Page 39 of Cads & Capers
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The carriage rolled along at a snail’s pace, stopping every few minutes for the droves of theatre goers and revellers to pass. It was a hot June evening, and the interior of the carriage was sweltering, making their halting progress even more vexing. They had only a mile and a half to travel; it would unquestionably have been quicker to walk, but walking anywhere was not the done thing in fashionable society, and good sense be damned!
They could not have gone on foot regardless, for Georgiana had already spent too much time and emotion in consideration of her chosen gown for the evening. Trailing her hems through London’s dirty streets was a proposition not likely to have been met with much enthusiasm.
Darcy smiled to himself at the thought that Elizabeth would have insisted upon it. His smile faded as a familiar fog of melancholy rolled in after it. It was a sadness that followed swiftly on the heels of every fond reverie, a bittersweet mix of affection and regret that he was all the better acquainted with on account of how often he thought about Elizabeth. He sighed quietly.
“My hair feels loose. Is it coming out?” his sister asked, anxiously patting her coiffure.
“Of your head?” Fitzwilliam asked.
“Of the pins,” Darcy said to his cousin with a warning look. Lord knew Georgiana was nervous enough without his teasing. To his sister, he replied, “It will only come loose if you keep poking it. Leave it alone. I have told you—you look exceedingly well.”
“Indeed, you do,” Fitzwilliam added more seriously. “Lord Rutherford is a fool if he is not thoroughly enchanted.”
Georgiana looked nervously between them both. “Do you truly like him?”
Fitzwilliam shrugged. “Ask us again at the end of the evening.”
Seeing his sister’s confidence waver, Darcy hastily added, “We would not have agreed to dine with him if we disapproved.”
Georgiana smiled sweetly at him, and he hoped he would not regret his words. If his lordship proved to be a rake after all, Fitzwilliam and he would have to extricate her from the situation with as much expedience and as little contention as possible. He thought it more likely Rutherford would be the same affable fellow both Fitzwilliam and he recalled, but they were nevertheless both on their guard for any hint of disingenuousness. Their close association with Wickham had taught them both what signs to look for.
Rutherford met them in person at the door, bowing over Georgiana’s hand before she had finished taking off her cloak. “Miss Darcy, you look sublime.”
Georgiana blushed deeply but looked pleased.
Turning to them, Rutherford held out his hand and shook first with Darcy, then Fitzwilliam, to whom he said, “It has been entirely too long. Darcy tells me Barclay is travelling. I trust he is keeping well?”
“So we are all assuming, for my mother’s sake. And you? You look well. I cannot believe Darcy did not recognise you. You have not changed a bit.”
“I did recognise him, once the confusion over names was resolved,” Darcy pointed out.
“You did, you did!” Rutherford agreed. “But we need not stand about in the cold when we can reminisce more comfortably in the warm with a drink in our hands.” He gestured to the nearest door.
“Hear, hear!” Fitzwilliam cried, and since he was closer to it than anyone else, Rutherford indicated that he should go through first, which he did, with alacrity. The viscount took the opportunity to step in behind him to offer Georgiana his arm.
Very sly, Darcy thought as he followed after them all. He frowned when a female voice from within the next room said uncivilly, “Oh, it is you. I was hoping Miss Darcy would be accompanied by one of her less irksome relations.”
“Tuppence!” Rutherford said through gritted teeth as he relinquished Georgiana’s arm and hastened into the room. “You promised me you would behave.”
Georgiana paused to glance anxiously over her shoulder, mouthing, “Lady Tuppence!”
Darcy did not wonder at her bewilderment, for the woman sounded much more in accordance with Fitzwilliam’s description than Georgiana’s. He gestured for her to keep walking.
“Pray, do not behave on my account,” he heard Fitzwilliam say in a tone that seemed entirely too cheerful for the circumstances.
“Have you brought your cousin with you?” the woman asked.
Georgiana had not taken Darcy’s advice and remained rooted to the spot, nervously wringing her hands together.
“This is Colonel Fitzwilliam,” Rutherford said. “I told you—Miss Darcy is his cousin.”
“I meant his other cousin,” Lady Tuppence replied. “The one with the decided opinions.”
