Page 45 of The Winter of Our Discontent (Pride and Prejudice Variations #1)
FITZWILLIAM DARCY, PEMBERLEY
I had been home for three days and done everything that needed doing.
I dismissed my steward and took the resignations of two others—the under butler and the head gardener.
Romney shrank into the background, looking wide-eyed and pale, having been one of Mrs Darcy’s staunchest critics.
He seemed perfectly cognisant of how close I was to also replacing him, and like almost everyone in my household, he was swallowing his terror at my swift execution of justice.
I was in no mood to be delicate with regard to anyone’s feelings, however.
Mrs Darcy, wanted or not, chosen or forced upon me, born to elevated status or raised on a hundred acres of barley in a manor house with a patched roof, was still Mrs Darcy.
I had been an imbecile in my handling of her arrival, for I began to suspect that Johnson, by drips and drabs, hints and sly looks, had broadcast the fact I had been tricked into a marriage upon threat of public scandal.
I should never have told him, I now realised. But in that regard, I was almost glad I confided in him, for if I had not, he would not have so blatantly shown his stripes. An excellent land manager he may well have been, but inhumanity in a man’s character was simply unacceptable to me.
I had also gone to visit Mr Hodge and his sister.
I took them one of our hams, gave him twenty pounds for his own support, and made sure I was seen in friendly conversation with him as I left the parsonage.
From there, I visited Maunders. He was not a ‘high stickler’ he said, and pardoned Mrs Darcy for being young and inexperienced.
He did not condemn her charity, only her lack of discretion in its dispensation.
I believed he would continue to allow his daughter and niece to visit us, and our other neighbours would follow his lead.
Yesterday, I called the tenants to a meeting in the east barn.
I announced we would be getting a new steward, which could not have been a plainer message.
However, I was by then so cross that I barked out a stern lecture about Christian charity, asking anyone present to deny having received any number of kindnesses from Mrs Darcy, and wondering aloud what they would think if she drove past their starving, half dead infants on the road in deep winter.
Frustrated beyond bearing, I ended with some dark warnings about men who felt entitled to neglect their families by frequenting the taverns and worse, the gin hut. No man present misunderstood me.
I would like to claim that I came to this clarity on my own, but it was my sister who had taken me by the throat, metaphorically speaking, and shaken me till my teeth rattled.
The house had become strangely silent in those three days, and I sat alone well after dark beset by the wrenching memory of Georgiana’s face as she at last found the courage to confront me .
After knocking timidly, she had come to me the evening after my disastrous interview with Mrs Darcy, and asked for a moment of my time.
But upon being given her opportunity to speak, she had wrung her handkerchief around into a rope of white linen, twisting and untwisting it as she struggled to begin.
“What is it, Porge?” I asked.
I have no idea how this simple question could have been construed as confrontational, but it had the effect of a match struck against a pile of tinder.
“What is it ?” she demanded. “I will tell you what it is! You are planning to send my sister to Scotland for helping a few Irish vagrants, that is what it is!”
I opened my mouth in shock and she seemed to believe that I was on the verge of a conciliatory reply—which, I admit, I was.
“No,” she said firmly. “I have no wish to be placated. Elizabeth is the kindest, bravest, most thoughtful person I have ever known, and I do not care how you came to marry her, for it was the best thing you have ever done for me, and-and if you send her away, you will send me along with her, because I will have nothing to do with you ever again!”
She stood before me, breathing hard, her nostrils flaring, her hands trembling, and a look of wildness or even stark terror in her eyes.
She was afraid of me! A bucket of ice-cold water over my head would have had the same effect as the display of hysterics to which my sister had just treated me.
Suddenly dead calm, I led her to a chair and sat across from her. “Tell me everything,” I said gently.
A torrent of words poured forth—how the servants say she lifted her skirts for me, and we were found in—well!
My sister blushed a fiery red. They also speculated I lost a wager and had to take her as a result, or that she was my town mistress, and I was forced to the altar by her father when he discovered me to be a rich man.
Some of those more inclined to be generous towards Mrs Darcy said I married in haste in order to avoid Lady Catherine’s insistence I marry my sickly cousin Anne.
Others said that I married the first girl I came across to shake off that grasping harridan, Caroline Bingley.
No one believed I married for love, “for you have shown nothing but contempt for her since the day she arrived here,” my sister roared at me in a darkly accusatory tone.
“And from that same moment, she has only ever shown you respect and conducted herself with a determination to be useful and to put everyone around her at ease. To the tenants, she has been a committed benefactress. She is a tireless campaigner for the poor, enlisting half the town to knit and sew for the charity box. She has finally rid us of that horrible old Mr Waverley and brought us someone with a propensity to cure rather than condescend, and she has enlivened my life, brought society here, comforted me, and pulled me out of isolation after...”
She took a breath, and I nodded because I sensed there was more.
“I have blushed for you, Fitzwilliam. What a stupid trinket you gave her for Christmas! You have treated my sister very ill, very ill indeed.”
This last was hurled at me in a kind of theatrical sob.
Predictably, such an explosion could only end in a flood of tears.
When I had assured Georgiana that she had done well to bring her grievances to me, that I did not wish one word unsaid, that what she said was true—I had behaved very badly, and I must begin somehow to put things right—I led her by the hand to her room and begged Mrs Annesley to see to her.
“I must dismiss Johnson,” I had said aloud in the hall outside my sister’s room, and from there, I had begun to know how to proceed.
With those tumultuous few days behind me, I sat in my darkened study with a glass of brandy thinking I had done everything that needed to be done—everything, that is, save the one thing left to do.
I had not gone hat in hand to Mrs Darcy. Nor did I have the courage at that moment as it was very late.