Page 12 of Old Boots (Pride and Prejudice Variations #3)

CHAPTER TWELVE

L ongbourn remained quiet, and I guiltily left Miss Elizabeth at the doorstep and slipped away.

We should never have been given the liberty to walk alone for more than an hour and a half.

As a friend of the family and after walking with them so often in pairs or even alone for short distances within sight of the house, I suppose my presence was no longer considered interesting or dangerous to the reputations of the Bennet ladies.

Netherfield Park was just coming to life when I arrived. I retreated to my room to change before breakfast, and when I went down, I met Bingley and his sister Louisa.

He was distracted with plans for his ball and in a tight conference with Mrs Hurst, who blinked and smiled at every idea he proposed.

Miss Bingley may have been a pretentious baggage, but she would have been capable of putting on a proper ball.

My friend was suggesting some outrageous decorations and a staggering number of dishes for his supper.

“How does Miss Bingley fare this morning?” I asked, hoping to interrupt my friend’s flow of creativity.

“She is still abed, Darcy. Is there aught you would like to do this morning? I have selected the twenty-sixth as the date for our ball, and I mean to visit a few of my friends to alert them that invitations will be forthcoming. Would you care to go with me?”

I hedged. “I have some letters to attend to, if you do not mind.”

“Of course, but would you visit Mr Bennet, and let him know I am hosting a ball? I do hope he and his daughters will come.”

Then and there, I should have invited him to go with me, but the devil within me rose up in a fiercely possessive flush of resistance.

I simply did not want to share my friends with anyone, nor did I want Bingley, who fell victim to Cupid every other month, to plague the ladies of Longbourn with poetry.

“I shall call tomorrow.”

I spent the remainder of my morning in the library.

I did not look at a single piece of correspondence, though there was plenty of it.

I stared at the clouds that built up on the horizon and then pulled my chair to the window.

With my old boots propped indecorously on the sill, I watched raindrops as they swelled on the glass before streaking down to their death on the ledge below.

I thought of the many revelations Miss Elizabeth had shared with me. Our young sisters had nearly identical histories! I could hardly reconcile the improbability of that coincidence.

Remarkable as that was, I also shared common ground with Miss Bennet’s early assumption of responsibilities she did not want, and I sincerely understood Mr Bennet’s melancholy.

My father had suffered an irrational degree of guilt when my mother died, and he was never the same man as a result.

In my own mother’s case, he had not been cruel, but he had not been present at the time of her accident.

Nothing anyone could have done would have rescued my mother.

She died after having tripped and hit her head on the stair rail.

The doctor said the glancing blow had caused a fatal bleeding in her brain, but my father, a man of great intelligence, was sadly convinced he could have somehow prevented the accident from ever happening in the first place.

He regretted the shoes he had bought her, the carpet on the stairs, the fact that the family was at Pemberley, and many similarly irrational incidentals.

I suspected Mr Bennet rehearsed a similar litany of regrets in his mind. He was often far away, though present in the room, and he reminded me a great deal of my father when he fell silent.

Some slight noise in the adjacent parlour brought me back from these sombre recollections.

My hostess must have come down. I thought with real remorse of Mrs Bennet’s nervous collapse and of how I was pushing Miss Bingley a little way down that same road.

I left my solitude in an effort to make amends with my hostess.

Alas, I had burnt my bridge to ash.

“Mr Darcy,” she purred, “have you been out visiting this morning? How are your friends at Longbridge?”

“Longbourn. The weather is dreary this morning. Perhaps you would like to play cards?”

“No, no. Louisa and I are taken up with putting on a ball for our neighbours. How delightful it will be to play hostess to the cream of Hertfordshire society.”

She was determined to be cattish, and I was determined to keep trying. “They are likely to be impressed by your efforts. It is not every day that a private ball is given here.”

She laughed—a false, unhappy sound. “Oh, but you know, Sir William Lucas has been to Saint James’s .

I am sure that he and his wife are used to elegant parties every day of the week.

