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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Darcy

I n a state of disordered tumult, I had taken my sister down to take tea.

Our conference upon her unexpected arrival had been conducted in the privacy of my apartment while a room was hastily made up for her.

Richard came perforce, saying he would be in on our council of war, and Georgiana stood before us like a maiden bound for the guillotine.

“You will wonder what I am doing here,” my sister said to her toes in a whisper of dread.

“ Wonder is a mild description of what I feel. I am appalled. You should not travel alone and upon some mad whim without either of your guardians knowing where you go and for what purpose.” Never mind that she came with a coachman, a groom, a footman, a maid and her companion.

To my mind, she may as well have run away on the common stage.

“What are you about?” I demanded. “What was Mrs Annesley about to let you come here?”

My sister’s face paled, and I thought she might burst into tears. “Pray, William, do not blame her. I made her come because I said I would leave without her. She did not want to do it.”

I grumbled. “Well? What is your emergency then, Miss?” That must have hurt her. I had only called her Miss once before, and that was when she confessed her plan to elope with Wickham.

With her head bowed in pitiable dejection, my sister wordlessly pulled a paper out of her sleeve and handed it to me. This was to be my explanation? A piece of paper? Good Lord, had Wickham written her? I sat up in agitation, unfolded the letter, and read.

Dear Georgie,

We are safely in Kent, and Lady Catherine is as she ever was. Darcy, however, is as far from as he ever was as I have known him to be. I suspect the cause is a visitor to the parsonage, a Miss Elizabeth Bennet. Your brother is behaving the idiot, which tells me all he will not say to me.

I read grimly through to the end of Richard’s letter and looked up at my sister.

“Well?” I asked in stern disapproval.

“Come, Darcy,” Richard said quietly. “Plainly, Georgiana came to meet Miss Bennet. You need not drag the confession from her. Were you curious as to who has caught your brother’s notice, kitten?”

My sister nodded and flashed a look of gratitude at our cousin before her eyes rose to mine in an open plea for mercy.

“Very well,” I said. “You will meet Miss Bennet this afternoon. There is no choice, but you must stay for church, and then I shall see you back to London.” I spoke with uncharitable disinterest and added, for the sake of punishment, “And you will bear with Lady Catherine, for if you insist on coming to Rosings uninvited and unannounced, then you must be equal to her strictures.”

Richard kissed her cheek and I, still fuming, said, “You may go and change before I take you down to tea. See that Mrs Annesley is properly put up, as well as your footman and outriders.”

Once we were alone, my cousin rounded on me. “Darcy,” he said in the voice of a man intent upon talking sense into a fool.

“I shall not listen to anything you say, Richard.”

He persisted. “Miss Bennet?— “

“I shall most particularly not hear anything you say about Elizabeth Bennet.”

We had then gone down to tea, and Elizabeth, my heart, my sister’s rescuer, did that afternoon, what I had never done, what I had never thought of doing. The exercise had been a revelation.

She challenged Lady Catherine de Bourgh, calling into question my aunt’s benighted pronouncements and bearing the lady’s rage with light-hearted indifference. I took up her cause. How could I not? Richard too joined in, and even Georgiana, meek as a lamb, ignored the witch in the room.

We disputed her distortion of facts and refused to be drawn in by her demands for attention, and when she furiously dismissed her visitors from the parsonage, I went forward to where she sat in a smouldering rage.

“That was badly done, Aunt.”

She puffed up and replied, “I have never encountered such disrespect in my life. The impertinence of that girl! And you…you! To go against me!”

“You do nothing to earn her respect—my respect. Your manners in company are officious and unkind. I leave here Monday at first light with my sister. Do not expect me to wait upon you again, and forgo your hopes of securing me for Anne. My future does not commingle with yours, Lady Catherine, on this you must be clear.”

On that note of reprimand, said in the spirit of a man taken past his limit of endurance and with the finality which I truly felt, I swept out of the room.

I heard my aunt gasp and also the footsteps behind me.

Richard and Georgiana flanked my exit, and we went as one body to collect ourselves in the library.

My aunt’s wails of outrage followed us down the hall, and we shut the door in relief.

My sister and cousin were slightly shocked, as was I, if I am honest. We stood in a strange, mute group looking at one another until Richard spoke.

“A rupture, Darcy?”

“Apparently so. My breaking point came upon me unexpectedly. I shall never apologise for what is the mere truth. Are you angry with me?”

He considered the question. “You have borne a great deal from her.”

“As have we all. And why? Why have we sat hour upon hour in sullen silence while she has berated us and spouted absurdities on every subject? I have seen—I have been shown —that we ought not to let a fool bully us into submission.”

“Miss Bennet is very brave,” my sister timidly put forward.

“Yes. That she is, Georgiana. But of her we must speak. I cannot offer for her, surely you see that? If I were to marry her, our uncle would cut her and in doing so, he would cut me. And you. I cannot ruin your future.”

Suddenly my sister’s diffident posture came up standing to full attention. She spoke with an animation I had not heard in a very long time. “But this is marvellous! I told you I do not want to be an heiress.”

Richard frowned in confusion. “Not want to be an heiress? What is this nonsense?”

“I shall never know if I am receiving an offer out of affection or ambition. Do you not see? If we are nameless with the Earl and Countess of Matlock, our consequence will tumble, and if I am courted, my suitor will necessarily partake of our fallen position. He would have to be stout-hearted, do you not agree? For what is money without power? There are tradesmen by the dozens who have ten times our wealth and cannot secure a voucher at Almack’s.

I say this is marvellous,” she concluded as stoutly as the beau of her imagination.

“You must marry Elizabeth Bennet if you love her. For my sake!”

Over the course of an afternoon and evening closeted as we were, my sister’s notion, which I rejected out of hand at first, began to take on a life of its own.

We ate our dinner in the library, and the three of us spoke at length about what our future would be without the assurance of support from our relations in the peerage.

“We shall not be invited to the grandest balls.” I said.

Richard laughed. “This is your objection?”

“Georgiana’s come out might not be well-attended.”

“Which suits me very well, William. I would like the smallest affair we can manage. Have I not always said so?”

“My wife will not be invited anywhere in London,” I said at last, as though this were my final argument.

“But at Pemberley and in Derbyshire, she will be of the first consequence. Miss Bennet does not strike me as a lady who requires more than that. She was raised in the country, was she not?”

“She is at heart a country lass,” I conceded.

My resolve crumbled a little as I thought of Elizabeth walking my grounds. How her heart would delight at such splendid paths, and she would strike out regardless of a drizzle, returning splattered with mud and shining like a lamp on a cloudy day.

No, Elizabeth would not covet diamonds. I would woo her with my woodlands.

I wavered. “But what of you, Richard? Will not your life be made uncomfortable? You will be placed squarely between the Darcys and the Fitzwilliams.”

“I have always been more of a Darcy at heart. Have I not told you I mean to live independent of my father’s estate?

What do I care if they cut me because of my support of you?

I shall marry to please myself and live to fulfil my own notions of usefulness.

No, you cannot use me as an escape. Do you love her? ”

“I do,” I muttered in bewilderment as though just discovering this truth. “I have severed my connexion to Rosings on account of her.”

Georgiana, who sat in an abstracted state throughout this strange conversation, suddenly spoke up, catching me completely unawares.

“But does she love you, William? I saw no particular regard.”