Darcy followed Elizabeth and Mrs. Collins to the door, but after giving her a brief squeeze of the hand and saying that he wished to know what plans Lord Rochester might make, he returned to the drawing room.
“My daughter...I have a daughter,” Lord Rochester exclaimed with delight as Darcy reentered the room. “Robert, I thought you were my only child.”
“My apologies! My apologies. We do respect your kindness!” Mr. Collins said to Lady Catherine, “I shall tell my wife that she must apologize for leaving without your permission. And I can scarce believe that Miss Elizabeth would do such a thing, as to go when she was ordered by a peer of the realm to stay. Mrs. Bennet said she was always a biddable creature. We have been the kind recipients of your condescension, and none of us should have acted in such a way! Miss Elizabeth has been...I will make Miss Elizabeth return, and... My Lord Rochester, is Miss Elizabeth really your daughter?”
“Who is this fellow?” Lord Rochester asked.
“My clergyman, Mr. Collins. Lady Elizabeth was raised by Mrs. Collins’s father. Do you know what he has to do with any of this? That was the chief source of my doubt before you confirmed Lady Elizabeth’s identity—none of us have ever had any to do with a Mr. Bennet.”
“Oh, he was the fellow that Amelia had wanted to marry. Scholarly little chap. No significance. I never thought of him at all. I had forgotten his existence until you mentioned the name in your letter. Mr. Collins, my daughter has been staying with your wife?”
“Miss Elizabeth, that is Lady Elizabeth has been resident these past days. I am at your service, sir, to do whatever you wish. I am sure that once she understands the goodness of...how you are one of the great. And she will then, Lady Catherine, I am but your humble servant. Mrs. Collins is as well. But Miss Elizabeth is really Lady Elizabeth ?”
“He is not one of the greatest minds of the age,” Colonel Fitzwilliam said quietly to Darcy and Lord Hartley.
When Lady Catherine confirmed Elizabeth’s identity as that long disappeared and oft thought dead creature, “Lady Elizabeth”, Mr. Collins exclaimed, “I have been so blessed! To play host to the daughter of an earl. I shall need to give her great thanks for her condescension in honoring my wife and I in such a way, even though...but why did she never tell me?”
“Really not one of the greatest minds,” Colonel Fitzwilliam repeated.
“She did not know!” Lady Catherine exclaimed. “This is why your wife and I must write most of your sermons for you. Now go, keep an eye on her, and tell me tomorrow morning how she fares, and what mood she is in. Begone.”
“That will not be necessary. I will bring her home with me tonight,” Lord Rochester said to Mr. Collins. “Go bring her back. I will not have my daughter spend another night under a foreign roof.”
“She does not wish to see you at present,” Darcy said as Mr. Collins hurried out the door to fulfill the demand, “Miss Elizabeth cannot be ordered about simply, as you might if she was a child.”
“She is my daughter. She will come when I order her—what is your interest in Lady Elizabeth. Have you been hanging about my daughter without my permission.”
“ You did not even know that she was alive or not until this evening.”
“That changes nothing of my parental rights. I have always liked you, Mr. Darcy, and I respected your father enormously. He was not a part of the baying mob which turned against me, when I was falsely accused of Lady Rochester’s death— Oh the Lord has been kind!— I might consider you as a suitor once I have fully taken the reins of her education and made her to develop such manners as a daughter of my house must show, but at present I have no such thoughts. You have been too familiar with her.”
There was a strong conflict inside Darcy between his carefully bred politeness and a desire to sneer at the man.
The question flashed through Darcy’s mind of what he would do if they ended up fighting a duel. Would he try to kill Lord Rochester or would he delope? Would he even accept the challenge?
No.
To accept the challenge would be to acknowledge that Lord Rochester had a right to dictate Elizabeth’s life.
“Sit down, Darcy,” Lady Catherine said. “Lady Elizabeth is none of your concern. You can have no interest in her.”
This was enough to make Darcy stop glaring at Lord Rochester.
What Lady Catherine said was true, and the shame Darcy felt on that account filled him again.
The instant he had put together why Lady Catherine had arranged for Lord Rochester and Elizabeth to face each other he had been filled with a sense of horror because he had not asked Elizabeth to marry him before he knew her true circumstances.
He loved her. He admired her more than anyone else he had ever known. And he desired nothing more in life than to have the right to protect her forever.
But he had not even, at least not until the last few days, even considered the possibility of asking her to marry him. And now...it seemed to him as though making an offer to a girl who would now be wealthy and titled, when he had not when she was poor and believed herself to be illegitimate, would mark a weakness of his own character.
He had not been worthy.
She was in fact, as she always had been, too good for him.
Darcy did sit down, staring at his hands. If Elizabeth needed him, he would still do anything for her. Even if he was unworthy to protect her, she may still need him.
“Rather a surprise to you,” Colonel Fitzwilliam said to Darcy. “ You like her a great deal. It cannot be wholly unpleasant to learn of her birth.”
Hartley stood with them. Those tears that he easily shed covered his face. “Alive...she really is alive. Papa did not kill either of them. All this time...do you think I might speak with her? Would she—she is rightly frightened of Papa. She remembers it clearly. But—Papa,” Lord Hartley spoke to his father who after a conversation with Lady Catherine had begun to strive towards the door. “You must wish for us to be a family. To live together as friends. You must not press Elizabeth so far. With what she remembers, if you attempt to force her to return with us, she will be likely to avoid us and—”
“She is my daughter. I will have her with me. She will come under my authority once again. Lady Catherine has told me enough that I know that damned small fellow mangled her education. I shall rectify that. I shall start now . She has been stolen from me, but she is now mine again.”
