by Lucy Tilney
“Nothing nice then,” murmured Elizabeth holding open the office door for her.
“Miss Bingley would love to marry my uncle and I am in the fly in the ointment. Like everyone else she describes me as ‘absolutely adorable’ and ‘an exotic beauty’ but having me around all the time as a reminder that her husband’s brother married an Indian would be terribly stressful. She knows I refuse to become a nice little deb and marry some titled nitwit and moulder away in some corner of Norfolk which means I might hang about Pemberley for the rest of my life putting a spoke in her wheel. I won't, of course, I can't wait to see the last of the place but I can hardly tell her that.”
Elizabeth relieved her of her coat and umbrella and gave them to Lily who was decidedly goggle-eyed.
“I didn’t get the impression at Netherfield that she and your uncle were involved.”
“Oh, good grief, no. Uncle Fitzwilliam can be a bit of a stick but I think he does want to marry for love and no-one in their right mind could love Caroline Bingley, she’s so shallow and now that Louisa has caught that brainless baronet Caroline is anxious to get Pemberley; the baronet’s pile is insignificant. London calls them the wisteria sisters, you know, fragrant and climbing.”
There was no doubt in Elizabeth’s mind that if Caroline could take her eyes off Pemberley she could marry very well indeed. She showed Georgiana into her little office and called for tea. Lily sent in Molly, the runner, who could barely speak with excitement at meeting Rose Kumar.
Georgiana leaned back in George's usual chair and smiled enigmatically. Today she had worn an ivory coat embroidered lavishly with white roses over a spring green dress.
“Ah, my dear Miss Bennet, Miss Bingley wants Pemberley. It’s just icing on the cake for her that my uncle is young and handsome.”
“I cannot imagine willingly marrying a man who would be indifferent to me and have affairs simply to be mistress of a great house. I don’t mean your uncle would but it sounds as if Miss Bingley wouldn’t care.”
Molly came back came in with tea followed by Lily with the papers and Elizabeth suspected that in another minute they would have both curtseyed. What was it like to be so wealthy and amazingly beautiful that sensible people lost all sense around you?
Georgiana tilted her cup, “When my uncle went to Poland he brought me a parure of ancient amber exactly the colour of this tea,” she tipped it towards Elizabeth to show her, “it has a huge dragonfly in the pendant. However, Miss Bennet, should you change your mind and decide to marry for property I heartily recommend you choose my family. Pemberley is the most beautiful stately home in England; Chatsworth is so-so in comparison and Blenheim merely tolerable, plus my uncle is extremely honourable and would never take mistresses.”
“I’ll make a note of that,” said Elizabeth, “and I am glad that you are Georgiana Darcy. Rose Kumar was somehow intangible and I was frightened she’d vanish and I’d never see her again.”
“I promise you will see much of me. I don’t have any friends in London, at least no-one that doesn't exasperate my uncle and I am trying awfully to keep on the right side of him. I only see my cousins and Loathsome Louisa or, I should say now, Horrible Hurst.”
“You find Louisa worse than Caroline?”
“Louisa is much worse than Caroline. Caroline only wants me to not be there when she takes over Pemberley and she’d feel that way if I was blonde but Louisa is bigoted. I overheard her saying once that it was a mercy my father hadn’t been stationed in Zanzibar or my colour would be even darker and the misfortune of my existence all the greater!”
Elizabeth’s ears tingled.
“The misfortune of your existence! Why on earth didn’t you tell your uncle?”
Georgiana wrinkled her nose, “I almost did but then I realised it would be unfair on Charles. Charles is a pukka sahib and he had such a dreadful war he really needs my uncle so there’s no point in stirring things up. He was terribly injured, you know, and trapped in freezing mud for hours and hours. He just held his lieutenant until the poor fellow died and then he drifted in and out of consciousness. He saw rats coming to eat the bodies of the men around him and heard voices but couldn’t use his own. Then he heard another saying, ‘I never thought I’d rescue a Trinity man,’1 because there was Charles waist deep in French mud wearing his college scarf, and somehow my uncle and Sibley, his valet who never left his side the whole war, found him and managed to get him to the casualty station. They’ve been inseparable ever since.”
