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CHAPTER TWENTY

Elizabeth

I cannot describe the terror and the thrill of the danger in which I found myself while in London.

Mr Darcy, while never completely charming, strove for politeness with my family, and upon occasion, he exhibited a graciousness that turned my head.

We had tea twice at his beautiful townhouse, went to an exhibition of paintings, and visited Hatchards.

One might wonder why I would call these pleasant excursions a danger, but I had come to think of my aunt and uncle Gardiner as my last line of defence against Mr Darcy’s incursions into my heart.

He was beginning to quite overpower my resistance.

The man’s efforts to be agreeable to my relations instead pushed me further and further into irreversible admiration. Even my body betrayed me. My knees turned strangely weak upon seeing him, my heart raced, my cheeks flamed, and when he spoke, I held my breath like a halfwit.

Not even the harshest internal remonstrations could shake me out of my wilting sensibilities. When I looked over my half dozen dresses with a wave of dismay, I knew I was beyond redemption. To wish for comely dresses to catch a man’s eye was my sister Lydia’s most constant whine!

“What is amiss, Lizzy?” Aunt Gardiner asked when I arrived in the parlour before dinner in a dress that had been perfectly acceptable for dinner at Rosings Park but now felt like a potato sack.

“Oh Aunt,” I said, wishing I could laugh at myself, but somehow, those two words came gushing out in a sound resembling a sob.

If that were not horrifying enough, when I looked into her kindly, affectionate face, tears clouded my vision and forced me to find the handkerchief I had tucked into the lace of my sleeve.

“I cannot talk about it easily,” I finally said, brushing the destruction of my face away with a watery smile.

My aunt did not smile back at me or cajole me. She looked at me very much like Mr Bromley would, as though seeing inside my head and finding an alarming malformation.

“You do not need to talk about it,” she said gently. “I have eyes.”

How lowering! My cheeks flooded for the hundredth time that week, and I looked downward. “I begin to hate this dress,” I said. There—I had laid out the whole of my distress in a form of code.

“Of course you do. I am sure the gentleman has seen it a dozen times already. No, no, Lizzy. There is no escaping the sad fact you would like to show yourself to advantage. You are not Mrs Wollstonecraft, you know. You should not expect to be always invulnerable.” She stood back and looked at me appraisingly with her dimple on full display.

“A little humility would look well on you, my girl.”

I could not help but grin sheepishly at her, and exercising the small store of humility I possessed, I thanked her for her forbearance.

She laughed aloud and discomposed me altogether when she said, “Think nothing of your dress, Lizzy. When Mr Darcy looks at you with his heart rising in his eyes, he cannot notice what you are wearing.”

This was the irritant I needed, and I sniffed back the last of my tears and stood two inches taller. “You will pardon me for wishing to arm myself. I would like to have a shield at least! Am I to be so easily felled that he can push me over like a rootless tree with his melting looks?”

“Come along, then,” she said.

And though we came down ten minutes late and left my uncle to do the pretty with our guests, I swept down the stairs, equal to seeing Mr Darcy in a hastily hemmed blue silk gown of my aunt’s.

We sat down to dinner. Mr Darcy had brought his sister and Colonel Fitzwilliam, and my aunt had invited Mr Bromley so that our numbers were even.

We were a small party, and conscious of Miss Darcy not being out, we did not conduct ourselves with overbearing formality.

In this, our soon-to-be brother helped us by playfully engaging Colonel Fitzwilliam’s leading remarks or contributing light responses to my aunt’s polished direction of the conversation.

Trying not to compare this convivial meal with the uproar of dinners at Longbourn, I began recovering my balance from my earlier nonsense over my dress and had just made my uncle laugh aloud by telling him of Mr Collins’s terror of his pigs, when I found myself thrown into confusion once again.

“Where do you go after your wedding, Mr Bromley?” Mr Darcy asked.

“We travel to Berkshire to visit my father. He is settled comfortably in Reading, but his bursitis does not allow him to come to us.”

Mr Darcy then asked in the style of a chatterbox, “Will you take your family to Miss Bennet’s wedding, Mrs Gardiner?”

“Just my husband and I shall go. Mr Gardiner and I had planned to take a tour of the Lakes this summer but amended our plans for the happy occasion of Jane’s wedding. Instead, we shall go straight from Meryton to visit my family, and we hope to bring Lizzy and Mary with us.”

Since this was news to me, I looked up at her in surprise as did my sister. My aunt casually assured us we could decide our willingness to go at our leisure.

Miss Darcy also sat up at this news. “But your family is in Lambton, is it not?”

“Why yes. My grandfather had the bookshop there, and my father was curate before he died. I have a few aunts remaining and cousins and friends too that I have wanted to visit, and there are many beauty spots I recall from my girlhood that I hope to see.”

“You were Mr Parker’s daughter then?” Mr Darcy asked.

“Do you remember him, sir? I believe you were often at school, but your parents were very kind to him and came to tea once when my mother was still living.”

“I remember him very well, ma’am. But if you are so close to Pemberley, you must stay with us.

The inn at Lambton is not in the best repair, and my sister and I would be delighted to have you.

