One afternoon in March when Darcy met Mr. Bingley and Colonel Fitzwilliam at his club, they were surprised to see Viscount Hartley enter the room.
Bingley immediately rose and clasped Lord Hartley’s arm. “Returned from rusticating! I depended upon being able to meet you at any time I wished in London, but as soon as I arrived in town, I was told by that fine butler fellow of yours that you were gone to the countryside. In the middle of the season as well. I wish to introduce Mrs. Bingley to you.”
“My apologies.” Hartley shrugged, opened his hands, and then sat down with the other three gentlemen. “I was called by duty. But I am glad to see you all. I was told by Darcy’s man that this was where to look.”
“Of course,” Bingley said with mock disappointment. “ I am never the person who anyone seeks.”
Colonel Fitzwilliam laughed. “It is that neither of us are tall enough.”
“It definitely is that Mr. Darcy is so very tall,” Hartley agreed. But the smile died quickly.
Lord Hartley in fact generally tended to cheerfulness, and easy laughter. But he also was a man who was famed amongst his friends for crying easily, and it seemed that he had been affected deeply by something.
“Do you need advice upon something?” Darcy asked.
“I do not believe so. What I need is to see you all. I already feel better.” Hartley rubbed at his face and swallowed back the drink Colonel Fitzwilliam had poured for him. “Maybe I need advice. I hardly know. Nor what to believe. I just returned by horse from seeing my father.”
“Your father!” Darcy said with some surprise.
“I thought you almost never had business with the old fellow,” Colonel Fitzwilliam said. “On account of that small matter of him being a murderer of women and children.”
“I do not wish to speak of this here.” Hartley gestured to the footmen waiting attentively to instantly serve any of the twenty or so gentlemen conversing in the large darkly paneled room. “Will you gentlemen attend me at my townhouse this evening?”
“Of course but let us go quickly,” Bingley said. “Poor Jane! I told her that I would likely be home early. But this is a matter on which my curiosity is such that I cannot leave until I hear it. But please, do not torture Mrs. Bingley for too long.”
“Young marriage,” Colonel Fitzwilliam said. “But are you sure that your presence is not more of a torment than your absence?”
“Very,” was the simple satisfied reply from Mr. Bingley. He called to a servant to ask for paper so he could scribble a note to his wife, and as he waited for the man to return, Bingley said, “Can you believe that Darcy tried to convince me not to marry Jane?”
“No!” said Hartley. “Our Darcy interfering in a matter of the heart? What was his objection?”
“Chiefly that he found her difficult to understand. Mrs. Bingley smiles too much, you see.”
This brought laughs to the whole group.
The writing implements were delivered, and Bingley scribbled a note which Darcy hoped, though he doubted, would explain to Mrs. Bingley the delay in that gentleman’s return.
As it was handed to the footman, Bingley said to Lord Hartley, “I’ll charge you to dine with us within the week. After you have occupied an evening of mine, it is only fair that I occupy an evening of yours. Darcy and Fitzwilliam, you both must come as well.”
“I must return to Kent tomorrow. There are a great many estate matters I should attend to. This is part of why I accepted my father’s summons. His recent attack of apoplexy has reduced his abilities, and he is right that I ought to know the peculiarities of the estate and be familiar with its present circumstances.” Hartley paused. And then he added with a wry expression, “Though when he should die, I will of course not have the ‘stomach’ required to do honor to the title, no matter how I apply myself. He still brings me to cry with little effort.”
The group of them set off. It was less than half a mile to Hartley’s townhouse, so they went by foot.
“Let me see if I understand correctly,” Hartley asked as they ambled along in the reddish London dusk, “You tried to prevent Bingley from marrying an acknowledged beauty of the highest degree, because she likes to smile. Darcy, I knew you to be a contrary man, but this astonishes me beyond all.”
“You make it to sound absurd,” Darcy replied. “And I do repent the advice. Bingley, I will say it again, it was to your benefit when you ignored me.”
“Yes, but what exactly did you say? I wish to gossip as much as if I were an elderly lady,” Hartley said.
“Allow me to tell the tale.” Bingley smiled, and he spoke loud enough that all of them could easily hear over the sound of carriages rattling past them on the fashionable cobblestoned London streets. “Mr. Darcy’s chief arguments, besides what has already been mentioned, that Jane always is smiling, were that Mrs. Bennet is a particularly awful specimen of that mercenary species ‘the mothers of daughters of a marriageable age’, and that Mrs. Bennet was particularly likely to pressure her daughter to agree to marry me against her inclinations, and also that he did not like Mrs. Bennet.”
