Chapter 12
“Letter for you, Herr Darcy,” barked the innkeeper in German when Darcy stumbled inside from the cold.
“Danke schön,” Darcy replied and took it. He glanced at the handwriting and scowled. His cousin, no doubt trying to deliver his own take on the summons Darcy had received last week from his uncle, the earl. Colonel Fitzwilliam would be trying to soften the blow, no doubt. To put things in perspective.
Darcy wanted none of it.
He stormed up the stairs to his rooms and slammed the door shut behind him, throwing the letter on the desk with the others.
He couldn’t even look at it without a dram of whiskey.
That was the problem with this damnable Swiss village. There were few sights but the mountains, and it was always so blasted cold that the only thing that made it at all bearable was liquor. He went through most of his days half-drunk to keep warm, and had grown so used to the constant heat and fuzziness of brandy that he now required stronger stuff to get through the nights.
And the nightmares.
Not to mention what most certainly would be the scolding contents of this letter.
There was a knock at the door. His valet, surely summoned by the sounds of Darcy banging around.
“Sir? Do you wish to dress for dinner?”
“I shall take dinner in my room,” he grumbled back.
There was a half-second of hesitation before the valet replied, “Very good, sir.”
It was the tiny little slivers of time that mattered. The wisp of a second in which a servant might signal his disapprobation. The delicious and transient flash that appeared in Elizabeth Bennet’s bright eyes precisely before she began to argue with him. The moment of glory when young George Wickham felt the bite of a fish on his line in the pond at Pemberley.
The fraction of an instant it took for a trigger to release.
Whiskey, yes. He poured himself a few glugs from the bottle.
His poor valet. To think Darcy had hired him four years earlier in large part due to the man’s obvious over-adherence to propriety. They’d thought alike, Darcy had believed at the time. There was a natural order to things. A proper code of behavior. A standard to uphold, despite the low and lascivious world that surrounded them.
Ah well. Best the poor devil learn that no one was free from scandal and perdition.
Darcy turned toward the letter when his glass was drained. He felt suitably armed to confront its contents.
Colonel Fitzwilliam did not mince his words.
My father does not look upon your odyssey with a friendly eye, in which opinion he has been joined by his sister. They believe your absence only fans the flames of whatever rumors persist in London, and will certainly be noted in Derbyshire, where the identity of both parties is all too familiar, and the sympathy toward one might overpower the long-held trust in the other. It was put forth that if you do not wish to remain in town, that your calm and steady presence at Pemberley would soon put the matter to rest, especially among your tenants and neighbors, who must know of your good character, and of the other’s more careless and unsavory tendencies.
Darcy scowled. It was nothing he had not heard before, for all that Colonel Fitzwilliam’s words were far more conciliatory and respectful than the earl’s had been. Darcy dreaded to think there was another letter forthcoming, this one penned by the hand of his aunt.
I have done my best to convince them of your point of view, but they are unmoved by any appeals for patience. I believe my father fears somewhat that such an unnecessary sojourn on the continent will engender in you the same weaknesses that have ensnared other men of our family. That I did not suffer such on a similar journey does not appear to signify—thus is the fate of all younger brothers, it seems. We are doomed to bear the responsibility for all those who enjoy the pleasure of rank.
My dear cousin, I could be more lighthearted if I were not also so wary. You promised to write very often. Are the boats from Belgium to be thus mistrusted? You know I would trust your character from one end of the Earth to the other, but I feel sometimes as if a stranger grows inside of you, and only rarely shows his face.
And now Darcy tossed the letter aside entirely. Perhaps it was the stranger acting all along. The one who was so concerned what others thought, so terrified of how any action he might take would reflect upon the shades of Pemberley, the honor of his ancestral name.
Fitzwilliam Darcy, the grandson of an earl, the master of Pemberley, the jewel of Derbyshire.
