by Lucy Tilney
“In other words, Bingley you lucky fellow!” whispered Darcy to Elizabeth as they sat together in the front pew not holding hands.
Louisa Hurst was a gracious hostess (if a few snide remarks about photographers were forgiven) and Netherfield, with snowy white tables placed the length of its long terrace, piled high with every good brunch food imaginable and champagne being poured with the liberality of lemonade, made a perfect setting for a wedding breakfast after an English country wedding.
No-one who was anyone, except Charlotte, was missing and no-one missed Caroline Bingley at all. Three Bennet cousins came, the only family her father had beside Cousin William and, for better or for worse, there was a huge contingent of Gardiners. Elizabeth rightly guessed that by the time the bride and groom left the party would be getting colourful but what Jane didn’t see couldn’t grieve her.
As for herself she was walking on air with happiness and knew she could cope with anything her mother’s large and gregarious family could produce and Darcy had promised if it all became too much (the poor man could not abandon all his refinement at once) to betake himself for a quiet Scotch in a quieter corridor of which Netherfield had plenty even with Mrs. Bennet’s nosey cousins sneaking around investigating how the other half live.
Rose Bingley had come down from York bringing in her wake a great gaggle of Bingleys from all over Yorkshire, most of whom were solid, prosperous farmers. Her sisters had come with their husbands and children mostly lawyers and accountants and knew themselves a cut above the farmers so Elizabeth made sure to introduce them all to a Gardiner of similar status from where they could goggle at baronets and millionaires while feeling comfortable with their peers.
She then comforted Louisa who was quite unnerved at seeing Mrs. Hill eating canapés instead of serving them, extricated the bishop from Uncle Horace Gardiner before the denouement of his favourite joke, saved Mr. Annesley from a theological discussion with Mary, blushed at a snippet of salacious conversation between Rose Bingley and Lydia, put Kitty in charge of keeping their father sober, and did her best to prevent Cousin William telling anyone who would listen that the reason he didn’t officiate was that he had once held a tendre for the bride (with the implication that it had been returned). And just as she began to wish Jane had had the decency to elope May Oliver handed her two glasses of champagne and told her to keep an assignation in the kitchen garden.
The kitchen garden at Netherfield was an informal, overgrown, fragrant maze and in the centre of it well shielded by an ancient apple tree sat Darcy. She laughed and offered him a glass.
“Your Miss Oliver is a nice sort,” he said, “I’ve risked both our reputations by asking her to lure you out here.”
“I’m sure our reputations will survive a tête-à-tête in the rosemary and lemon balm,” she replied, “and if they don’t there are at least three clergymen in there to lead us on the paths of righteousness. And honestly Fatty Willikins needs an occupation, do you know what he…”
But he stopped her with a kiss. And another. And another. And yet another until it occurred to her that they could be seen from one or two upstairs windows supposing anyone was in the rooms and looking out the window at precisely the right angle. They shouldn’t have been but with a houseful of Gardiners, it was impossible to feel safe.
“You looked awfully solemn in church,” she said making a decentish amount of space between them on the bench, “there was a point where one might have been forgiven for thinking you were at your friend’s funeral rather than his wedding.”
“It is the solemnisation of matrimony but I am sorry and I hope no-one else noticed. Certainly, the happy couple had eyes for none but each other so perhaps you alone had eyes for me. I was, I suppose, weighed down for a moment by the responsibility. Being a good husband and a good father is certainly not something to be enterprised lightly.”
Elizabeth considered how paternal he was with his companies, with Pemberley and every last man, woman, and child on the estate, with Georgiana, with Anne, and how easily he had taken over care of Annette. She wondered if she - who was at least up to this point, independent - could be much of a responsibility compared to a sister with a chronic disorder, a cousin with a blighted life, and a niece who stole Lloyd George’s top hat.
“You - and our children should we be blessed - will be the greatest responsibility of my life. I hope I will be yours. I’m afraid, my darling, between finding out what my father did to Annette and… something I heard recently from a friend I feel exceedingly despondent and I can’t shake it which is why I arrived with Georgiana in that silly yellow car she had shipped over from the States. If it hadn't been for her I might still be sitting in my dressing room.”
The fact was, and he had long since admitted it to himself but still found it hard to fully understand, that he could not live without her and the idea of letting her down in any way at all was terrifying him more than anything had ever done.
She nudged him, “Well, I’m glad you’re not still sitting in your dressing room. Please stop looking so severe.”
He leaned in close to her, “Shall we ask Jane and Charles if we can make our announcement after they leave? I’d like to see your ring on your finger. I can go to your father immediately.”
“I think so,” she replied.
“But, Elizabeth, we must be in absolute control of this. The thought of your mother…”
She stood up as he did and put her head on his shoulder nuzzling into his neck, “The thought of my mother… yes, my love, I understand. As for my father if you were to go to him now and relieve him of whatever Bingley or baronet or racehorse owner he’s making small talk with he will love you forever.”
Darcy grinned but before he could release her Charles burst through the lavender hedge.
“What’s going on here? Unhand my sister, sir!”
“Are you off then, Charles?”