Darcy took Georgiana’s arm and gently but firmly walked her into the room. If this pantomime was to continue, he would at least see all the players.
“As it happens, he is here,” Fitzwilliam was saying, “but I ought to explain. You see, we thought?—”
“ You ?”
Darcy looked up, surprised to discover the woman Fitzwilliam was addressing—Lady Tuppence, he presumed—looking directly at him, her expression one of unqualified outrage. She was handsome, fashionably attired, and betrayed all the bearing and assurance of elevated rank. He had the feeling he had seen her before, though he had no idea where, nor why she might be so angry with him.
She raised a finger to point at him with such fervour that Darcy would not have been surprised if she had stalked across the room to poke him in the chest with it had she not been sitting down.
“ You had the gall to accuse Rutherford of being a scoundrel? Upon my word! If anyone’s conduct has been ungentlemanlike, it is yours, sir.”
Georgiana let out a small whimper. Darcy squeezed her arm reassuringly, though he was deeply affronted—more so on account of her choice of words, so like Elizabeth’s when she rejected his offer of marriage. He had made considerable efforts to redress the defects in his character since then and did not like being accused of failing. He opened his mouth to reply but was anticipated by Rutherford, who had turned puce with anger.
“Good God, Tuppence, what are you about? This is Mr Darcy—Miss Darcy’s brother ! He is a consummate gentleman!” To Darcy, he said, “I can only apologise, Darcy. This is my cousin, Lady Tuppence Swanbrook, and I have no idea what has got into her.”
“Do not be in too much haste to apologise, Cousin,” she interposed. “You might be less eager to humble yourself when you hear this is the man who has been putting about the rumour that you are a rake, not to be trusted with ladies’ reputations.”
Fitzwilliam cleared his throat. “Nobody was ‘putting about a rumour’, madam. As I was trying to explain…”
Darcy stopped listening to him. The vague sense that he recognised Lady Tuppence had grown while she was speaking. It was her voice that brought the recollection flooding back to him with a jolt. “I did not call Rutherford a rake, madam. You did.”
Fitzwilliam stopped talking and frowned at him in puzzlement.
“I beg your pardon?” Lady Tuppence demanded with great indignation.
Georgiana had tugged her arm away and was staring at Darcy aghast, but that only made him more determined to prove his innocence.
“I heard you with my own ears. At the beginning of the week, at the exhibition, you told a young lady that Rutherford ‘spends more time than is good for him in gambling dens and gin houses— and worse ’.”
“Oh, very gentlemanly, Mr Darcy, eavesdropping on ladies’ conversations! But I said nothing that was not true. Rutherford… politicks. ” Her pause and the gesture she made with her hands as she searched for the word indicated her distaste for the activity.
“A group of us in Whitehall are working to see such dens of iniquity shut down,” Rutherford explained.
Lady Tuppence tilted her head accusingly at Darcy. “There is a certain ilk of men who find this ambition particularly distressing. Are we to assume you are one of them?”
“I shall not dignify that with an answer, madam. I would have thought it was obvious that I was concerned what sort of man you were encouraging the young lady to meet. It was not clear from what you said to her that policymaking was the reason that your cousin frequents illicit establishments. Indeed, quite the opposite—you specifically called him out as a cad.”
Lady Tuppence gave a loud, mirthless laugh. “He is not a cad—he is The Cad! That has been his nickname forever.”
Rutherford grinned awkwardly. “My initials. I was christened Charles Andrew David. Though, I was not actually known as The Cad until I was at school. In fact, I believe it was your cousin who first coined that name.”
“Barclay?” Darcy looked at Fitzwilliam and groaned inwardly to see him grimacing with contrition.
“Gads—do you know, Darcy, now that Rutherford mentions it, that might be where I heard it said that he was a bit of a cad. Makes sense now.”
Darcy stared at his cousin in disbelief. This entire week of mayhem and misdirection, all his failed interventions and sleepless nights had come about on the back of that one, misremembered appellation! He was not much less vexed with Lady Tuppence, whose careless words and strange behaviour that day had further confused matters. Thanks to both, here he now stood, in the home of the man he had unjustly accused, who might very well one day be his brother, looking an utter fool. Darcy abhorred being made to look ridiculous.