” She turned her attention back to the list Mrs Hurst had made of Bingley’s ideas and said brightly, “But all is not lost. Charles would like us to drape the ballroom in gauze. ”

“Surely you could talk him around.”

“But why should I? I would like to make a spectacle and, as you suggest, impress these people you have come to esteem so much. What say you to red?”

“You know already what I think of a ballroom shrouded in red gauze.”

“Oh yes! Indeed, I recall you made some sneering comment at Lady Caldwell’s affair last year. I shall see if I can find blue then.”

“Pray excuse me,” I said, having reached the tail end of my patience. The limitless correspondence required of a landed gentleman seemed preferable to spending another moment in Miss Bingley’s wounded aura. I retreated back to the library.

After I read and replied to six letters, I wrote a note to my sister.

I told Georgiana of making the acquaintance of a country gentleman who was bookish and retiring.

I mentioned his pleasant daughters and their unruly dog, and I even went much further than I normally would, describing a recent incident when Bandit arrived at the kitchen door with a limp cat hanging in his jaws.

Miss Bennet, who had gone down to talk to the housekeeper, released a rare, unladylike scream that startled Bandit into loosening his jaw, and the cat, who had only been playing dead, then ran away.

Bandit gave chase, and he was only brought to ground an hour later and a mile away when I found him in the spinney, covered in mud, digging at a weasel’s hole. I wrote to my sister:

Apparently, he forgot all about the cat which must have been pretty tame when compared to a weasel.

He returned home triumphant and properly pleased with his state of filth, only realising he might have offended when he was plunged into the trough by the backhouse boy and the groom.

Miss Elizabeth remarked that he even sulked for once.

This struck the family as an improvement in the animal’s mental function, since his usual reaction to a scolding is gratitude for the attention.

The ladies then expressed a sincere hope he would suddenly become a smarter dog, and I went to Mr Bennet’s library lest I burst out laughing at the idea.

I had little hope that a single frothy anecdote would meet with any more success in engaging Georgiana than had my few attempts to reconcile with Miss Bingley.

One attempt at reparation never leads to reconciliation.

A kind of campaign of many such peace offerings over time would be required.

Miss Bingley was a lost cause, I decided, because I did not have the will or the patience to befriend her.

Besides, encouragement would only render her more determined to possess me, and I did not like the idea of being anyone’s trophy.

I had made a career out of avoiding that very thing.

But I would try to build a bridge with my sister no matter how long it took.

Retrospection and some flash of insight communicated to me by Elizabeth Bennet gave me reason to believe I had done a poor job of concealing my anger.

My sister, being fairly modest, would naturally assume I was angry with her, and this misunderstanding had surely caused her endless grief ever since.

This brought me full circle. I replayed my entire morning’s conversation and smiled to remember Elizabeth’s flashing eyes when she said of Wickham, I am sure you killed him. Without a doubt, she would have killed Wickham with her bare hands had she been in my shoes, gossip be damned.

As the ball approached, days at Netherfield became thick and miserable with unspoken unrest. Miss Bingley, failing to bring me to my knees with a proposal of marriage through the expedient of pouting, began to grate on her brother.

Even Mr and Mrs Hurst grew tired of her occasional rants and snide references to the inferiority of the county of Hertfordshire.

More than once the conversation ended abruptly when I arrived for breakfast, and the air around the table became oppressively polite.

Clearly, they argued regularly, forcing me to go earlier and earlier to break my fast so as to let them fight in peace.

And this left me free to go earlier to Longbourn.

It was just as well. The Bennets’ attendance at the assembly meant that the neighbourhood was free to knock down their door. The family was now plagued with company, and twice I had to leave after the usual quarter of an hour instead of making myself at home for the morning.

“I am glad you came when you did, Mr Darcy,” Jane Bennet said one morning after I apologised for finding them still at the breakfast table. “We are expecting callers at eleven, and I did not know when we would be able to take Bandit out for his training.”