He laughed, mirthlessly. Of course any story about such an object would be a fascinating one, sure to spread. The story that such a man was a murderer? Tantalizing. The rumor that he’d fought a duel? Utter rapture. There were no doubt debutantes swooning all over Mayfair.
But they did not know him at all, and the more he thought of how little resemblance their imagination of the great and noble Mr. Darcy bore to his actual self, the more he wondered if the costume had ever fit.
Perhaps he was always weak, always driven by passions that might lead to fisticuffs in a darkened garden. After all, even a few days before the Netherfield ball he was racing his horse through the rain, just to clear his head. He was rolling about in the mud and laughing at the clouds.
He was standing under a yew with Elizabeth Bennet, his hands clenched into fists to keep from pulling her into his arms.
Yes. He was always a dismal failure. Amazing that they’d been able to avoid scandal as long as they had. He’d been given good principles, but was left to follow them in arrogance and conceit, and there, all his father’s teachings had but grown into an onerous, ill-fitting mask.
He played at being a gentleman. He ordered about his servants at Pemberley and in his house in town. He kept his fortune secure and his estate in good repair. He made all the necessary appearances in society. He—he guided others, Lord help them all. He had made so bold as to instruct Bingley as to how he should act and with whom he should associate if he wished to increase his status to be commensurate with his fortune—and called it friendship.
Lies. All lies. He remembered the ones he’d told the Bingleys that first evening out in Hertfordshire, when Bingley had been so entranced by the eldest Bennet girl.
With such low connections, they can hardly be expected to make good matches.
It had been a warning. Jane Bennet was pretty and sweet, but she would not deliver to Bingley the status that his family craved for him, the standing that Darcy had so long valued as the pinnacle of worth.
Of course, Darcy already enjoyed that status himself. The fortune, the land, and the ancient estate sealed it tight. He could, in all probability, have a man murdered with little tarnish to his reputation, provided he act right in company and marry the well-moneyed daughter of a baronet.
What hypocrites they all were.
Bingley adored Jane Bennet. Anyone with eyes could see that. And the girl had loved him as well. But the entire time they’d been in Hertfordshire, Darcy and Caroline Bingley and her sister spent their time insisting it was nothing. A flirtation. A trifle. All because they had expectations that Bingley’s worth was wrapped up in social climbing, not in his own happiness.
And what of you, Darcy? Did you too get wrapped up in a Bennet?
But no. Those thoughts required another glass of whiskey. At least.
For those were truths that the Fitzwilliam side of his family must never know. That they suffered now—that Darcy suffered now— because he was unwilling to let some girl from the country be ruined by rumors. All the whispers in town were a price Darcy was willing to pay. Every time they called him a killer, they were not calling Elizabeth Bennet something worse.
His lordship would not like it. His lordship’s sister, Lady Catherine, who possessed an even stronger disposition, would never allow it to stand. She’d see every person in Longbourn ruined first. Even Colonel Fitzwilliam would find it an unnecessary burden. Why should he or Georgiana be made to suffer to protect some country chit?
; Why should any of them have even a moment of discomfort for a girl worth fifty pounds a year?
For that was the whole of it. Georgiana Darcy had thirty thousand pounds, and thus she should never be forced to stand in a ballroom and hear a word spoken against her brother.
Georgiana had thirty thousand pounds, and thus Wickham wanted to trap her into a lifetime of deceit and misery, whereas he only wanted to doom Elizabeth to one by taking her out in the gardens at Netherfield.
Darcy’s head hurt. How much liquor had he had now? Enough to think of all the ways he wronged Elizabeth, long before he’d tried at the end to make things right?
If only he could tell his family that. If only he could send that back in a letter.
My lord,
You find my behavior quite shocking, you say. But I wonder how shocking you would find the truth? Wickham was killed that night because I fought him—nothing so noble as a duel, no. Fists in the darkness, punches thrown in anger.
Are you shocked yet? Imagine then that I told you why. He did not seek to harm Georgiana this time. No, his sights were set on another, a woman he brazenly told me was nothing.