Charles nodded looking like the Cheshire Cat, “I have a bride to corral and a liner to catch,” he said, “have you any idea where Jane might be, Lizzy?”
Elizabeth volunteered to help Charles find Jane and as the three of them reached the house she gently shooed Darcy in the direction of her father who had been pinned into a corner by Uncle Jeremiah Bingley and Cousin Alfred Gardiner both of whom wanted to know what the Labour Government was going to do about wool prices.
Jane was found in a coze with Aunt Florence who had been explaining certain things Phoebe had been too delicate for.
“I am not at all sure,” murmured ‘poor Jane’ as she was rescued what that was all about but I am sure, Lizzy and Charles, why Aunt Florence and Uncle Arnold don’t have children!”
Within the hour Jane appeared at the foot of the stairs in her going-away ensemble. Charles made another speech thanking everyone he could possibly think of. The bouquet was thrown and caught by Sir Reginald who announced loudly he was not bally well doing that again and insisted on a repetition. The second time it was more satisfactorily thrown at Kitty who cheered up after having spent the entire day sulking because she was not a bridesmaid after having refused to be one. And finally, amidst all the tears, laughter, tipsy jokes, and repeated congratulations a magnificent Rolls Royce swished Jane off to the first stage of a very happy life.
Professor Bennet waited until the furore had died down and the band had struck up before ushering Elizabeth into the morning room to the annoyance of his three spinster cousins who had sneaked in their wine and cake to gossip about Netherfield Park in the ‘old days’ and re-vent their feelings about Gilbert marrying ‘that vulgar girl’.
“What on earth, Lizzy?” he demanded as the trio of elderly Miss Bennets scuttled out, “Are you out of your mind? He is rich to be sure but the last I heard you found him insufferably proud and arrogant.”
“This is a poor start. I wanted to tell you myself but I didn’t want my mother to know because it would steal Jane’s thunder. Then he insisted on doing it now.”
She slumped in an armchair and wished for the
champagne they’d left under the apple tree but, honestly, what was she coming to if she needed Dutch courage to talk to her own father?
“Of course, if you love him…” Gilbert was pacing now and he suited anxiety as well as he did his morning dress, “if you really love him, of course, you have my consent not that you need it. But Lizzy, for all his wealth and yachts and great houses, he is still a proud, arrogant, Tory.”
Elizabeth said no politics. Gilbert ratched things up a notch.
“He reached the zenith of his classical career in prep school! I had to ask him to leave my Byzantine theology classes back in… whenever it was. Dear God, Lizzy, his Greek is the sort that can order a cup of coffee in Athens!”
“Daddy,” she said, straightening his lapel and re-affixing his buttonhole which he had half stuffed in his pocket, “I admit he doesn’t share our politics, well, not all of them, you might be pleasantly surprised at where he is forward thinking, but he is still a human being and I think he is the loveliest one I’ve ever met and I want to spend the rest of my life with him. Please tell me you said yes.”
“I said I’d like to speak to you first but if you can assure me you are not marrying with love, oh, Lizzy do anything but that… if you can then yes. Yes with my whole heart but don’t dare tell him I remembered him. I so enjoyed pretending I didn’t have a clue who he was.”
Elizabeth stifled a snortle recalling how she had done the self-same thing meeting him in Meryton last autumn. She nodded and gently taking her father’s shoulders pointed him in the direction of a cluster of tall potted palms by the band.
“He’s in there somewhere. You left him in limbo so it’s your job to release him.”
The day ended even more beautifully than it had begun. With both Gilbert and Jane knowing Elizabeth felt officially engaged even if, in discussion with father and fiancé, they had determined to keep it from Phoebe and the Rest Of The World for another few days.
MR DARCY EXPLAINS
The letter Lydia had received at de Freville Avenue in the neat, precise female hand that was from neither Pen Harrington nor Lupin Browne was, in fact, an offer of an interview for a position. Lydia, who had little enough to offer, beyond boundless good health and a hitherto unimagined capacity for foreign languages currently expressing itself in Italian, had advertised herself as a ‘companion for a woman aged between twenty and thirty-five who doesn’t like staying at home’. And she had put it in The Lady magazine on the advice of her former headmistress who had turned out to be a better friend than Lydia ever deserved.
This letter took her to a somewhat better Cambridge tea room than The Buttery which, in view of its splendid currant buns tended to fill up with just about anybody who could afford a cup of tea, whereas the one she was poking her head into now was frequented by elderly academic wives and where wealthy undergraduates took their mothers.
Her quarry, she corrected herself, her lady was easy to spot. She had offered to wear a purple hat and from her vantage point behind a ridiculously large potted palm, she assessed it. She wouldn’t have worn such a hat herself but it was a beautiful specimen of the milliner’s art and had cost a small fortune; if she was wealthy enough to purchase a hat like that then she was wealthy enough to pay a companion, she was also young, under thirty, which was much better than forty even if Miss Paterson wouldn’t think so. The first part of the interview over (she was interviewing no matter what the lady thought) she trotted briskly forward only to stop abruptly when she recognised Mr. Tall, Dark, Handsome and Rude. Or Digby. Or Darcy. Oh, Lord.