Elizabeth was silent for a long while, “Poor, poor Charles,” she said.
Georgiana nodded, “And then my uncle persuaded him that he didn’t need to be in his father’s regiment so he joined the Royal Flying Corps and designed aeroplanes as well, that’s what he does you know, he owns Bingley Beaufort Aeronautics plus other things but so many airmen died in rickety little planes and Charles feels guilty.”
“Even though he was flying them himself?”
“He knows that but feelings are funny things, and that’s why he is the way he is. You know, parties and nightclubs, always dancing or drinking, or racing his yacht. He never stops because if he does he’ll have to think. I nearly fell over when my uncle told me he’d bought an estate but he won’t settle there, it’ll just be a playhouse for Caroline.”
“I see,” said Elizabeth miserably, “I’m glad he has your uncle to take care of him.”
“Uncle Fitzwilliam takes very good care of him. Of course, he admits how much he’s gained from Charles, it isn’t a one-way street. Everyone loves Charles because he makes them feel good and after half an hour with him, they go away feeling perhaps their problems aren’t so bad after all. He reminds my uncle to keep going even when his memories and worries get him down. Still, if it wasn’t for my uncle Charles would have married a fortune hunter and he’d never get over that, it would suck up all his hope and optimism and he’d end up an alcoholic or something. Apparently, there was another one just at Christmas plus a vulgar, pushy mother and four awful sisters.”
She took a sip of tea and shook her head although at the quality of the tea or the audacity of the mother it was hard to tell. “I think it was someone who came to the Christmas ball so you probably know her. Anyway, forget Charles, my point is my uncle. You’ve heard of Murray's Mackintoshes, haven’t you?”
Despite fizzing Elizabeth managed a nod.
“Uncle Fitzwilliam owns it. All the workers are either war widows or war wounded and because of child care and clinics and literacy classes and all that it hardly makes any money. Anyone else would throw out all the widows and cripples and run it for profit but not Uncle Fitzwilliam. He is such a darling to everyone, Elizabeth.”
Elizabeth certainly understood one thing, that Miss Darcy wanted it to be known she was misunderstood. By her own admission, her uncle was practically a saint and even he didn’t understand her. On the other hand, all this information about Mr. Darcy was causing her a problem that Miss Darcy didn’t even come into.
“It’s simply terrible,” she said plaintively into her teacup, “you have no idea, Miss Bennet, what it’s like to go through life like this. Oh, do you think it would be a good idea for me to talk to the girls in the office?”
She was fêted and fussed over by the entire staff. She showed them photographs of herself in a sari and on an elephant, demonstrated writing in Hindi, and assured them Molly and Lily was simply a perfect pest being courted by an earl.
By the time she left Elizabeth was exhausted.
1 There was a traditional rivalry between St John’s College and Trinity College.
GUNTER’S
Georgiana’s revelations about her uncle were hardly comforting. If Mr. Darcy was really some paragon of virtue going around saving lives and employing war widows, then just possibly she had misjudged Charles’ reasons for leaving Hertfordshire. Perhaps he might be too fragile for relationships and poor Jane was just the latest in a long line of discarded blondes. She went to Selfridges to think. It wasn’
t like a ramble up to Oakham Mount but it was far better than the crowded street outside.