“I beg you would forgive me, Rutherford,” he said tightly. “The misunderstanding is deeply regrettable. It was only the insistence with which her ladyship was pressing her companion to agree to a meeting she was clearly averse to that gave me such cause for concern.”
This did not provide Darcy with the exoneration he had anticipated. Lady Tuppence’s mouth set into a hard line, and she raised a solitary, reproachful eyebrow and stared at him for longer than was comfortable before replying in a disdainful voice.
“I would not have been in such a rage to persuade Miss Bennet to meet Rutherford, had she not so desperately needed the panacea of his consequence to repair her damaged reputation—damage you caused, when you gave her the cut direct in front of the entire assemblage of the British Institution.”
“I am afraid I do not take your meaning, madam. I have not, and never would, give any lady, least of all that one, the cut.”
“ Au contraire , Mr Darcy. I could call fifty witnesses to attest to the fact that last Monday morning, you walked into the upper east exhibition room, halted in your tracks upon seeing Miss Bennet, looked her directly in the eye for long enough that nobody could mistake it for a fleeting glance, then turned your nose up and left again. The whole place was scandalised.”
“I did no such thing,” Darcy said with a strength of conviction that he was far from feeling. Indeed, as the seconds ticked by, an appalling sense of being very, very wrong began to creep over him.
“Oh my! I think you might have done,” Georgiana whispered in a distressed tone. “We did leave very suddenly because you had seen her if you recall.”
He was not likely to forget it. He had almost cried out when he spotted Elizabeth mere feet in front of him—had only been saved from doing so because the sight of her had quite literally taken his breath away. He knew he had stared, too, because he had been unable to tear his eyes away from her while his head and his heart battled over whether or not he ought to speak to her. In the end, his head had won, and he had turned on his heel, grabbed Georgiana’s arm, and all but dragged her out of the exhibition before Elizabeth could notice either of them.
They had made it as far as the pavement before his heart overruled his head and persuaded him that such an opportunity ought not to be thrown away. He had left his sister waiting in the carriage and gone back in to search for Elizabeth. Except, by the time he returned, she had attached herself to someone new—Lady Tuppence, he now understood—and he had spent the next ten minutes skulking behind pillars and eavesdropping on conversations, before ultimately leaving without ever saying a word.
The possibility that he had done far worse than failing to talk to her—that he had inadvertently given her the worst conceivable form of public insult, that she must have seen it and thought it was intentional, and that she was suffering society’s scorn as a result of it—was so distressing, it took him a moment to comprehend that Lady Tuppence had asked him a question.
“Pardon?”
“Miss Bennet—do you mean to tell me that you know her?”
“I do, yes.” Darcy’s ears were ringing.
“My cousin is as generous as the most generous of his sex, madam,” Fitzwilliam said, “but he is nevertheless not generally given to trying to resolve the romantic difficulties of young ladies he does not know. All three of us are acquainted with Miss Bennet, and happily so.”
Rutherford gave a little grunt of surprise. “Then—and I hope you will forgive me for asking—why did none of you approach her directly with your concerns?”
Darcy could scarcely order his thoughts, which must be why he could not think of a single rational answer to this. “I had reason to believe she would not wish to speak to me,” he mumbled at length.
“Well, I can see why!” Lady Tuppence said, laughing genuinely now. “A shocking way to behave, even if it was by accident. The irony being, of course, that despite your best efforts to save Miss Bennet from Rutherford’s wicked ways, it would seem that you are the only cad among us, Mr Darcy.”
She evidently thought this was vastly amusing, and Darcy supposed he ought to be grateful when everybody else joined in her mirth, for it broke the tension and allowed them to laugh their way out of the inauspicious beginning. He did his best to share in their amusement, and when the chance came to change the subject, he seized it with both hands. He gave Georgiana frequent encouraging smiles, nodded ‘yes’ to Fitzwilliam’s every silently sought assurance that he was well, and even managed to make Lady Tuppence laugh once or twice.
Privately, Darcy was despairing. He had not liked to think that he would never see Elizabeth again, but he could have borne it much better knowing that, wherever she was in the world, she did not think ill of him. He smiled at something Rutherford said and felt the expression stagnate on his face as he considered that now, Elizabeth would despise him forever.