by Lucy Tilney
“Rescue Mr. Annesley,” she said, “Miss de Bourgh has already left so he’s the only one of my friends alone there now.”
Darcy nodded, “I’ve always been sorry for him, poor fellow, I promise I’ll get him a new position. Now, let’s find Jacques and a car and get back to the airfield.”
“A car, not a motorbike, that’s a relief,” smiled Elizabeth. She was holding on to Annette for dear life, feeling her hand touch Darcy’s around the girl’s slender waist, not sure which of them was the most likely to faint. Was it even possible that she was sitting in a restaurant in France with Charles Bingley, Mr. Darcy’s long-lost sister, and Mr. Darcy himself looking so deliciously gorgeous.
Darcy lifted Elizabeth into the plane but unfortunately, it only took a second and she would have liked the feel of his hands around her waist to last. Now, at this least convenient of times, when he might well be furious with her for her part in withholding Annette’s existence from him, she had begun to understand he was exactly the man in both character and temperament who would suit her the most. She saw with perfect clarity how their different dispositions would complement and encourage each other and her heart crept into her stomach as she considered the consequences of what she had done in intending to deal with Annette’s situation herself.
Annette was soon asleep with her head on Elizabeth’s shoulder despite the rickety motion of the plane.
“I feel the most terrible fool,” said Darcy after ten minutes or so.
“You were a child,” said Elizabeth, “a child believes what the adults tell him.”
“No, I mean, I’ve been visiting Rosings since I left school hoping to help Anne and all the time my own sister was a mile or two away in far greater need of help. If I had not been such a snob and walked in the village more often and got to know the doctor or the vicar I might have found out sooner.”
“You might,” Elizabeth tenderly stroking Annette’s hair, “but Annette says it’s only this past year she has had any freedom. I suspect if you’d made a habit of wandering around Hunsford Mrs. Younge would never have let Annette out of her sight or, even more likely, your aunt would have moved them somewhere else.”
He shook his head, “My father. This had to have been his work. The very moment my poor mother died he must have seen a way to be free of Annette too.”
His jaw trembled for a second. It all made too much sense too fast. Lady Catherine dashing over to Italy instead of simply dispatching Sir Lewis to assist as she had done when her other sister died barely fifty miles away in Margate. Sir Lewis bringing him home instead of helping his father with the legalities of burials in Italy when it was Sir Lewis who spoke Italian, not Lady Catherine. Even at the time, he had wondered why his uncle was taking him home, not his aunt, but obviously, Sir Lewis was being got rid of while his wife was effectively getting rid of their niece. God, what a family! What a father, what an aunt! Perhaps he should do the world a favour and not inflict himself on a woman or introduce anymore Darcys/Fitzwilliams into the population.
The rattle and vibration of the aircraft made much more conversation impossible but when Darcy’s hand slid across the narrow aisle to rest on the same hand of Annette’s Elizabeth was holding she felt nearly ecstatic and he felt safe.
IN LADY ANNE’S GARDEN
The next morning as soon as it was light Elizabeth made her way outside to the English cottage garden Lady Anne had created in the middle of Mayfair. The cool air brushed over her face lifting a clean, earthy fragrance from the banks of silver spiky lavender, deep green hollyhocks, and flowery lupin leaves each one cradling a glittering diamond. She closed her eyes for a moment and held her face up to the fresh morning sky and felt Darcy’s lips brush lightly across her cheek.
“Do you normally go about kissing women in gardens?”
“Only if they are dryads. You are a dryad, aren’t you?”
“I would happily be a dryad if I could live in this garden. It was a lovely idea of your mother’s.”
“My mother was a second wife and as this house had been purchased just before the wedding to replace my grandfather’s townhouse which my father hated, she knew she could do as she pleased which she never would have in the old one. She was in awe of my father’s first wife who was in awe of my grandmother. It’s astonishing that we ever have anything new at all.”
“Your mother’s taste here is exquisite. Pemberley must be magnificent.”