She dawdled around the haberdashery counters examining ribbons and buckles and considered the purchase of a purple velvet dahlia to pin on her coat. Phoebe had once opened her wardrobe and told her the varieties of green, yellow, and purple looked like a crocus patch. Yet… she caught sight of herself in a mirror… she suited green very well and it was nice, in the middle of London in winter, to be wearing a coat of pale spring green and a soft scrunched velvet hat amidst the sea of grey and brown. She smiled at the person in the mirror whose green hat went so well above her honey hair and her mind flitted to the close-fitting seriously fashionable hats she could wear if she didn’t have so much of it. She bought a yellow ribbon and began to make her way to the tea room to reconsider getting her hair cut off. Mr. Darcy or no Mr. Darcy. And why on earth had she allowed Mr. Darcy's unspoken opinion to dictate her hairstyle anyway?
There was a woman perched on a high stool at the corner of one the glass-topped counters choosing slowly between two lengths of trimming and beyond her, a tall, masculine figure hovered. A poor husband. Oh, no, not a poor husband.
Him. Again.
She was in no mood to talk to him and he might admire her hair. This was how Georgiana felt when Miss Bingley had cornered her in the same shop doing much the same thing but it was too late to slip behind one of the neo-Grecian pillars and pretend she hadn’t noticed. Wretched, despicable man – was he following her? How ridiculous! She glanced from under her lashes as she bought time examining... oh good grief... brassiere elastic! A hasty departure from the elastics counter brought her face to face with him each one pretending surprise.
He seized the moment, “Will you have tea with me in Gunter’s, Miss Bennet?”
The temptation to spend time with him now that she had met Miss Darcy and spoken with George was irresistible. This time, she told herself, I will meet the real Mr. Darcy. I will find out what kind of man has so much influence on his friend’s life because, as George says, saving someone’s life shouldn’t mean dictating the rest of it. If he does.
They walked the ten minutes or so to Berkeley Square in silence. For a man who had just invited someone to tea he was taciturn and good walker though she was she had difficulty keeping up with his pace.
Gunter’s was one of the oldest tea rooms in London where many a Regency lady determined between beaux and rakes but Darcy was neither and having heard George’s story and read between the lines of Georgiana’s she was not surprised he was single and she did not imagine he could get out of his strait-laces long enough to be rakish. She came out of her thoughts to hear him telling her it was his favourite place in London but that he rarely visited it.
“I used to come here with my mother,” he was saying and I rarely come now except to think of her and that is often painful. She was a young and apparently healthy women, only a few weeks past thirty-seven, yet she had an invisible heart condition.”
She kicked herself for being so lost in her own thoughts that she had missed the preamble to that unhappy information.
“I faintly recall being taken to a tea room in Cambridge by my mother when I was about six and she deemed Jane and me decent enough for public consumption but it was a rare event.”
“He laughed, “You make yourself sound like a cake. In my mother’s case, I’m sure the closeness helped, no-one wants to trail a small boy around too much of London, but she had also been a lady-in-waiting to Princess Louise1 and Gunter’s supplied the princess’s wedding cake. Mother was so impressed she had her own made here as well and from then on it was one of her favourite places in the whole of London.”
“Back from the United States?”
“My father was a diplomat in Washington. His career was cut short in 1888 by the Murchison Affair but my grandfather’s death occurred almost at the same time giving him a respectable excuse to resign from the Foreign Service and return to run Pemberley.”
“What was his part in the Murchison Affair?” She hoped she sounded as if she knew what he was talking about but she had no interest in the politics of a generation ago.
“Almost nothing, certainly nothing scandalous, excepting in the Foreign Service of these days. He was the only other person of significance who saw Baron Sackville’s letter regarding the desirability of re-electing President Cleveland.”
Without her father there to undoubtedly have an opinion on President Cleveland, she resorted to more standard feminine conversation.
“How old were you when you lost your mother?”
“I was twelve and I lost my mother and my sister within a day of each other. My mother never fully recovered from her birth and Annette was her life in a very special way. I would go to school, go into the law as my older half-brother was to inherit, have a home and family of my own but even as a tiny child my father had decreed Annette would never be fit to marry or leave home so she would always be with our mother. Then in the summer of ’05 in our villa in Tuscany my mother died; she came out of the dining parlour on to the verandah, she smiled at me, and then suddenly she went down in a great billow of white lawn. She was dead when I reached her. A heart attack, the doctor said.”
