Page 9 of Elizabeth’s Refuge (Mr. Underwood’s Elizabeth & Darcy Stories #16)
The following morning General Richard Fitzwilliam stomped into Darcy’s breakfast parlor.
Darcy had been busily engaged in conversation with Elizabeth, rather than breakfasting downstairs when his guest arrived, so he hurried down to meet his cousin as soon as the servants informed him that he’d arrived.
“Where’ve you disappeared to for the last week?
” General Fitzwilliam grunted as soon as Darcy entered the room.
The officer was already seated at Darcy’s table, slicing a long sausage apart, while sipping a mug of coffee.
“Haven’t seen your clothes nor your face for a week.
And you haven’t been to the clubs either.
If you were a different gentleman, I’d assume you’d fallen in with a lushly proportioned opera singer, and be happy for you, but with you I became profoundly, and, ah, deeply concerned when you ignored your usual haunts. ”
“Really?” Darcy raised his eyes sardonically.
“Not so very worried. But your servants are all buttoned mouthed about something.”
Darcy had not been to speak with his cousin in the past days, and not just because he had been absorbed by Elizabeth.
Perhaps irrationally, Darcy had avoided General Fitzwilliam because he associated the officer a little with his cousin, Lord Lechery.
The two even looked similar, though Lachglass was taller and had a handsomer face, while General Fitzwilliam was his superior in every single other respect.
Should he tell Richard about Elizabeth’s presence and ask him to help with keeping her safe and hidden from Lachglass?
“Even if you haven’t missed me,” Darcy said after he decided that there was no call yet to ask for additional help, and a secret was best kept amongst as few as possible, “I am glad to see you here.”
“Haven’t missed you? Darcy, course I missed you.
Any case, had to come. Had to come. I am damned done listening to my deuced damned mother sympathize with that bleeding, blistered, biting ass of a cousin her father saddled us with.
Would have been better if she’d killed him, I think. He deserved it.”
“Oh,” Darcy said, in as offhanded of a manner as he could manage. “Who would it have been preferable for your mother to kill?”
“Jove!” General Fitzwilliam barked out a laugh.
“You have been out of news. Lord Lechery, my cousin Lachglass. An old friend of ours, Miss Elizabeth Bennet, beat him over the head with a vase. A very expensive decorative piece. Lachglass complains to everyone that it was an authentic Ming.” General Fitzwilliam laughed.
“You must remember Miss Bennet, she was a fine fiery specimen of womanhood. She was at Rosings, the Easter a year after Georgie had a kerfuffle with your Mr. Wickham. We all talked a great deal, you walked round the park with her a half dozen times. Half expected wedding bells from that. Not your normal habit.”
Darcy blushed at that and General Fitzwilliam laughed again. “I see you recall her. Pretty thing, she was. Doesn’t surprise me at all she’d beat him over the head like that.”
“I do,” Darcy replied quietly, “dimly recall Miss Bennet.”
“Damned bad luck for her. Damned bad luck all around. I sent my man around to nose out the whole story when I first heard of it from Mother — cannot conceive of why Mama yet likes Lord Lechery, though he is her nephew. Miss Bennet, her father died three year back. I understand her uncle sustained business reverses in the late banking crisis, and then she had the misfortune after all that to be hired by Lechery. Damned bad luck for her.”
“What happened?”
“What a girl.” General Fitzwilliam laughed again.
“Rather wish we’d had her with us in Spain and at Waterloo — I thought from the first evening we spoke that Miss Bennet would have made a fine soldier, if she’d been a man.
I respect that in a woman, none of that fuzzy fainting that so many of the female sex respond to danger with.
No, she banged him over the head with a vase, straightaway — you should see Lechery, it warms the cockles of my soul, it truly does, to see him with the bandages wrapped around his head like a turban.
She broke his skull a little, the doctors say. ”
Darcy nodded. “Does he have any notion where she disappeared off to?”
“A fine woman. Fine woman, I would have, I think looking back, made a play for her hand, if she’d had any dowry worth the word. What a fine, pretty, clever woman. Very easy to talk to. Smarter than most I’ve seen, and—”
“The story, Richard. The story.”