He was wrong. She was everything.
Darcy stared down at the words on the page. He hadn’t meant to write them. He would certainly never send such a missive. But he could not deny that the sensation of writing had unleashed something in him. He had not felt so light in weeks. Not all the liquor in Switzerland had done it, nor weeks of alpine treks.
He drew another piece of foolscap toward him.
Dear cousin,
I am in receipt of your letter. And may I say, most gently and with all the respect I have held for you since we were children: I do not care. I do not care what your father wishes me to do, or the schedule our aunt sets for me to return to my estate. Pemberley is mine, and is well-managed without her input and even without my constant presence. I am sorry only that you have been forced to abide their lectures in my absence. But, have you considered following my lead and not doing that?
You talk constantly of your dependence and what self-denial it brings you. I do not think, in the full measure of things, that the younger son of an earl can really know much in the way of want or hardship. Perhaps you mean that you cannot marry where you like.
But let me tell you, my dear cousin. Neither can I.
This paper, too, he shoved away from himself.
No, none of it would do. Not one of these letters was the one he truly wished to write. The one he wished with all his heart he might compose, even if he knew he’d never send it. With trembling fingers, Darcy reached for his pen again.
Dear Elizabeth…
Chapter 13
From the time that Mr. Collins announced their invitation to dinner at Rosings, scarcely anything was talked of the remainder of the day, or even the next morning. Mr. Collins at all times engaged himself in the office of carefully instructing them in what they were to expect, that the sight of such rooms, so many servants, and so splendid a dinner might not wholly overpower them.
He made special provisions for the tutelage of Elizabeth. “Do not make yourself uneasy, my dear cousin, about your apparel. Lady Catherine is far from requiring that elegance of dress in us which becomes herself and daughter. I would advise you merely to put on whatever of your clothes is superior to the rest; there is no occasion for anything more. Lady Catherine will not think the worse of you for being simply dressed. She likes to have the distinction of rank preserved.”
How very good, thought Elizabeth, as she had not packed her best dresses and believed that even Sir William had left his court clothes behind in Hertfordshire.
As for herself, she looked upon the dinner with a mix of curiosity and dread. All vague interests in the folly of Lady Catherine de Bourgh that she’d been given reason to anticipate by Mr. Collins’s reports paled in the remembrance that the woman was Mr. Darcy’s aunt, and thus the topic of Mr. Darcy might reasonably be suspected to arise in conversation, particularly if, as Charlotte had hinted, some version of the circumstances surrounding Mr. Wickham’s death had become known in Kent.
Elizabeth had not been given the opportunity to converse longer with Charlotte about what version of the story her mother might have put in her letter, and what report might have been given by Mr. Collins to his patroness. They had been interrupted in the drawing-room by the return of Mr. Collins and the Lucases, and the new lady of the house had been quite busy for the remainder of the afternoon in making sure her guests were properly fed and cared for.
While they were dressing, Mr. Collins came two or three times to their different doors to recommend their being quick, as Lady Catherine very much objected to being kept waiting for her dinner. Such formidable accounts of her ladyship and her manner of living quite frightened Maria Lucas, who had been little used to company, and she looked forward to her introduction at Rosings with as much apprehension as her father had done to his presentation at St. James's.
Elizabeth lay the responsibility for such anxiety at Mr. Collins’s door.
As the weather was fine, they had a pleasant walk of about half a mile across the park. Every park has its beauty and its prospects, and Elizabeth could not but admit that she saw much to be pleased with, though she could not be in such raptures as Mr. Collins expected the scene to inspire. She was, however, amused by his enumeration of the windows in front of the house, and his relation of what the glazing altogether had originally cost Sir Lewis de Bourgh.