“Thank you. It is. At least the buildings and the setting are magnificent but my mother did almost nothing to it except to have a conservatory built in the style of Syon House and as the previous Mrs. Darcy had been frightened to offend Lady Victoria, my grandmother, everything at Pemberley is the height of good taste around 1850. Alas, one of the few problems in being able to purchase the best of things is that it lasts forever so there is never a good excuse to get rid of it.”
Only a man would need an excuse, thought Elizabeth, aloud she said, “I agree the 1850s were not the most auspicious era for interior design but have pity on me, Mr. Darcy, we had things at Longbourn that had been there since it was built in 1665.”
“But these are heirlooms.”
“Oh, no, they are merely three hundred and sixty years old!”
He laughed and then sat on a stone bench surrounded by banks of glistening lavender foliage and beckoned for her to sit next to him.
“I love the scent of lavender,” he said caressing an early bloom, “sitting out here on a summer’s evening is so splendid that one could forget London and imagine oneself in Provence. What is the scent you wear? I can never quite make it out.”
“Pear’s soap,” she said with a smile, “and jasmine but it’s merely flower water I buy at the chemist so it fades quickly. My sister, Jane, loves working in the still room and if she makes it lasts longer but I have long since run out of hers.”
“I may have to ask my gardener at Pemberley about growing jasmine and the housekeeper about making the still room fit for a lady. I hope to need both in the future but, for the present, Elizabeth, let me make the apology I owe you.”
She sat very still and looked at her hands clasped against the pale green linen of her dress.
“I am going to say perhaps the most unromantic thing a man has ever said to a girl in a garden,” he whispered bending so that his face almost touched her hair and little frissons of expectation danced along the nerves at the back of her neck, “I wish I could exchange Lady Catherine for Mrs. Phillips.”
She wanted the moment never to end but… Aunt Florence?
“What did you say?”
“I…” he began.
Elizabeth slipped her hand into his and drew it on to her lap. She wondered what the etiquette column in ‘Twenty’ would have to say about that. His hand on her thigh or hers on his but was too late. It was done. She looked at their hands entwined, hers pale and elegant with one little pearl ring and his strong and brown with tiny calluses suggesting some practical interest. She was glad of that because for some reason she could not name she could not thrill to a man who spent his whole life indoors with a ledger no matter how handsome.
“Does this mean…” he looked at their hands tightening his a little, “that you might reconsider the feelings you had in February? Mine are unchanged. I want you in my life for all of my life and the only alteration I can make to my declaration is that I no longer want to waste time waiting for my family to come around. What a fool I was to ever think that way!”
“It was unromantic of you, almost as unromantic as mentioning our aunts just now, but I was the fool. I mistook, misunderstood, and misinterpreted on a colossal scale. I am utterly ashamed of myself.”
He moved closer to her and any worries she had had about her hand on his thigh took second place to the fact that their thighs were now touching that if her heart wasn’t thumping so furiously she would have been quite convinced there was no more of her than thigh.
“You had every reason to misunderstand and therefore you didn�
��t misinterpret. It simply did not occur to me until far too long afterwards to comprehend how you saw things regarding Lady Claire. I was so used to ignoring my aunt’s ambition for me to marry her goddaughter that I simply didn’t realise that you thought I was morally engaged to her and therefore asking you for a clandestine relationship.”
“I saw you with her once, at least I think it was her, talking closely on the steps of All Saints’, Margaret Street.”
He nodded, “We needed a quiet place. I saw you too, with the receptionist from your office, you were carrying cake boxes. Claire was telling me she is happiest on the estate in Norfolk breeding horses and shooting unfortunate pheasants. She won’t give up the estate and she won’t marry unless she can find someone who loves it as much as she does which would exclude a man with an estate of his own. I was kindly put in my place and I cannot tell you how much of a relief it was.”