Elizabeth wanted to reach across the table and take his hand.
“I remember sitting on a sofa with my arm around Annette while my father dictated telegrams to England. She was desperately scared and the fear induced one of her convulsive attacks. Her nanny came and took her away. I never saw her again. My father woke me the next morning to tell me that, like our mother, she had a weak heart and it had given out.”
The chatter and bustle around them dulled and faded. Elizabeth felt the racket her own heart was making must surely be audible to the entire cafe. She began to reach tentatively across the table but before she could the waitress arrived to take their order and she returned her curiously tingling hand to her lap. They placed their order and he continued:
“My aunt and uncle arrived two days later and my uncle, Sir Lewis de Bourgh, brought me home. He gave me into the care of my brother at Dover. Forgive me, Elizabeth, I really didn’t invite you here to share childhood unhappinesses.”
She shook her head, “No, it is I who should ask forgiveness. I was unfairly curious.”
“We seem to have got off on the wrong foot,” he said waving away her apology. There was still the gnawing fear she had overheard him at the Meryton dance. He was sure she had.
She frowned slightly. Why did he think it mattered? He had successfully split up Jane and Charles who were the only people connecting them so they had no likelihood of being in each other's company unless he was hypocritical enough to imagine she'd see him when he'd ruined things for Jane. Perhaps he was.
“I don’t think it matters. Your friend and my sister haven’t become an item so we will hardly be in each other’s company in the future, even if you spend a great deal of time at Netherfield I am usually only at Longbourn at weekends.”
She smiled coldly then immediately reprimanded herself. A moment ago she had wanted to take his hand.
The waitress returned with coffee for him and strawberry ices for her. She shifted nervously on the hard gilt chair. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. She would steel herself against his unfair good looks and rich, velvety voice with the slightly clipped upper-class vowels. There was no need to ever see him again, particularly if he stopped trailing her around London.
“It’s odd, now that I think of it,” she said wickedly, “we weren’t aware of ever having seen each other before the dance yet it looks as if we’ve been skirting each other at Maison Lyon, Hampstead Library, Shoolbred’s and who knows where else since. Perhaps we’ve been doing it for months or even years without knowing?”
He sipped his coffee. Around them, smartly dressed women glanced and whispered unable to decide whether to look at him or devote themselves to a careful assessment of her. With hearing honed by a houseful of sisters and secrets she caught a few choice remark
s and sensed a faint pink flush on her cheeks.
“I admit, Miss Bennet, I followed you into Selfridge's haberdashery department today. I generally have no need for buttons and bows but I have excellent reasons for being in all the other places. I assure you I am not the kind of man who entertains himself by following young women around town.” He smiled and he had perfect teeth. Elizabeth was susceptible to teeth and hands.
Except when they are mysteriously irresistible, may God forgive me. He sipped his coffee again, “I understand you have recently met my niece.”
Ah. She was being vetted.
“And she wants your magazine to publish one of her stories. I hope she is using a pen-name.”
There was George’s unreasonable Mr. Darcy and there was the same arrogant set to his mouth she had seen at the Meryton dance when he was too proud to participate and at Netherfield on Christmas Eve when he saw George taking photographs.
“Yes, and yes,” she replied and smiled beguiling at him over her coffee cup. Two could play that game.
“I’m glad,” he smiled even more and infuriatingly the smile actually reached his deep grey-blue eyes.
She noted they were greyer than they had been at Netherfield then wondered why she had such a vivid memory of the colour of his eyes. Don't make a fool of yourself, Elizabeth Alexandra Bennet, even if George is lying about Charles his standards have been set by royal princesses, glamorous film actresses, and women who send their maids out to buy their ribbons.