When they ascended the steps to the hall, Maria's alarm was every moment increasing, and even Sir William did not look perfectly calm. But Elizabeth's courage did not fail her. She had braved far worse than the presence of an earl’s daughter in the past few months. She had heard nothing of Lady Catherine that spoke her awful from any extraordinary talents or miraculous virtue, and the mere stateliness of money and rank she thought she could witness without trepidation.
From the entrance hall, of which Mr. Collins pointed out with a rapturous air the fine proportion and finished ornaments, they followed the servants through an ante-chamber to the room where Lady Catherine and the rest of her household were seated.
Elizabeth immediately recognized the woman herself, and divined that the other grown woman nearby was Mrs. Jenkinson, whom Mr. Collins had mentioned not above a dozen times as the hired companion and sometime-nursemaid for the sickly Miss Anne de Bourgh.
There were also two younger ladies in the room, which came as some surprise to all the visitors from the parsonage. They could not be that much older than Elizabeth’s own sisters. At first glance, Elizabeth was not able to discern which was Miss de Bourgh, for though one woman was a tall, well-formed girl, and the other was a tiny, bird-boned creature, both wore pale complexions, shadows beneath their eyes, and—most notably—the same dour and demure expressions.
Her ladyship, with great condescension, arose to receive them, as did the other ladies in the room. Fortunately, as Charlotte had settled it with her husband that the office of introduction should be hers, it was performed properly, without any of those apologies and thanks which he would have thought necessary, and thus was concluded in a timely and efficient manner.
Upon which time Lady Catherine gestured to the taller of the two girls and said, “We have an unexpected addition to the party. This is my niece, Miss Darcy, who comes to us from London.”
Elizabeth swallowed and could not entirely hide the surprise from her expression. They took their seats, and she cast furtive glances at the young lady who could not be other than Mr. Darcy’s famously accomplished sister, Georgiana.
As the minutes passed, Elizabeth was not sure she could discern any strong family resemblance. Miss Darcy was not quite so handsome as her brother, though she was also extremely tall, and though only sixteen, was well-formed for her age. Still, like her cousin Miss de Bourgh, she did not speak at all any of the half hour that they sat conversing.
Well, not so much conversing as answering the questions put to them in t
urn by Lady Catherine. Her ladyship was a tall, large woman, with strongly-marked features that might once have been handsome. Her air was not conciliating, nor was her manner of receiving them such as to make her visitors forget their inferior rank. She was not rendered formidable by silence, for she directed the conversation in every manner possible. Whatever she said was spoken in so authoritative a tone as marked her self-importance, and everything she said seemed pitched to delve as deeply into the private matters of everyone around her as possible. Elizabeth could not comprehend why Lady Catherine would concern herself so with the movement of housemaids from one neighbor’s estate to another, nor why Charlotte should consult her ladyship on all her medical and dietary needs. She found it all very impertinent, but as everyone else in the room thought only to defer to Lady Catherine’s whims, the display went on and on.
Despite herself, Elizabeth could not help but think of the report she had once received on Lady Catherine from a most unexpected source: Mr. Wickham. He had not had anything generous to say about the woman in whose house Elizabeth currently found herself. To him, she was dictatorial and insolent. Even with their short acquaintance, Elizabeth realized she must agree with the memory of the deceased. He had not, for that matter, portrayed Miss Darcy with any degree of fondness. What was it he had said about the young lady? That he wished he could call her amiable?
Watching her sit in silence, her eyes downcast, Elizabeth wondered if that impression, too, was to be proven true.
Eventually, Lady Catherine turned her attentions to Elizabeth, and, inquiring after her family, her education, her accomplishments, her sisters, her sisters’ marriage prospects, and every other particular, proved she expected all the same deference from Elizabeth as from all other visitors to her home. Elizabeth, conscious above all of being a guest of her ladyship, responded politely but concisely. No, her father did not take them to London. No, her mother had never employed for them a governess. No, she did not think it had aught to do with her father’s income—the very idea! No, she did not find it shameful that her younger sisters were out before she or Jane were wed.
In Darcy's Dreams Page 10