I was unsurprised to see the mongrel sitting in anxious alertness at her feet. Dogs at Pemberley were allowed indoors if they were well-trained pets, but they were put in the loose-box in the scullery during meals without exception.

“He howls unrelentingly, sir,” Miss Elizabeth remarked as she stirred her tea. She refused to look at me and did so to great effect. How she could cause me to feel so de trop and uninteresting through the simple act of eating her breakfast was a mystery.

“Pardon me?” I asked, taking the chair Mr Bennet offered to me.

“I refer to Bandit. Clearly you are astonished to see he has the liberty to beg for scraps. We must look like the Ye Olde Man & Scythe in Yorkshire after the hunt.”

“A little,” I said. “All that is missing are strings of birds hung from the rafters in various stages of decay.”

She strove mightily to continue snubbing me but ended her campaign on a chuckle before she turned to her sister. “Do you take Bandit out today, Jane?” she asked.

“I would like to go. Will you come with me?”

“Certainly, unless Mary wishes to get out of doors.”

“Why do we not all go,” I suggested. “The air is sharp, and we shall make quick work of our walk, I think.”

We went then, and the wind was biting cold. Even the dog, who had a cast-iron construction, seemed unconvinced of the viability of our plan. He managed—barely—to pay attention to our commands and eyed the road behind him longingly.

A brisk, cold walk rendered Longbourn almost heavenly with warmth and welcome when we returned.

I went to sit with Mr Bennet in his book-room for some time, and only decided to go when I heard the knocker.

From the sounds in the hall, I felt certain the Lucas family had arrived, Sir William having a distinctive and penetrating voice.

I went with Mr Bennet to greet his company and stayed for five minutes more for the sake of politeness before excusing myself.

I left the parlour and was heading through the vestibule when Miss Elizabeth came out into the hall behind me.

“Mr Darcy,” she said almost surreptitiously, “might I have a moment of your time?” In a flash we were back in the breakfast parlour, now cleared of dishes and deserted.

“I met a lieutenant in the militia yesterday by the name of Wickham. He was at my aunt’s house for a card party. I do not know whether this is the man you told me about, but he is rumoured to come from some county in the north. He is newly kitted out in a red coat and charming as the sun in May.”

“The devil you say.” I put my hat and crop on the table and stared at her. “I suppose it is him. How could it not be? He has plagued me all my life.”

“What will you do?”

“I suppose I will have to kill him,” I said darkly.

“No truly, what will you do?”

“I-I do not rightly know. What should I do?” That I asked a lady for advice on a purely male matter of business struck me as madness. I opened my mouth to retract my question and to beg her pardon, to ask her to overlook?—

“I am glad you asked me, sir,” she said briskly. She then began speaking and gaining momentum until I felt I had been given my marching orders and was expected to click my heels and salute.

“No.”

“And why not?”

“Because you are not serious. You cannot be! What you suggest is a heinous thing to do to a man, even though he is a villain.”

She tossed her curls and flashed her eyes at me. “I am always struck,” she said, “when what is considered ordinary abuse of a woman, is decried as unthinkable and inhumane when applied to a man.”

“I-I did not mean to imply?—”

“You will suit yourself in this matter, but should you decide to follow my advice, you must act as quickly as possible. The plan relies on the supposition this man does not yet know you are in the neighbourhood, so he cannot make the connexion to you and your family. Now, pray excuse me. My long absence might be noticed, and I do not want to have to lie to my sister.”

She swept out of the room and left me reeling in the turbulence of her wake. Not even an hour of formulating every possible objection was required for her idea to begin to steal its way into my imagination. My greatest resistance centred around the underhandedness required.

A gentleman would deal directly with his enemy, look him in the eye and enact a frontal, justified revenge.

But when dealing with a man who is not a gentleman, I began to wonder whether he deserved to be treated as one.

Miss Elizabeth’s plan was both wild and wicked, and it was also the very definition of poetic justice .

With the sinking feeling that Elizabeth Bennet could handily induce me to do anything by simply tossing her curls, I went in search of my coachman.