Page 19 of Elizabeth’s Refuge (Mr. Underwood’s Elizabeth & Darcy Stories #16)
Elizabeth looked around impressed by the breakfast and the room.
They’d dined in a private first floor room, overlooking the garden ten feet below. The garden must be splendid in spring, a proper English style courtyard garden, with lawns, ample beds of flowers and several varieties of trees. There was a fine fountain of a nymph ready to spit water to the skies.
The sky was grey, and so were the plants. All grey sticks with their leaves fallen off.
Inspired by the scene, Elizabeth intoned, “Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” Darcy frowned at her worriedly, and she laughed.
“There is hint of at least one early bloom in that garden, near the wall there, so not quite the proper poem.”
“Not proper at all. No dourness,” General Fitzwilliam said. He and Major Williams had risen at her entrance. “You are alive, and safe.”
“Safe enough.” Elizabeth nodded and she eagerly sat down to breakfast, finding herself drained by the meandering from the bay and down the crowded avenue that led to the hotel.
The table was piled high with food and drink.
There were decorated carafes of coffee and small jugs of milk to pour into the coffee.
There were brie cheeses, squares of mouth-watering butter sitting on small china plates, an ornamented jug of honey with a little bee on the outside, and piles of freshly baked bread, still warm from the oven.
A few hothouse fruits were also available.
There were French style tarts and a pile of croquants with almonds in them.
The smell of rich bread was divine, and Elizabeth had by now completely recovered from the nausea of her boat ride, and she was ravenously hungry.
Darcy busied himself filling a plate for Elizabeth. He delighted in asking her which of the breads looked the most appealing, and in quickly and expertly piling them with more melted butter and honey than she would have dared to give herself.
The coffee tasted fresh, and was mostly clear of grounds.
Elizabeth wondered how Dessein managed to make such smooth coffee for all his guests, their cook when she had lived at Longbourn never had the patience to pour the cups back and forth, or use isinglass to clarify the grounds out of the coffee.
“Add more milk, Miss Bennet, more milk,” General Fitzwilliam demanded of Elizabeth after she took her first sip. “The French always take their coffee with an almost disgusting amount of milk — cafe au lait . You shall commit a crime against this fine country if you do not add more cream.”
Elizabeth laughed. “If it is a requirement of politeness.”
“Just ask in any cafe for cafe au lait. They also serve chocolate, tea — anything. It is quite the proper thing for women to frequent the French cafes, though I hear that was not so before the revolution.”
“I shall certainly in that case frequent one myself.”
Elizabeth did not want to think of money being spent for her entertainment by Darcy — since she assumed his cousin would leave him with the entirety of the bill at the hotel.
“Is there…” Elizabeth bit her lip, and then shrugged. “You shall need to go to Cambrai immediately, I believe, General Fitzwilliam.”
Major Williams answered for his commander, “Not so quickly, we’ll wait till all the regiment, the men left in England, come by ferry from Dover. Best to all march out in a body. That will take a deuced long time — you have no notion how slowly a large body of men can move.”
“Do you think… shall it be a great problem for me that my French is… ah less than perfectly polished? I swear, I can read anything in the language, but while I made an attempt to teach it to my pupil, it seems I needed a teacher myself. I have not had much occasion to speak to authentic Frenchmen — this establishment is well equipped for English travelers, but—”
“Not a problem at all,” Darcy replied. “My French and German are excellent but on my Grand Tour I travelled to Russia and Poland and through Bohemia and Hungaria. You can manage well enough anywhere with shopkeepers by pointing and showing a few coins. You must also angrily shout and wave your arms about if you think they wish to cheat you.”
“Here in France many speak decent English, the better to take advantage of our leisured classes.” General Fitzwilliam laughed and patted his Major Williams on the shoulder. “Fitz told me that you encountered your old school chum, Lord Wakefield.”
Darcy’s sour face made Elizabeth laugh.
“He is,” she said, “the sort of man who appears to have walked off a satirical drawing — it is easy for you to say I need not worry about speaking French, but I am trapped here. How is your French, General?”
“I get along well enough. Always have,” General Fitzwilliam looked at Major Williams with a smile, “My governess ensured I had it pounded into my head.”