“Good God,” Colonel Fitzwilliam said to Darcy. “The woman was not to be your mother-in-law.”
Laughing Bingley said, “In Darcy’s defense, he had a more serious cause of his dislike for Mrs. Bennet. From the time he met her, he always had a friendly and protective sentiment towards Mr. Bennet’s ward, Miss Elizabeth, and he thought that she was ill treated by Mrs. Bennet—I assure you, I have spoken further to Lizzy. She really is all gratitude towards Mrs. Bennet.”
This brought a grimace to Darcy’s face. “She shall say that. But it does not mean that her treatment is how it ought to be.”
They reached Hartley’s familiar townhouse. Hartley hurried up the step and opened the door, and he said to the butler as soon as that gentleman appeared, “Bring out that excellent port you got for me in January.”
“I really think you misunderstand Lizzy,” Mr. Bingley said to Darcy as they handed their light coats to the servants attending on them. “She is a happy creature.”
Darcy felt jealous at Bingley’s familiar use of her name. He had not thought that often of her, but whenever he had thought of her, it had been with a sharp sort of longing and painful remembrance of her beauty.
“I know that Miss Elizabeth is a naturally happy creature. That does not excuse Mrs. Bennet’s treatment of her. And I have no reason to believe that this has been improved by your marriage to Mrs. Bingley or by Mrs. Collins’s marriage.”
“Arguing over a woman?” Colonel Fitzwilliam exclaimed. “I can very well imagine our Mr. Darcy thinking that he knows better than everyone in an affair of the heart, but I never imagined this.”
Bingley and Hartley laughed, but Darcy did not join them. He had some tenderness around the point.
When they settled in the drawing room, glasses of port poured from the decanter, Bingley asked, “Now tell us your story.”
“No, no, not yet. Who is this Lizzy?”
“Just Mr. Bennet’s ward.” Bingley waved a dismissive hand. “She is a short thing, penniless, and not particularly pretty. No one but Mr. Darcy would notice her. But she is quite clever. Always laughing at everything. But do not think too much about it. Darcy chiefly interested himself in her affairs because he thought she was mistreated—which she is not.”
Colonel Fitzwilliam laughed. “A man seeking to save a not too pretty damsel in distress. Not even I expect to hear wedding bells.”
“She is extremely pretty,” Darcy exclaimed in annoyance. “Quite as beautiful as your own Mrs. Bingley. It is merely that she takes great care to look as poorly as she can, so that she will avoid Mrs. Bennet’s displeasure, and that prevents everyone from seeing that.”
“Oh.” Lord Hartley’s eyes and mouth went wide. “ This puts the matter in a different light.”
Darcy haughtily said, “I assure you that my sentiments with regards to Miss Elizabeth are under excellent regulation. Only, I am not blind like so many other gentlemen.”
“I have changed my opinion,” Colonel Fitzwilliam said, laughing again. “I hear the wedding bells already.”
Darcy made a strong effort to not think about that. Images of Elizabeth that he suddenly found were imprinted in his memory with painful clarity flashed before him.
Dancing with her, her sweet small hand on his. Sitting in the library together, smiling and happy as Mr. Bennet snored next to them. Overhearing her voice that first night, “Mr. Darcy seems to be a more interesting man than Bingley.”
The image of her dressed in a fine silk gown, standing before a parson and smiling at him as he handed her a ring forced itself into his head despite his best efforts.
Damnation, he only admired her and wanted to see her happy. He did not mean to marry someone who was so wholly out of his sphere, not even if his cousin would find it hilarious.
Seeing that Darcy did not intend to say any more upon the matter, Hartley grimly said, “I suppose I should now explain—I no longer am at all convinced that my father murdered Lady Rochester and my half-sister.”
“What! No, no, no,” Colonel Fitzwilliam exclaimed, sitting tall. “Take that back. I have bragged for years about how the half-brother of my least favorite uncle was the most notorious, unhanged, wife murderer in England.”
“Fitzwilliam,” Hartley replied with asperity, “this is not a joke. None of it is. It never was.”
Colonel Fitzwilliam opened his mouth with an expression that said he was about to explain that it was in fact a matter of amusement to him . But he then thought better. “You are serious. Facts now.”