” He glanced to Miss Darcy and received a look of shy encouragement.

“And if you enjoy fishing,” he said, turning to my uncle, “summers are ideal for lake trout.”

“You tempt me, sir,” Uncle Gardiner replied with a look of pleasure, and nothing more was said to the purpose until after dinner when we were seated together in the parlour.

Miss Darcy came to me. “Pray say you will convince your aunt to let you stay at Pemberley.” I glanced uncertainly at Aunt Gardiner, who stood with my uncle and Mr Darcy in animated conversation.

Thinking to see what sense Mary made of this mad plan, I looked for her. She was speaking with Colonel Fitzwilliam, and from what I could infer, he was telling her of the pleasures of Mr Darcy’s park in summer.

I smiled wanly at Georgiana and struggled with a growing sense of unease.

That Mr Darcy nurtured a tendre for me even my aunt now openly acknowledged.

But how could he offer me more than his admiration?

I thought of his estate, a place which could stable fifty horses and was being described by his cousin as a kind of Elysium.

Had not Miss Bingley waxed poetically about his palatial house and the enormity of his collection of silver? Inwardly, I quailed. This was too much!

Just when I had resolved to be ill or to batten myself on my newly married sister Jane—anything that would rescue me from going to Pemberley and facing my multiple inadequacies—Mr Darcy and my aunt approached.

He peered at me and said, “Mrs Gardiner, might I have a few minutes with your niece outside and in plain view of that window?”

As he helped me to stand and walked me towards the door, I heard Mary say in a confidential tone, “Do not worry, Aunt. Mr Darcy also had to talk sense into Lizzy at Hunsford when she was determined we should take the mail coach.”

Darcy

“I see you are having another attack of lunacy and mean to refuse my invitation if you can,” I said sternly. “What is it now? Does my house have too many rooms? Is my park too large to suit you?”

Elizabeth and I stood face-to-face as though on a stage, lit by the lamps of the parlour and framed in the rectangle of Mrs Gardiner’s front window. To my absolute horror, a few tears spilled over and down her cheeks.

Rather than crumble while weeping, as Georgiana would, she stood taller, and those looking at us would not think anything amiss, since our faces were covered by the gathering dark.

“You have bested me, Mr Darcy,” she said in a small, plain voice.

“I had not thought we were fighting for once,” I said, almost desperate to understand her.

“We have said many honest things to one another, Elizabeth Bennet. You must now simply say what has upset you, for I have not the lights to pick apart your very complicated objections to staying at Pemberley.”

She swallowed and looked at me, imploring me not to be stupid.

But upon seeing my growing bewilderment she said with the briskness of a woman forced to say what she would rather not, “Do you not see? I have fallen in love with you, Mr Darcy, and things being unequal as they are, it would be kind of you to find an excuse for why we cannot accept your invitation.”

By some miracle, I did not fall backwards as though I had been hit in the jaw. Instead, I came to full attention at the way she stood before me as though she meant to refuse me before I had the chance to offer for her.

“My lord!” I barked. “What are you? A fiend? You have led me here to this spot on earth, pushing, pulling, and utterly bewitching me with your every breath, and now you will stand there wringing your handkerchief and cry quits?”

She stood quite still, which was just as well because I was nowhere near finished speaking.

“What next? Will you now tell me that your position would pull me down, that out of kindness for my consequence—a thing you have always hated—you must sadly decline to know me? You-you,” I stuttered, “You mean to point out the unhappy fact my relations will object to the connexion, that my sister deserves someone who can bring her out in society, and that you are unequal to being mistress of anything other than a clumsy cottage with a kitchen garden!”

“Mr Darcy, you are raising your voice.”

“Of course I am!” I roared. “I am at my wit’s end, Elizabeth. You have driven me stark raving mad. Can you not see that I adore you? That I would do anything for you?”

She then bowed her head and discretely made use of her handkerchief. “You have never said so.”

“And when would I have done so? You have anticipated me! I had the thing planned very well, I assure you,” I said with less rage and more petulance. My romantic notions of bended knee in Pemberley wood and my mother’s ring in my pocket were in shards all around me.

Then, seeing that my heart was battered as she stood before me, I said in a far gentler tone, “There are no obstacles, my love. I am a gentleman, and you are a gentleman’s daughter.

We belong to one another, and I mean to have you, even if I must pull you aside and shout at you a hundred times over. ”

She again took refuge in her handkerchief, and glancing at the window, I passed her mine. “You had better make quick work of recovering your composure, Elizabeth, because we have treated our relations to a scene. I believe your uncle comes to rescue you.”

True enough, Mr Gardiner appeared in that small patch of light where we stood in the front garden off of Waters Street. “Well, Lizzy? I have come to see if there are any bloody wounds in need of stitching.”

“Sir, I mean your niece no harm,” I protested.

The man laughed very gently and said, “Of course you do not, Mr Darcy. I came to see if you were still intact. By the looks of it, you have taken several hard blows. Will you come to see me at my office in the morning? Meanwhile, your sister has said she wishes to go home. Goodnight, Mr Darcy.”

I turned to see Richard and Georgiana peering at me from the stoop, and trying not to stumble, I left to join them.