Page 51 of The Last House in Lambton (Pride and Prejudice Variations #6)
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
M r Darcy had escorted my poor, shattered person back to the house where I was teased, caressed, and scolded for keeping such a secret close and giving no one a word of warning that I had ‘caught’ Mr Darcy.
To say it was embarrassing would do little justice to what I endured, but I clutched at little Queenie for dear life and forced myself to smile.
My mother insisted Mr Darcy and his sister stay, but he looked at me in his penetrating and perceptive manner and said, “I believe Miss Elizabeth is developing a headache. Perhaps it would be best if we left for London, particularly at this hour. If we linger any longer, we would be forced to use lanterns on the road. Besides,” he said in a somewhat pointed manner, “I believe my sister has some notion of going on a brief holiday.”
“A holiday?” my mother demanded. “But you have only just arrived here !”
“I plan to go to Brighton before my presentation, ma’am, and I wondered if I might invite Elizabeth and Miss Bennet to accompany me? ”
Another surprise? Had these people no consideration for my nerves? These were my ungracious thoughts, but in truth, the moment my head no longer hurt, I could think of little I would rather do than escape Hertfordshire.
“The seaside?” Mama cried while clapping her hands, her annoyance forgot. “But how lovely for my girls to see the Pavilion!
“I shall escort them myself if Mr Bennet will allow it,” Mr Darcy said. “Would Monday suit?”
And just as suddenly as our visitors had been swept into Longbourn by a cold breeze, they were swept out again in short order. I staggered up to my room and fell onto my bed, and Jane, dear Jane, slipped in with a cold cloth for my eyes.
“I have cried myself sick,” I said in a pathetic rasp.
“Hush. Leave Mama to me. Hopefully, I can secure you an hour before the trunks are brought down.” She paused. “Poor Lizzy, you look done up. Are you not happy?”
“I shall be when I have recovered. What a terrible trick Mr Darcy played upon me. I had no notion he was coming. I all but told him to give me up! And then to speak to Papa before saying a word to me—horrible man.”
She chuckled. “And, if your head did not hurt, you would be laughing even now. I do not believe you disliked it.”
“Go away, Jane.”
My sister chuckled once more, kissed my forehead, put the cloth on my eyes, put a shawl on my feet, and after filling a glass with water, which she set on the table next to my bed, she left me alone. I may have actually swooned then, for I remember nothing with regard to the subsequent two hours.
After dinner, while my entire wardrobe was emptied out and declared a shamble of rags for which I was wholly blamed, I slipped down to my father’s book-room.
His eyes swept over me with one of his driest looks. “If you are come to rage at me, you are wasting your breath, Lizzy. I could not refuse such a man, though I know you do not like him much.”
“He will make me terribly happy, Papa. He has a grand library, you know. His butler once condescended to explain to me that the collection had been amassed over generations.”
He sniffed, looked back at the page he had been reading, and spoke as though disinterested. “That is some consolation for when I am forced to visit you.”
I bent down to kiss his cheek and said, “I dearly love you, sir.”
He sniffed again but this time from another cause, and while patting my arm and still pretending to read, he said, “If you mean to force me to some similar confession, consider it said, child.” He cleared his throat and dismissed me.
“Now go upstairs, and see if you can induce your mother to cease her shouting.”
In the midst of the pandemonium of packing our trunks, being required to try on every dress, having every seam inspected, and stitching imaginary tears, I was forced to endure many a jumbled conference on the details of my wedding.
The date of this stupendous event had not even been set, yet the minutiae were already of consuming, urgent interest to Mama.
Now that we were certain to have escaped the hedgerows, the question of how she had failed to ask Mr Darcy to name the date of our triumph became Mama’s constant lament.
“I intend to make him tell me on Monday, else I shall go distracted,” she said, lying back in her chair with her scented handkerchief pressed to her nose.
I could not break the news she had gone distracted some years prior, and so I said in a voice of reasonable calm, “He will consult with me, and I shall ask that we wait until Miss Darcy has had her presentation. ”
“Wait!” she screeched, sitting violently upright. “Wait until after the Queen’s birthday?”
The notion terrified her. He could somehow slip out of her, er, my grasp! Long engagements were fatal, did I not know it? Poor Charlotte did not even warrant a second look on her wedding day, so disinterested had become her bridegroom.
“You must secure him while he still looks at you with admiration, Lizzy,” she warned in all seriousness, and I wondered if she had also felt Papa’s indifference on her wedding day.
I held firm. And what is more, I trusted Mr Darcy to do just as I wished in this regard. He may have forced my hand in the primary instance, but having won his point, he would willingly step aside and grant me any wish I could subsequently name. Such was his nature.
With something akin to a shock, I realised that I knew him.
I knew him as well as I knew anyone in my family, as though he had already crossed over some invisible line, and we were intimate—inseparable and secure.
For a certainty, I knew he would not look upon me with indifference on my wedding day or at any other moment in the entirety of our marriage. He never had!
The realisation of why he had stared me out of countenance from the very beginning forced me out of doors so I could release a demented laugh in the company of the willows. They danced joyfully in the first wind of April and seemed to laugh alongside me.