“Since his attack of apoplexy Papa has endlessly talked with this vicar who has a living three or four miles away. A fanatical young fellow, almost low church in his enthusiasm, though he does hold to the rites. Papa has thrown himself into the same enthusiasm for all that is Holy, and the gentleman of the cloth convinced my father with many sound arguments that he must forgive the adulterer and her spawn.”
“He still refers to them in those terms?” Darcy asked. “It makes me suspect the sincerity of this forgiveness.”
Lord Hartley shrugged. “That is between his soul and the Almighty. My commission was to go to London, hire a dozen of those fellows whose jobs are to find people to find Lady Rochester and Lady Elizabeth—though of course Papa, despite having forgiven them, will give neither the appellation of ‘Lady’.”
“He could be saying this to please his priest,” Colonel Fitzwilliam said, “And he may know perfectly well which particular six-foot-deep hole the Lady and her child can be found in.”
Bingley said, “I like to imagine that this is true, and that he is sincere. Maybe you always have thought worse of him than you ought?”
The other three gentleman turned to stare at him.
Bingley blushed. “My wife always says that she hates to think ill of anyone. Perhaps I am influenced by her.”
“Even if he did not murder them, he beat both my sister and my stepmother terribly. I can still remember the sound of his fists hitting Lizzy as she screamed and sobbed. With every blow he shouted, ‘bastard!’ Damn him. I do not care if she was my sister in blood or a transplanted sapling. She was barely five years of age.”
Silence all around.
Colonel Fitzwilliam poured himself, and then everyone else, a tumbler.
Hartley then wiped at his eyes. “And damn these tears. I can never think about that day without crying. No stomach to me .”
“I admire you,” Darcy said to Hartley. “You should cease to care that your father does not think highly of you.”
“Is it not ridiculous that I have this memory before his eyes, and yet his insults still stick under my skin?”
“Not ridiculous,” Colonel Fitzwilliam said.
Bingley had gone pale. He swallowed his port. “I had half-forgotten the details of that story you told us all at Harrow. Even Jane would judge him harshly.”
“You are no longer convinced that Lord Rochester murdered them?” Darcy asked, returning to the chief point. “And in any case you are to hunt the pair out so he may ‘forgive them’.”
“Even though he is a vicious terrible fellow,” Bingley said, “it speaks well of your father that he wishes to now forgive his wife.”
Darcy rolled his eyes.
“I have it!” Colonel Fitzwilliam exclaimed. “It is part of a plan to have her declared dead in a way that does not put the blame on him. Wasn’t Lady Rochester’s fortune held separately in trust for her and her children? He must want you to inherit that extra sum. Didn’t the trustees refuse to pay anything out to him from the income? If they have reinvested everything, it must be a quite tidy sum by now.”
Bingley asked, “Couldn’t he petition a court to have her declared dead after seven years? Is that not what they do with sailors?”
“And then he would remind everyone that he murdered his wife,” Colonel Fitzwilliam said. “I would not in his place.”
“I do not think my father’s chief motivation has ever been mercenary. I know you will disagree, Fitzwilliam. You dearly wish to keep the distinction of being related to a wife murderer.”
“No really, but how much money is it?” Colonel Fitzwilliam said.
“More than forty thousand by now,” Lord Hartley said. “Which is enough to convince you that you are right. But my father’s manner suggested sincerity. Maybe I should not even be surprised if they are alive. The inquest established that Lady Rochester had fled.”
“I am sure,” Colonel Fitzwilliam declared, “that I could convince an inquest, especially one led by my brother—”
“Sir Lewis had only been one of the investigators, he did not lead the group,” Lord Hartley objected.
“ I could convince them that a woman had fled, when she’d been patted into a neat little bed of earth, helping the flowers to grow.”
Everyone else grimaced.
“It is true,” Colonel Fitzwilliam added, “Human remains are as good as fish. Better than manure, the best fertilizer available except for the droppings of a bat. If you ever visit the land where a great battle was fought, you can see a year later the lines of combat by how thickly the grasses grow where the men died and bled out into the soil.”
After saying that, Colonel Fitzwilliam got that look in his eye again which suggested memories most unpleasant.
“And so, with our spirits much enlivened by that thought,” Lord Hartley said, “might I assume that none of you have lately seen Lady Rochester or her daughter?”
“How would I know if I’d seen her daughter?” Colonel Fitzwilliam asked. “I barely knew the mother. But I remember that Lady Rochester was a fine looking woman. A damned pity, all of it. If he did not murder them, I do not know that his crimes are at all comparable to placing a false child into the line of succession. That is a deep sin as well.”
