Page 12 of Only Mr Darcy (Obstinate, Headstrong Girl #1)
CHAPTER ELEVEN
E lizabeth entered the library, looking with slight despondency at the meagre collection of novels, plays, and travelogues offering so very few distractions. Certainly, there was nothing enthralling enough to claim all her attention and prevent her from obsessing on a man who perhaps wanted her, but who would never act upon it. He was Mr Darcy, a man who possessed generations-worth of libraries, a vast fortune, begotten with the blood of earls.
In comparison, she was in Mr Bingley’s book-room, and her fate was sealed to its owner.
It was time she left Netherfield, if she had any hope of keeping to her resolution. No more conversations, no more lively discussions with Mr Darcy. She needed no help in falling further in love.
That is not true , she admitted to herself. She desperately needed help falling in love—with a different man.
But instead of returning to Jane—who, although a little better, was not anything close to recovered—and beginning the task of convincing her it was time to go home to Longbourn, or even trying to make sense of the geography she had selected, she plopped inelegantly onto the leather sofa. Leaning back, she stared at the ceiling, where plaster cherubs romped playfully amongst the flora and fauna in an immense depiction of the garden of Eden. How does one direct the force and flow of love? she wondered, sighing, contemplating a youthful Adam tantalised by Eve’s winning smile.
“Has your sister worsened?” a deep voice asked from very nearby.
Elizabeth gave a little gasp of surprise before slapping her hand over her own mouth.
He raised his brows at her response.
“I did not see you there!” she cried.
Mr Darcy glanced around the room with an irritating scepticism. The sofas were placed at angles before the massive marble chimneypiece, at a rather awkward arrangement for ease of conversation—but hardly out of sight of each other. She had chosen the side nearest the fireplace, thus he was several feet away—but not at all hidden, although he had not called attention to himself.
“Very well, I should have seen you,” she said, as if he had not checked whatever sarcastic retort he was thinking. His scorn was obvious regardless.
“Has your sister worsened?” he asked, repeating his question.
“Not yet,” she replied.
“But you expect her to be?”
She sighed heavily. He would never understand, not in a thousand years. Should she try to explain? He would only think her stupid, her sensibilities absurd. “Are you superstitious, Mr Darcy?” she asked hopelessly.
He appeared to think about it. “Not in the sense of worrying about spilt salt or a broken looking glass or walking beneath a ladder,” he said. “Such worries are baseless, silly folklore, and incredible to the rational mind.”
“You do not believe in…in inexplicable phenomena then? There must be a logical explanation for everything?”
There was a long pause, the only sound the pendulum clock on the chimneypiece. “I might not, I suppose, were it not for the one-handed servant-widow of Pemberley,” he replied—not without obvious reluctance.
“A ghost, then?” That he would hold such a belief was completely unexpected, and she leant forward in her seat.
He shrugged. “Some might say so. According to legend, Pemberley had a hard-working, faithful servant who was born with only one hand. For some years she was promised to the blacksmith’s son in Lambton—the nearest town to the estate. They wished to marry, but the smith was a foul-tempered fellow who hated her deformity and would not allow it. One afternoon, word was sent from the village that the smith had thrown a red-hot poker at his son, and the lad was dying as a result. In his delirium, he was calling for her. Pemberley’s master and his wife, my many times great-grandparents, however, were hosting a grand party for all their invited neighbours that evening, and she was certain she would not be allowed to go to him. It would have cost her the job to abandon her post, even for a few hours.”
“Oh, my,” Elizabeth murmured, now on the edge of her seat. “Was permission refused? Did she try to climb out a window to escape, regardless, slip because she had only the one hand, and fall to her death, calling for her lost love? Can her cries still be heard on stormy nights?”
Mr Darcy gave her a look of disdainful asperity. “No. She told the housekeeper, who told the master, who sent her to the village in his own carriage and then sent for the doctor in a nearby town as well. The young man was brought to Pemberley, where he eventually recovered—although he was blind in one eye ever after—and he was given a job in the stables. Eventually he was promoted to stablemaster, for his skill with horses. They wed and had six children, and lived happily for many years, until his death upon their fortieth anniversary—and she died, at Pemberley, on what would have been their forty-first, with her children and grandchildren all around her.”
“That is almost beautiful, Mr Darcy,” she said, delighted.
“Tradition holds that when the mistress of Pemberley is with child, should any catch a glimpse of a one-handed apparition, her babe will live to adulthood.”
“And you believe the-the tradition is a true one?”
He hesitated. “My mother told me that she saw it, shortly before I was born. She had already lost three infants, and it gave her great comfort. I suppose I do not dare disbelieve, you see.”
“I do see,” she nodded. Suddenly she sat up straight, gazing at him directly. She would tell him. Not only would it convince Fate that she was doing everything in her power to resist her attraction to this man, but he would never suspect it. Perhaps, even, he would whisk Mr Bingley away, taking the whole problem out of her hands. If hers was an impossible fate, it was best she learn it now.
Still, her resolution was limned with despair as she continued. “I told you of my grandmother who had…who had what I think of as ‘the second sight’.”
“The one who ‘somehow’ predicted every babe to be a female?” He sounded critical and dismissive again.
“Everyone knew of her gift. I am not the only one—you can ask others. The day she died, she predicted that I would marry a man who must be… who, I believe, is Mr Bingley. There, now. Laugh me to scorn. Tell me it is all impossible, that I have not the manners nor the looks to aspire to such a match, were my grandmother the most famous seer in the realm. Go right ahead and say it. I know you must want to.”