Page 27 of Under Such Circumstances (Desperately Seeking Elizabeth #1)

SHE HAD SERVANTS now, and so, Mr. Darcy was received in her sitting room and served a bit of refreshment, though it was only bread and butter and tea, no sweets or anything lavish.

He didn’t come out with the letter at first. Instead, he said he had been to visit the Vicomte de Larilane and he was come to tell her what had occurred.

“He says he is not your father,” said Mr. Darcy. “But I don’t know if we must believe him or not, for he might wish to deny the entire business for a number of reasons. He admits to having left Weythorn and some money for your mother, however.”

“He admits to that but not to being my father?” said Elizabeth. “Well, that doesn’t make any sense.”

“I shall tell you his tale,” said Mr. Darcy, “and then we can speak together of whether or not we think it true, but I must say this is all that I can ascertain of it, and I do not know who your father is. I wish you to understand that before we embark upon this conversation.”

She regarded him, thinking he was being very grave and very serious, and, well, just like himself, truly. She sighed. “Is there some grim and important conversation we are about to undertake, sir? Have I agreed to such a thing, for I don’t remember doing so.”

He looked away, vaguely pained. “Apologies, madam. I have gotten ahead of myself. It is only, you see, that my plan has been—for some time—to gather some information for you, valuable information, and then sort of offer it to you in exchange for some questions I wished to put to you about Colonel Fitzwilliam.”

She could not stop herself from visibly wincing at his name.

Mr. Darcy noticed. “There is something to tell, I see. You may not wish to speak of it, but I am hoping that you will simply tell me. I intercepted this servant, you see, with this letter today when I was visiting my cousin.” He took the letter she had written out of his jacket pocket and set it down on a small table there, next to his tea.

“Oh,” she whispered, the sight of the letter sending a reaction through her, one that seemed to turn her entirely inside out. She was trying to remember exactly what it was that this one had even said. Was it incredibly damning?

“I spoke to the servant who told me that he works for you, here.”

“Yes, I have taken to using my own servant instead of my aunt’s and uncle’s, but it is a bit more difficult for him to get into London from here.

But he has managed it for me.” She felt a rush of guilt at asking her servants to deliver these idiotic communications to a man who was obviously indifferent to her.

“This servant would not have given this letter to me, for it was not addressed to me, except that I told him that I was Mr. Darcy, and the servant had seen more than one of these letters opened by the colonel, and read that they said things about me, that if the colonel did not come to visit you, that you would tell me… something.” Mr. Darcy sighed.

“This one doesn’t say that.” He opened the letter and showed it to her.

She hadn’t written much in this letter. It only said, This afternoon. Weythorn. I beg you.

“Does he visit you here?” said Mr. Darcy. “I am sorry if you were expecting him and got me instead.”

“He does not,” she said, squaring her shoulders and trying to decide on how she was going to lie about this.

“Then why…?” Darcy blinked at the letter.

“I ask him, but he never comes,” she said. “He says it is because I must marry you, and I suppose he thinks that he cannot be near me anymore. I suppose he thinks I’ll eventually forget about him, but it doesn’t seem to be working that way.”

“You’re in love with Richard,” said Darcy quietly.

Her jaw worked, but she said nothing.

He raised his gaze to hers. “How did it happen? He says that you discovered him spying. But if that were the case, he would have reported it to me faithfully that very day. There is no reason for him to conceal it. He pursued you, did he not?”

“He did,” she said. “In a manner of speaking, I suppose. He had his ideas about it all from the beginning, that it was not to be… permanent. He never wished to marry me. Anyway, once he discovered that Mr. Wickham had not actually taken my virtue, he swore off me, and I have been…” Oh what did it matter? “Pining over him ever since.”

Darcy sat back in his chair and lifted his tea cup, thoughtful. “Are you saying to me that he pursued you for the sake of only…” He cleared his throat. “The right word evades me.” He licked his lips. “Bedding you, that’s perhaps the best we can do.”