“Beating a child can never be justified.” Darcy remembered Miss Bennet, Mrs. Bingley now, telling him about how Elizabeth had been terribly beaten when she first came to the Bennets.
“I am surprised,” Colonel Fitzwilliam said, “that you treat such a matter with casualness. As the master of a great estate, you are particularly vulnerable to such a loss.”
“A man ought to be sure of his wife and her integrity before he marries,” Darcy replied.
“And,” Lord Hartley added, “he ought to pay her proper attention so that she does not have reason to stray. My father had always been unkind and harsh to Lady Rochester. The Lord knows that I know she sinned, and that what she did to my father in cuckolding him was wrong. But, Jove, I saw enough of their habits to know that I must never treat my own wife in a like manner when I marry.”
“There are many women who are perfectly well treated, whose husbands believed them to be virtuous when they married, and who nonetheless cuckold them.” Colonel Fitzwilliam stretched his legs out on the deep piled red rug. “Neither of you have enough experience of the ‘fairer’ sex, and as a result you still believe them to be fair , when they are not. Your average woman is as cunning as any Spanish guerrilla.”
“You would beat children to convince their mothers to never stray?” Lord Hartley asked angrily.
“No, no. I do not say that,” Colonel Fitzwilliam replied. “Bingley, you have not been engaged too much in the dispute, so you are a safe party to ask. That is not what I said, is it?”
“No, not me. I hate disputes,” Bingley replied. “I would much prefer if you both left off the argument.”
“That is why you are the best unbiased party,” Colonel Fitzwilliam replied.
“But what did you say?” Bingley frowned deeply as he tried to remember. “I think that you said that Lord Rochester’s sin was no worse than that of Lady Rochester. Assuming that he had not murdered either of them.”
“Yes, yes. And that is what I will stand by.” Colonel Fitzwilliam said, “I do not try to diminish your father’s guilt, but merely to make clear that Lady Rochester is a woman who deserves no one’s sympathy—not even if Lord Rochester was the worst of husbands.”
“I cannot agree,” Darcy said. “Perhaps if he had only beaten Lady Rochester—no, even then he would have acted very wrongly.”
“I do not disagree on that point,” Colonel Fitzwilliam replied.
“He terribly beat an innocent child,” Darcy said, “for a cause that had no source in anything she had ever done. That is worse. That is unjustifiable. I would never be friends with an adulterous woman, but I will despise a man who beats a child for spite.”
“The legitimacy of all of the great in the land depends on the line of succession being clear,” Colonel Fitzwilliam replied.
“To make a husband raise the child of a lover is a deep crime against the husband,” Darcy agreed. “I do not disagree. I simply say that the repugnance I feel towards a man who severely beats a child is far greater. Perhaps this is because I have a dear friend who was beaten as a child, and it affected her deeply, but I have never known a man who was forced to raise another’s child as their own.”
Bingley looked at Darcy with tilted head, and an odd expression. “Do you speak of Miss Elizabeth?”
The question made Darcy flush, but he nodded.
“Did she tell you about that?” Bingley said with some surprise. “I did not even know that she remembered.”
“What details I know were given by your wife.”
“Ah.” Bingley nodded. “I do suppose…Hmmmm. I have never thought how Lizzy…”
Bingley trailed off.
Darcy turned to Lord Hartley. “Accompany us when we go to Rosings for Easter. It is close enough to your family seat, and the company will always be welcome. And if you delay the extra day, you will be able to attend that dinner you owe to Mrs. Bingley.”
Lord Hatley laughed. “I can delay one day—but only if such a day will be convenient for your wife.”
“Without doubt,” Bingley replied. “We already have a dinner planned for that day, but with guests of such a sort as I feel no compunction about adding additional persons. However , I have not been married so long as to forget that one ought to ask one’s wife before thrusting a guest of such magnificence as the heir to an earldom onto her table. I reserve the right to send you my apologies if Jane should demur. And with that said, I think I ought to return home now.”
He gave them a smile which suggested to all of them that Bingley was very eager to return to Mrs. Bingley. Given her beauty he should be.
As Bingley left the room, he turned at the door and said, “Speaking of Lizzy, Miss Elizabeth will be staying with Mrs. Collins while you are there. You must say hello to her for me, since that shall be more direct than a letter.”