“You know,” Major Williams said, “I asked her if you were such a diligent student as you pretend you were, and while she confesses to believing you were already as charming as at present — not that I believe that you are charming in the slightest—”
“I do,” Elizabeth laughed. “But how are you both acquainted with General Fitzwilliam’s governess?”
“She is my fine and fantastical mother,” Major Williams replied with a smile.
Elizabeth’s attention was drawn to Darcy drawing his breath sharply in and looking with a close frown at Major Williams.
“Yes,” General Fitzwilliam said grandly to Darcy. “My father’s bastardy. Also why she was dismissed. He’s my half-brother.”
Darcy blinked. And then he extended his hand to Major Williams. “That makes us cousins as well. As close related as I am to Richard.”
The young officer laughed. “I’ll accept that connection a little more nicely than most — I’m not terribly enthused by a great many of my noble connections .”
“Ha,” General Fitzwilliam said, “but you are still a Fitz William.”
“Wait,” Elizabeth said with some surprise. “Your father acknowledged him?”
“No.” Both Major Williams and General Fitzwilliam laughed.
Major Williams lounged back in his seat.
“My Christian name is Fitz. That makes me Fitz Williams — my mother wished to claim the old earl as my father when she Christened me, but he had threatened to remove the little support he offered her — the bare least that he could do. She was not such as to stand upon noble but unadvantageous principles when the happiness of her child was at stake, and I am glad for this, for my life could have been significantly worse had she fought for the principle in the matter — what education I did receive, and my commission as an ensign and then a lieutenant and captain were purchased through that means.”
“Perhaps, as he did support you, you ought not be so angry him, as I perceive you and General Fitzwilliam to be.”
“ I am angry at dear Papa,” General Fitzwilliam said, “for certainty.”
“’Twas the normal story, as I understand it.
” Major Williams said, “I asked my mother what occurred once, when we’d returned from Spain, before Waterloo.
She was not raped, for she did not scream or fight as you did.
But she was neither willing. Such is my belief.
Perhaps I am wrong. You cannot speak with a parent in any detail about such events, but…
I have never once met my father. He did not wish his wife to know of his indiscretions, and the reason why the governess was dismissed without her say so. ”
“And she then named you Fitz Williams. To spite your father?”
“A joke, a two-fold joke — my mother has a fine education, her father was a poorer vicar. It has always been a common thing to name bastards by appending Fitz to the family name. My father’s line starts with a favored mistress of a king — but to name me Fitz-Fitzwilliam would have been more ridiculous than even Fitzwilliam.
Fitzwilliam,” Major Williams poked General Fitzwilliam as he said this, “is sufficiently pretentious and nonsensical.”
“I would not say that,” Elizabeth replied, herself nudging Darcy. “In my ear there is a sweet sound to it.”
Darcy smiled widely at her saying that. He was her savior, so of course his Christian name had a sweet sound to her ears.
“I’ve been thinking,” General Fitzwilliam said, leaning forward, and rather viciously sawing his meat with a knife.
“How to convince my loose, leaky, lecherous cousin to forget charges against you? Public pressure is the thing: The people love stories of aristocrats proving their rights should be taken away. Let’s have the story told clear and simple so everyone in London hears it and knows what sort of creature Lord Lechery is. ”
Elizabeth sat straighter, her hand holding her cup of coffee. It tasted nice, but very milky with this much cream in. “I would like his reputation to be generally known, so he cannot simply hire another woman who will enter such a place unknowing of the risk.”
“Ha,” General Fitzwilliam said. “You have that fire in you, to want some revenge against him.”
“No, no.” Darcy placed his hand on Elizabeth’s elbow briefly, and she smiled at him, enjoying the comfort of his incidental touch.
“Let’s not wish to splash a bad reputation for you about town.
Lechery will not drop his plans that way; he will pursue them assiduously, because he must prove that he was right. ”
“He’d be a laughing stock. A nitwitted object of scorn — think, Darcy, think.
” General Fitzwilliam growled, “How will they speak of him in White’s?
Already laughed at — already despised. Simply the whispers about the story.
Everyone will make him an object of fun, for having been beaten to a pulp by a woman who he tried to force, and then they will sneer at him for trying to use the courts to rectify a private loss — nay, I tell you, it will hurt him. ”
“That isn’t the point. I don’t give a damn about Lechery. I’ll challenge him one day, and then—”