed.”

She shifted herself on his legs so that she could see him as she spoke.

“No one deserves to be treated unkindly. On that first night, the night you insulted me, when I went to my friends and had a laugh at your expense… Indeed it soothed my own wounded feelings, but I gave no thought to how I might be harming yours. Or what you might have been thinking or feeling to say such a thing. I decided it was because you were rich and therefore black-hearted. I did not consider that even rich men have problems.”

“We do,” he said with a faint half-laugh. “Expensive ones.”

That made her laugh a little too.

“If I may, I wish to say that I am dreadfully sorry for all of it. I wish I had behaved better, that I had not been so eaten up by pride that I saw your friends and family as beneath me. I wholly dislike people who behave so and am mortified to be counted among them. I hope I never again make any person, no matter their station, think me too high in the instep.”

“And I hope that no one, particularly you, should think me sharp-tongued, no matter the provocation,” she said lightly .

“I hope I shall never indulge my resentful temper as I have these past weeks. I am ashamed of how I acted.”

“Anger is natural,” she said, looking back at him. “Understandable, to be sure… But I must say I hope that in the future we will be able to speak more honestly about the trials and tribulations that beset us.”

“I am sorry.” It was a very short distance between his lips and hers. “You may depend upon it that I have learnt my lesson and shall never behave so again.”

She murmured a quiet thanks and then they were silent, the weight of all that had been said needing time to settle between them.

He wanted to tell her again how he loved her, how horribly frightened he had been thinking she might be hurt, or worse.

He wanted to ask her if it was at all possible that one day she might love him.

But he said none of that, settling for a mere, “I want you to be happy. I want to make you happy.”

“I want to make you happy, too,” she said and then turned her face towards his. His breath caught, thinking she might kiss him, but she stopped herself. He closed the gap between their lips, beginning softly but it rapidly became something else altogether.

A conflagration erupted within him. His feelings, the near loss of her, his desire became molten hot, but he knew he could not pursue it. Not yet. Not until he had shown her what was in his heart. Not until he could be certain that it was what she wanted, not simply what she permitted him.

Finally he pulled himself from her. “Go to bed,” he murmured. “Before I cannot stop myself.”

She rose from his lap, then bent to place one last kiss on his cheek.

As she did, the moonlight behind her shone through the light muslin of her nightgown, illuminating her curves just enough to further madden him.

He swallowed hard and closed his eyes, hoping she did not see just how affected he was by her, or if she did that she would not misunderstand it.

He would not have her feeling frightened by his ardour.

When he opened his eyes again, she was still standing there, watching him. “Forgive me,” he said sheepishly. “I have yearned for you for such a long time.”

“Have you?”

“Also since that night at the assembly.”

“That was quite a long time ago.”

“A lifetime ago. But that is not important. What is important is you knowing how sorry I am and how much I wish for things to return to…well, I cannot say what they were. To return to the promise of what could be.” He swallowed and then added, “Because I really do love you.”

With their eyes still locked to one another’s, she reached out a hand. He took it, feeling surprised when she tugged on it, pulling him until he stood. It was not until she gave him a shy smile and a brief word—“Come”—that he understood what she offered.

“You do not have to,” he forced himself to say.

“I know,” she replied and then led him to his bed.