“Papa, if you are not so impetuous,” Lord Hartley said, “I hope that we can convince Elizabeth to freely come with us. She must want to know both of us, to know her position and the house she belongs to.”
“She is not yours,” Darcy said. “She is her own person, nearly of age, and fully capable of making her own decisions.”
“Darcy,” Lord Rochester said with a blaze in his eyes, “if you attempt to interfere once more with my management of my daughter, I will call you out.”
Darcy stared at the man, his throat working.
“Papa, you are overwrought. Let us all rest.” Lord Hartley grabbed his father’s arm. “This cannot be managed tonight. If you approach Elizabeth in this manner—Mr. Darcy, do you think she would accept my presence?”
“Mr. Darcy has nothing to do with a woman whose lawful guardians have never permitted him to speak with her,” said Lord Rochester. “Robert, you do not care sufficiently for the dignity of our house. No stomach. I saw you crying.”
“If Lord Rochester kills you,” Colonel Fitzwilliam said to them all with a fake cheerfulness, “I will avenge you, Darcy.”
Something about his cousin’s eyes suggested that he was joking neither about the fear of Lord Rochester trying to kill Darcy nor the plan to kill him afterwards.
“Papa! Elizabeth has been returned to us, beyond any hope that I ever had. Do you wish to destroy what hope we can have a reconciliation?” Lord Hartley replied desperately. “I wish to rejoice in my found sister. And in knowing, at last, that you did not...”
Lord Rochester glared at his son.
“I would at least take it kindly,” Hartley said with a forced smile that oddly reminded Darcy of Elizabeth’s manner, “if you did not threaten to duel one of my dearest friends.”
“What reconciliation? She is a child who was kidnapped from her father. I shall now return her to my house. Lady Catherine, might I have the aid of your footmen to ensure that no one interferes with my recovery of Lady Elizabeth from the relations of her thief.”
Lady Catherine seemed rather startled by this herself. “Rochester, she will return to you in good time. But she is an independent sort of girl. She has a bit of the iron that is in you in her. It would not be wise in my view to—”
“I am her father. This is my right. I demand all my rights. Will you help me assert my rights.”
Lady Catherine sighed. “Always so stubborn. Too sure of yourself, too unwilling to listen to counsel.” She rang the bell. When the butler came in, she said, “Assemble all of the footmen, we are going to all walk over to the parsonage.”
Colonel Fitzwilliam had a grim look to his face. He whispered to Darcy, “Order your carriage called round to the parsonage. Quickly now. Do you have a gun in your luggage?”
“For a visit to my aunt’s house?”
“I’ll give you one of mine then.”
The two of them stepped out the door, followed by Lord Hartley. He looked pale. “My father is mad. It must be the apoplexy. Or...”
“This is who he has always been,” Darcy said as he walked quickly towards the exit to the house nearest the stables.
Colonel Fitzwilliam tapped Darcy on the shoulder as they passed the stairs, he pointed upwards, and then quickly hurried up the stairs, presumably to gather his pistols, and likely that batman he always took with him.
“I will be taking Elizabeth to Mr. Bennet’s house in Hertfordshire,” Darcy said to Lord Hartley. “From there it will be impossible for your father to seize her without a gaining a legal writ from Chancery, and if he succeeds in doing that before she is of age, I will make sure she that can flee the country until such time as she is old enough that he will have no legal right to control her. Go see if you can do to delay the whole. I fear that violence might follow if your father is too quick.”
“No, I am with you. I shall come with you.”
Darcy found the room next to the stables, where his coachman and one of the postillions he’d brought with him sat playing cards with Lady Catherine’s grooms and coachmen around a table with a dark cloth set over it. The setting sunlight shined through the window, and it looked as though his man was winning. “We are leaving now. Can you have the carriage ready in ten minutes? Go around to the parsonage across the park, and you shall pick me up from there.”
“What? Mr. Darcy—but I already exercised the horses this afternoon. Would it not be best if—”
“Quickly now. I depend on you coming around within fifteen minutes.”
Colonel Fitzwilliam and his soldier-servant stood right outside of the stables when Darcy stepped out of the room. Colonel Fitzwilliam gave Hartley a hard stare and then he handed Darcy a fine pistol. “Careful with that. Loaded. Do not point it at anyone who you do not wish to hurt—do not be precipitous. Can you promise to not use it unless there is no other option? Perhaps not even then. I hate to trust civilians with weapons, but you have always had a calm head. Now across the field, quick, the party was about to depart as I came down the stairs.”
Darcy and Colonel Fitzwilliam, followed by Lord Hartley and Colonel Fitzwilliam’s soldier-servant jogged across the park and reached the parsonage as they saw the collection of ten of Lady Catherine’s liveried footmen following the stride of Lord Rochester and Lady Catherine herself who were approaching via the avenue.
It was clear to Darcy that his carriage would not arrive until many minutes after the group had, and this filled him with a sort of anxiety.
He was deeply aware of the pistol in his pocket.
The parsonage looked completely ordinary, a garden with hedges about. Windows open to the warm spring air. A candle in one of the windows.
Darcy knocked hard on the door.
There was no answer.
The group approaching had come close enough that Lord Rochester and Lady Catherine could clearly see the group by the door.
Lord Rochester shouted, “Darcy, what are you about! What is the meaning of this. Bobby, why are you here?”
Darcy knocked again. “Elizabeth, my carriage will be here in a few minutes, and I shall convey you back to Mr. Bennet’s house.”
A minute later the door was flung open, Elizabeth boldly strode out. Mr. And Mrs. Collins stood small in the door frame behind her.
She held a small pistol in her hand that she pointed at Lord Rochester.