“Testy are you? I take it you have not been simply relaxing these last days. You should find a lushly proportioned opera singer.” General Fitzwilliam raised his hands in apology at Darcy’s glare.
“I will tell you what I know, which is not much. Lachglass claims she beat him over the head for the purposes of robbing twenty pounds from his wallet which he claims is missing. And she also broke the vase, whose value far is above the hanging value. All lies — we both know the stories about him. He finally chose a woman who was beyond his abilities.”
“Yes,” Darcy said quietly. “But will the courts see it in that manner?”
“Cases like this. Damned cases like this. I’ve been talking to some Frenchmen a great deal, since we’ve been occupying their north frontier.
And I learned… something else about my damned father a few years ago.
Just an example. This is just an example, but the damned rights of the aristocracy need to be stripped down — when I heard the story about Lachglass, and when the name connected to it came out, Miss Elizabeth Bennet.
That name, I tell you, it sent a chill shivering down my spine.
It feels different. I’d known Lachglass bothers his servants — bothers servants.
What a disgusting circumlocution. Let’s say it straight: He rapes them.
He is a rapist. Perhaps some are happy enough to give up their favors and get some compensation for it, but he does not care greatly whether they are or not.
My cousin is a rapist; it makes me disgusted to have the same blood flow in both our veins.
And my mother defends him, and still swoons over her sweet nephew Arthur. ”
“Any man of honor would do differently than he does.”
“When a man acts in such a way, it becomes the duty of someone to stop him. It makes me feel different about that sort of violence. This should not feel different, but it does. To know that my cousin tried to rape a woman of my acquaintance, a woman who I admire, both as a woman and as a human. A woman who is a gentlewoman, whatever may have happened to her family’s money, she is as much a gentlewoman as my mother or sister, or Georgiana. And he tried to rape her.”
“It makes me think as well,” Darcy replied.
“I’d challenge him to a duel if I had the slightest excuse. I will yet, and do more thoroughly for his skull than Miss Bennet did, much as my mother would hate me for her nephew’s death. But otherwise by the law we can’t do anything about him.”
Darcy grimaced, and he sat down next to General Fitzwilliam.
Was there a way to punish Lord Lechery? Perhaps Darcy should challenge him.
Once he married Elizabeth… if she would have him.
He did not consider it presumptuous to believe that her opinion against him of four years prior was malleable, and likely already changed.
He hoped to marry her, and when — if — no, when he married her, he’d have the right to challenge Lord Lechery to a duel over her honor.
Right now, challenging Lachglass would simply point the constables towards where Elizabeth was. Her safety saved Lachglass for the moment from his deserved punishment.
“He is family still,” General Fitzwilliam added contemplatively, crossing his ankles in front of him under the table.
“I’ve lately been thinking about blood, its importance, the duty a man has to those of his blood.
If I could… if I gain the chance… I will kill him.
It is the job of a family to deal with their own.
Lachglass is a rabid dog. If your dog starts to go mad, you don’t have a furrier shoot the poor puppy.
Not if you are a man. If you are a man you shoot your poor animal yourself. ”
Bang. Bang. Bang .
The sound echoed to the breakfast room from Darcy’s front door. The sound of the door opening, and then, without waiting to be escorted, the subject of their conversation, Lord Lechery, the Earl of Lachglass, snarled into the immediately tainted room.
He wore a purple turban wrapped around his head, but the fringe of the bandage was rakishly visible.
His nose was a giant twisted purple bruise that looked unlikely to ever recover its proper shape.
Lachglass was a handsome man, usually brimming with good health and vibrancy, but at present he looked happily beaten in.
The earl waved a piece of paper in front of Darcy. His voice came out distorted by the completely blocked up nose. “Where is she! Is she here! Did she come to you!”
Darcy’s stomach spasmed with terror, while his chest roared with anger.
Lachglass suspected. Somehow he suspected Elizabeth was here. He must protect Elizabeth.
“The deuce?” Darcy replied calmly, sipping his coffee. “Old boy, no idea who you are speaking of. Rather impolite to hound a man at breakfast with such questions. Bad form, Lachglass. Bad form.”
General Fitzwilliam glared angrily at his vile relation, but when Darcy started speaking he twisted his face fractionally in confusion as he glanced at Darcy.