Elizabeth blushed, “I was so absolutely prejudiced against you that I was capable of believing anything. I took a dislike to the way you conducted yourself at the Meryton dance, I chose to forget that Charles is a grown man responsible for his own decisions, I believed you were oppressing Georgiana and, worst of all, I believed all of George Wickham’s tripe. I, who earn my living advising young women on how to find their way about life.”
He paused. He could not fault her for listening to George Wickham. She had known him a lot longer and met him under more auspicious circumstances. He may even have been a sincere friend, up to a point. He knew George was not bad but so weak that he might as well have been bad. He stopped thinking long enough to drink in Elizabeth’s gold-tinged hazel eyes, thank God he had met her when he did, he had been given good principles but allowed to follow them in ignorance which had lately developed into conceit and his family was full of examples of how that grew into middle-age and beyond. He gave an involuntary shudder. It had been worse for George, his mother had died giving birth to his sister who had been sent away to one aunt and then his father had died and George was given into the care of another aunt who, while a decent woman in herself, was not capable of raising a boy.
“You often appear in two minds about your father,” she said tentatively.
“As you are about your mother,” he smiled.
She smiled back, “Yes, my mother means well but she made an unequal marriage and it has tried her terribly.”
He nodded, “My father was a good man who was so consumed by being a Darcy and being responsible for Pemberley that he never learned to know himself. He married his first wife, Katy Ellington Fisher, an American mining heiress simply on the principle that Pemberley might need an extra million one day but I doubt he ever loved her. She died in a riding accident and he married my mother barely two years later because she was a renowned beauty while the woman he probably ought to have married in the first place remained a spinster. He simply never realised she loved him. He was far too busy being the master of Pemberley.”
Elizabeth’s tears welled up. She was becoming soppy like the heroine of a popular magazine serial and she loved it.
“I’m sorry. I’m snuffling on your suit,” she said.
He held her a little closer, “Snuffle away, firstly, I have more suits than I can count and, secondly, I’m quite sure Sibley will enjoy the challenge of removing tear stains from the lambswool.”
He smiled ruefully, “Dearest, loveliest Elizabeth, if I hadn’t been so damnably proud and unable to imagine that a woman could say no to me we might have resolved it all just as amicably long ago. As it was although my parents instilled in me good principles they also taught me to think too highly of myself. My brother did what he could but he was at school and then in the army in India. I reached the age I am now an insufferable creature and would have well on the way to approaching old age like my aunt if not for you. When you told me you would not have me if I was the last man on earth you brought me to my senses as nothing else ever has. Your words, no thank you, Mr. Darcy echoed in my brain until I was forced to take stock of myself.”
“You never could be like your aunt,” she said with a blush remembering how she had thought that exact thing.
He slipped his hand in hers and looked up at the house before speaking.
“Aunt Catherine was not always as she is today. She was a handsome girl and well educated. Sir Lewis too was quite a catch. He was older than her and had been resisting English debutantes and American heiresses for twenty years when they met. Unfortunately, after Anne was born my aunt became increasingly obsessed with lineage which eventually led to her inane theories about race. I could so easily have become like her although I hope not in ways that make a mockery of science and morals but, nevertheless, I was on the way to making pride the lode-star of my life. I was even toying with the idea of marrying Claire de Bourgh for her background regardless of her feelings and I did feel myself to be your social superior, you were more than right to refuse me.”
Elizabeth’s blush deepened, “Please do not remind me of what I said then. I am now so anxious to forget it.”
“Then it is forgotten. But tell me, are your feelings the same? My desires are the same, the only difference is that I now owe you an immeasurable debt for finding my dear sister.”
“My feelings,” she said, resting her head on his shoulder, “are so utterly, utterly different. I cannot tell you how different.”
“Does that mean you will become Mrs. Darcy?”
“I will.”
BERKELEY SQUARE
One morning as they shared coffee and pastries in their spot by the lavender she tentatively broached the subject of his niece.
“Georgiana,” he repeated rubbing his temples the way Jane did after a particularly gruelling session with their mother's nerves, “all Georgiana wants is to get back to India to her Mr. Kumar.”
