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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Darcy

T he elation and madness of yesterday lay dead in the cold, grey light of that rainy morning.

I sat at a desk when I would much rather have ridden hard.

I stared down at the blank page in front of me.

Awake at dawn, I had thought to write to my uncle to tell him of my intention to marry Miss Elizabeth Bennet of Longbourn, Hertfordshire.

And there, under my drying pen, my aspirations came to a stuttering halt.

I faced an assault of wild disapprobation from my relations.

To marry a penniless nobody when my uncle’s earldom teetered on the brink of insolvency would earn me no quarter.

I could not be expected to fund their rescue, but as a wealthy connexion, they would be extended more credit than otherwise.

Were I to provide both wealthy and noble connexions, the veneer of Matlock’s consequence would shine all the brighter.

Relations in Cheapside and in the squalid village of Meryton would reflect upon them in exactly the opposite way.

Any bride less than a titled heiress would disappoint.

The duty, the obligation to family and service to its unrelenting hunger for power, for survival, had been pounded into me from infancy.

Could I forsake this ancestral drumbeat?

Black Annis would certainly hang my skin outside her hut if I offered for Elizabeth.

Her howls would be heard as far away as London, and my uncle would hunt me down with threats of all manner—of disownment, of refusing to notice me, of despising my wife and her children in perpetuity.

I thought the lady easily worth these consequences, but my family’s rage would affect my sister, and therein lay the reason for my vacant stare at a blank page. There sat a letter I could not write.

I wandered the halls of Rosings in an interminable state of stupefaction.

My disappointment physically hurt. I ached in every joint, every muscle, and I could not sit for ten minutes without standing abruptly.

Richard found me haunting the billiards room, and we played an indifferent game.

He tried to draw me out, but I could not be enticed to more than primitive grunts.

When a footman brought a note from the steward about the bridge north of Hunsford, my cousin said, “Thank God,” under his breath and we put on our caped greatcoats.

As we neared the parsonage, Richard hammered on the roof of the coach. I was too flooded with dismay to feel more when he suggested we invite Sir William to come on our errand.

“We face a deadly dull afternoon,” he said, “and if we collect Sir William, we shall necessarily have to deposit him back again, and if we are asked to drink tea, we shall mop up a half an hour or more in consequence.”

I faced Elizabeth, who now possessed my heart, as she sat across the room from me.

What was left of me that day was the horrified, burnt-out shell that had housed it for eight and twenty years.

Could I live like this? I doubted I could, and yet what choice did I have?

For what was my fortune, I wondered bitterly, if I could not have the woman I wanted most?

In that wicked state of disenfranchisement, I briefly contemplated divesting myself of all my holdings to live like an ordinary man with a competence designed for a wife and two children.

Twice I betrayed my disconsolate state. “You were in London?” I blurted out to no purpose. And, “You had a music master?”

I sincerely hoped I could master my disappointment enough to forestall such blunderings when their party came to dinner on Wednesday, and for the most part, I managed a dignified silence unless directly addressed.

My aunt carried the dinner conversation as was her prerogative, and since Sir William had returned home, she spent a considerable time asking the Bennet sisters all manner of invasive questions.

“What is your age, Miss Bennet?” she asked in her typically brusque fashion.

Elizabeth paused as though in disbelief at such a vulgar question before she answered coolly, “I am one and twenty, Lady Catherine.”

“And you?” she asked turning to Miss Mary

“I am just turned nineteen, your ladyship.”

The sisters exchanged one of their looks, and I knew Elizabeth was swallowing an urge to bluntly ask my aunt her age.

“There are five of you girls?”

Elizabeth took on the job of speaking. “Yes, ma’am.”

“And I understand from Mr Collins that they are all out?”

“True, Lady Catherine.”

“Most singular,” my aunt sniffed. “What was your mother thinking? Had I advised her I would have told her to bring your younger sisters out only after her oldest daughters were married.”

“I was not privy to my mother’s logic, ma’am.” Another look between sisters and I knew they enjoyed a secret joke in that their mother was not prone to either thinking or logic.

The casual and unintimidated manner in which Lady Catherine’s interrogation was answered seemed to frustrate her. She turned abruptly to Mrs Collins and introduced a new topic—that of the management of her poultry yard.

Richard, who was relegated to the nether regions of the table between Mary Bennet and Maria Lucas, spoke to them quietly.

He managed, I noticed with envy, to pull modest smiles from Mary Bennet, and his efforts with Miss Lucas earned him shy looks of gratitude.

My dinner companion, Anne, sat in a flaccid pile of shawls and sniffed into her handkerchief.

The longer I sat next to my cousin and compared her to Elizabeth across the table, the more irate I became at the general family expectation I would marry Anne.

There would be no possibility of heirs. None!

When we adjourned to the parlour, I stood at the mantel until the roar of the blaze forced me to move to the window.

And when my aunt insisted we have music, I could not help but wander to the pianoforte where Elizabeth sat, playing with expressive finesse.

There was nothing I could say, and even if I had been equal to speaking in general that night, I would have been struck mute by the quality of her performance.

Miss Mary too played well, and I wondered at my recollections of her plunking away as though she were chopping wood.

The last chords of her rendition of Haydn rang pleasantly in the room.

“That was a passable performance,” Lady Catherine called out from ten yards away. “I am an expert judge in matters of taste, and you should be pleased to hear me commend you. Anne too is very musical. I daresay if she had learnt to play, she would have been a prodigy.”

Only Richard’s hand on my shoulder restrained me from hurling the nearest object at hand at my aunt’s head.

“Water running over stones, Darcy,” my cousin murmured.

The next three days I spent in full retreat.

Claiming the demands of my own estate’s business, I closeted myself in my dead uncle’s study, or I woke before Richard and went out with the steward to the farthest farms. If my cousin approached me with that look of his which signalled he was going to discover what ailed me, I forestalled him with busy talk of drainage and lambing.

I counted the days remaining in my tour of penance—twelve—and wondered if I could become believably ill on Easter morning and forgo Mr Collins’s preaching on the Resurrection.

And the sight of Elizabeth Bennet. And her company at dinner later.

Unfortunately, I was never ill and did not quite know how to pretend to be.

Besides, I was at heart a man, and a man does not cower in his bed.

Thinking to bring myself back to some semblance of my sensible self, albeit without my heart which now slept at the parsonage and took muddy walks in the woods, I began to think seriously of when to disabuse my aunt of her matchmaking ideas.

The next day broke fine and I thought the lanes might be dry, and in the midst of striding towards the stables with the notion of pondering while riding, a coach pulled up the gravel.

It looked odd to me. Was that—was that my own London coach? The one I left for my sister’s use?

“Georgiana!” I roared. “What has happened?”