“He said it would ‘heal’ me,” she said. “Maybe it did.”

“Wait, are you saying that he did—”

“No,” she said. “No, he stopped short of it, I suppose, not that it seems to really matter to me, for whatever he did do, it has altered me.”

“And he gives you no reason for not marrying you besides me?” Darcy asked this of his tea cup, not her.

“I don’t know if he ever really did wish to marry me,” she breathed.

“He did and he does,” said Mr. Darcy. “I shall speak to him.”

She gave him a sharp look. This wasn’t what she’d expected from him.

But then, yes, it should have been. This was Mr. Darcy. He was not going to fly into some kind of passion. He wasn’t that way. He would be subdued and controlled and proper, even if he were hurt and devastated.

Of course, the time that she’d rejected his marriage proposal, he’d been much more agitated than this.

Maybe whatever he had felt for her had faded.

“Miss Bennet,” he said softly, “you have never really returned my feelings, and this is something I’ve always known.

I suppose I sort of hoped… it’s beneath me to think it…

but that I could trap you in some marriage of convenience and you’d be grateful to me for rescuing you, and then you might come to fall for me.

But I see that is not to be. And I now realize why my cousin has been drinking so heavily as of late, as if he’s drowning his sorrows.

You and he… you always had…” He shrugged.

“He has always made you smile and laugh, and I never have. I don’t know what it is that I am doing here, but it seems to me that I’m only causing you both misery. ”

“Mr. Darcy—”

“No, I know I have said it over and over, more times than I should have, and I never seem to follow through with it, but this time, I swear to you, Miss Bennet, I shall give you up. I shall leave you be.”

She let out a shaky breath. She wasn’t sure that was reassuring, in the end, but Mr. Darcy had put up with a great deal from her, and he would not remain devoted to her forever. That wasn’t real life, was it? Men didn’t fall in love in that way.

“We shall remain amiable,” he said. “You will be my cousin’s wife, and we shall see each other, and I shall bear you all the respect and love that I bear a member of my family. But nothing more, I promise you.”

She should reassure him, tell him she would respect him as well, that they would have friendly affection for each other in the future. But all that came out of her mouth was, “I don’t think he wishes to marry me.”

“Leave that to me,” said Darcy. Then he cleared his throat and changed the subject back to Larilane. “Shall I tell you what the vicomte told me?”

She was a bit jarred by going back to this after all of the dramatics between herself and the colonel, but she was curious obviously, so she picked up her tea and nodded. “Yes, please.”

“Well, I arrived at the house and was shown in to the sitting room and his wife was there. I indicated that perhaps this was a topic he might wish to speak of with me alone, and he said that was nonsense and would not be moved on it. Which is a reason to perhaps think that he is lying, for the sake of his wife. However, for her part, she said she knew of it all, and that it had all occurred before she even met him, so she had no feelings about it one way or the other.”

“So something occurred?” said Elizabeth. “I thought he claimed he wasn’t my father.”

“Oh, he did,” said Mr. Darcy. “I brought up your mother’s name, and they both reacted.

He said, immediately, that he had left Weythorn for her, signed the deed over to her free and clear, and left her a certain amount of money, and that it was not his fault or his business if she chose never to use what he had given her and to live with her family. ”

“Well, that is interesting,” said Elizabeth.

“I had to inform him your mother had passed. He was grieved.”

“Was he?”

“Aye, he very nearly had to excuse himself. He was on the verge of tears. His wife patted his arm and said it was to his credit he had been so good to your mother.”

“Really?” Elizabeth was very confused.

“Yes.” Mr. Darcy drank some tea. “So once he was composed enough to continue, I pressed for more information. He said that he fell in with your mother and she was already with child. She was on the run from whoever it was your true father was, who he said she was frightened of, physically frightened.”

“Oh, dear,” said Elizabeth.

“Yes, and apparently, there were signs on her body to support that she had been ill-used by this man,” said Mr. Darcy.