“Rose Kumar was her nom de plume. Is Mr. Kumar someone she’s in love with?”
Darcy groaned frightening off a couple of sparrows who had come to share their breakfast, “She was fifteen when she left India, darling. Mr. Kumar, or to give him his real name, Oliver Lennox, is the son of a prosperous Anglo-Indian lawyer. His great-grandfather was Scottish, his cousins live in Edinburgh, and educate their sons and Glenalmond and St Andrews. I am sure he is an excellent young man but I doubt he plans to marry Georgiana, shake off the shackles of empire, and live for democracy, pacifism, and equality somewhere called Real India.”
She felt free to graze his ear-lobe, “Real India?”
“It only exists in the imagination of an over-privileged girl who has seen little beyond her grandfather’s palace and the gilded drawing rooms of the Raj. If she sees a slightly ragged child on the road in Lambton she cries, can you imagine her in the streets of Delhi?”
Elizabeth, whose experience of overwrought adolescent girls far exceeded her fiancé's, shook her head. Even Jane had never been that soft and Georgiana who had brains, money, and energy in heaps ought to be putting it all to better use. For a moment the old resentment against her father for his inability to manage money and her mother for her prejudices washed over her and she recalled Lady Catherine saying if she had been born a generation later she would have gone to Oxford. If I had been born to parents with an ounce of fiscal sense I would have gone to Oxford too, oh Lord, deep breath.
“Darling?” Darcy tipped her chin up with a finger, “Are you quite well?”
“I was thinking of what Jane and I would have done with a fraction of Georgiana’s money, to be honest. She’s a capable girl and there ought to be a good and useful profession in her future. Why don’t you take her to India for a twentieth birthday treat, I’m sure her grandparents would be grateful, but tell her she must apply herself to study afterwards? In fact, make her apply to university before.”
“I have considered something of the kind but she has become too predictably unpredictable of late. The only thing I can be sure of is that she will act in whatever way she can to exasperate me to the utmost and things are unlikely to work out
according to plan once in India. Georgiana was no more to Oliver Lennox than a little girl who was also the granddaughter of his father’s most valuable client. He no doubtless played a couple of games of tennis with her, lent her a few books, and unwittingly made her feel terribly important in the way that a young man can with an adolescent girl.”
Elizabeth winkled the apricot out of her pastry, “What can I do?”
He shrugged, “I am at my wits’ end. Apart from the brilliant idea of eloping with George, she goes to the Kit Kat Club and dashes around town with the so-called ‘bright set’. Or more specifically half a dozen brainless girls who call themselves the Kit Kat Kittens who go on scavenger hunts chasing each around London in cabs, buses, and the tube collecting or, more accurately stealing, various items and vying to see who is first or who can take the most ridiculous risks. The last time it was Lloyd George’s top hat and after the subterfuge involved in my valet returning it to his valet I suppose I am only grateful it was not his moustache.”
This was said without a trace of humour so Elizabeth smiled and nudged him until he did too, “We're only young once,” she said, despite never having been on so much as a chase across Meryton on a bicycle.
“The problem, my darling, is what happens between being young and growing up. It isn't innocent if we include drunken parties, cocaine, and the likelihood of eventually waking up in a strange bed.”
Elizabeth blanched and he continued glumly, “Shortly after the Wickham debacle she glued a knitted moustache to the portrait of Queen Victoria in Lambton Town Hall. I returned from smoothing things over with the local police inspector, a stiff-necked fellow and Wickham’s cousin of all things, to find the housekeeper in a state because there was a photograph of her on the front of ‘The Confidential Companion’ kissing Lady Lucy Keppel in a fountain in Kensington Gardens which is the second time she’s got herself in that rag. When I asked her why she thought that was a clever thing to do she threatened to marry our cousin Leopold who is, as much as it pains me to say, proof that even Darcys are descended from amoebae.”