“Bruises and scars and the like. I pressed for some indication of his identity, but Larilane said that your mother would never say who it was, saying that she was worried that Larilane might go and confront this man. She didn’t wish the man to know anything about her whereabouts, she said. ”

“Oh,” said Elizabeth, furrowing her brow. “Well, that doesn’t make sense. If my mother was in hiding from some awful man who abused her, then she would have remained in hiding. Anyone who was looking for her would have been able to find her for all of my life.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Darcy. “I said this.”

“And?”

“He had no answer for it,” said Mr. Darcy.

“Perhaps she did not need to hide, because the identity was the way she hid,” said Elizabeth.

“Pardon me?” said Mr. Darcy.

“Well, I don’t know exactly, but if my Aunt Matilda was only pretending to be my Aunt Matilda, and she was really someone else, I suppose.”

“I can see that, I think,” said Mr. Darcy.

“But then, where would the real Matilda Bennet be?” said Elizabeth, shaking her head.

“Yes, it’s rather convoluted,” said Mr. Darcy.

“And anyway, I look like my father.” A pause. “Like Mr. Bennet, I mean. I must be related to him in some way.”

“Hmm,” said Mr. Darcy.

She shook her head. “Well, no matter. Continue.”

“Erm, that may be all of it,” said Mr. Darcy.

“Well, no, I don’t understand. Why did he leave my mother a house if he was not my father?”

“Oh, they were involved,” said Mr. Darcy. “Involved like that, I rather imagine, though he didn’t say. He did say they lived together there, so that implies they were intimate.”

“Yes,” she said. “So, he fell in love with my mother when she was already gone with child, with another man’s child.”

“A conveniently unknown man’s child, who is horrible in some way,” said Mr. Darcy, shrugging.

“You think he made it up.”

“I think it’s possible,” said Mr. Darcy. “Perhaps only for his wife, to make it sound as if he were a better sort of man than he is.”

“Well, why did he leave?”

“He said the quarreled about too many things,” said Mr. Darcy.

“I pressed for details, and he was vague, saying it was the normal sorts of quarrels. He said they could not remain together, and so they ended up parting. He said he did what he could for her, for he did not wish her to suffer. His wife said that he had no obligation to do anything for ‘that woman,’ and he shushed her and said he made promises to her, so that yes, he did.”

“Quarreled,” murmured Elizabeth.

“Yes, but maybe what happened is that he decided he could not marry a woman who was gone with another man’s child, and so he left.”

“We think it was another man’s child?”

“Right, right,” said Mr. Darcy. “It is odd, if it was his child, that he would leave the house to her but would not marry her.”

“Yes, that’s quite odd,” she said.

“But I don’t know that we’ll ever find out the truth of it,” said Mr. Darcy. “I suppose you’ve asked your father—Mr. Bennet, that is—about all of it, and he has nothing to tell you?”

“He did not know of my existence until my mother entrusted me to him,” said Elizabeth. “He says he has no idea who my father was.”

“I am sorry, Miss Bennet,” said Mr. Darcy. “I wished to find this out for you.”

“Yes, to win me over, I suppose?”

He sighed. “I should like to say that my intentions were nobler than that, truly, that I simply wished to do it for you and that I hoped to get nothing in exchange. But, well, who knows?” He chuckled, soft and sad.

She bit down on her lower lip.

“At any rate, it hardly matters,” he said.

“You will marry the colonel and this business about your parentage will be entirely concealed, for I can’t tell you how damaging it would be if this came out.

My aunt and uncle, the Matlocks, they shan’t be pleased with you in any circumstance, but if it were known that their son had married the natural daughter of no one, well… ”

“The ruined natural daughter of no one,” she murmured.

“Sounds to me as if he’s done the ruining, however, which means you are his responsibility.”

She bit down on her bottom lip. She didn’t want to be an obligation. She wanted to be wanted. And she was not entirely sure that the colonel did want her.