It was too late to do anything but keep going. The ‘A. Lewis’ who had signed the letter stood up and introduced herself as Anne Lewis and her cousin, Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy. Lydia, who had hidden at Jane’s engagement party and wedding breakfast wasn’t sure whether she was supposed to know him or not but she did recognise the tall man who had lured George out of the hotel when he was supposed only to be making a telephone call at the desk.
An ‘I believe you are my brother-in-law’s friend,’ solved that problem and tea was ordered. Lydia conducted herself perfectly mostly by pretending to be Lizzy or Jane depending on the question and she got on so well with Miss Lewis that she almost forgot that Mr. Darcy was there. Miss Lewis was interested in Italy, so was Lydia. Miss Lewis liked chocolate covered marzipan, so did Lydia. Miss Lewis disliked politics and current affairs and never listened to the news on the wireless, Lydia only ever put the wireless on for the dance music and never saw a newspaper except on the floor of the budgerigar1 cage. It was a match made in Heaven just as much as if she’d married Rudolph Valentino.
An hour later she left the tea room. She adjusted her hat, well, Lizzy’s hat with the buttercups, in the window of a handy bookseller (she had always known books make excellent mirror backing) and then considering Lake Como in her near future actually went in and bought the Baedeker guide to the region. It was not her first outing in a stolen hat or was she the first girl in the family to get a job but it was the first time she had bought a book - any book - for even her textbooks had been got by her father. It was such a momentous occasion and such an investment in her future that she threw caution to the wind and spent several pennies on a bus ride home.
The aftermath of Jane’s wedding left Elizabeth in a slump. Her mother took to her bed for a week and her father fled back to his college so it was left to her, with some help from Lydia, to go back to Longbourn and divest it of its paintings to wrap them up for the man from the art dealer. Lydia flirted with him. Not the actual art dealer, that would have been bad enough, but the young man in a brown coat and flat cap who drove the van that took them away.
She then helped Lady Hurst pack and send Jane’s wedding presents to Charles’ London house and after an hour of that she would cheerfully have flirted with a young man in a flat cap herself had there been one available but there was only poor Fred Tovey, Netherfield’s dogsbody, smelling of the canal again. At the end of three days which felt like three months, she could barely believe her luck when she was alone on the Meryton to Kings Cross train clutching a Meissen Columbine that Lady Hurst had deemed too fragile for the post and waving goodbye to Granny, Kitty, Aunt Florence and Lady Lucas who had all come to see her off as if she was leaving for America never to return.
Darcy was waiting for her at Kings Cross and somehow in their embrace, she dropped the box with the Columbine.
“I know the tree they grow on,” he said with a smile, “we’ll have it replaced before dinner.”
They linked arms and walked slowly enjoying the freedoms of a busy street in a busy city. He told her about Lydia.
“Anne was considering putting an advertisement in ‘The Lady’ but your sister’s caught her eye and when she wrote and received a reply from an L. Bennet in Cambridge I encouraged it. As strange as it may be Anne is thoroughly taken with Lydia.”
‘Foreboding’ was the word for Elizabeth’s feeling but whether it was justifiable or simply based on not knowing the new Lydia who had some sense she wasn’t entirely sure. Well, the new-ish Lydia who still flirted with anything in trousers.
“I can hardly imagine Anne and Lydia roaming around Italy together,” she said.
“Oddly enough I can,” he leaned in and squeezed her arm, “I think they will complement each other well. We don’t want Lydia at Pemberley with us, do we?”
What a thought! Elizabeth was all for helping Lydia improve but preferably not at quite such close quarters.
“Then she’ll go to Italy with Anne, Ranulf will move into the dower house and run Rosings which will enable him to marry his Russian princess, Charles will buy Dovedale House barely thirty miles north of us, and we’ll all live happily ever after. Are you agreeable?”
She laughed aloud, “I only need you but, yes, that all sounds very good indeed. Have you given any thought to our wedding?”
“That’s your department,” he replied, “come on, let’s go home. As much as I like walking with you I like sitting on a sofa
with you a good deal better.”
A cab was hailed and soon they were ensconced in the morning room in Berkeley Square with a pot of coffee and a box of cakes brought from Gunter’s by a footman. The ever-discreet Robards closed the door and posted the same footman outside.
“I have a confession to make,” he said once they had removed their shoes and were comfortably arranged on what was the only truly comfortable sofa in the house, “I am, in fiscal terms at least, the new tenant of Longbourn.”
“How is that possible? Oh, Fitzwilliam, as lackadaisical as my father is I’m not sure receiving rents from his son-in-law will be acceptable even to him.”
He leaned over her and pinched the vanilla cream choux pastry he knew she wanted, “I have done it all through intermediaries. An old friend of my mother’s who has led a miserable life through no fault of her own wishes to retire to the East Anglian countryside where she grew up. She was a friend of my mothers and I thought perhaps Mary might like to move back there with her. Mrs. Neville is most agreeable to the idea. I realise Mr. and Mrs. Phillips have a commodious house but I thought Mary would prefer to be at Longbourn.”
“I am sure she would. She had to leave Ollie, that’s her cat, with Mrs. Hill as my aunt, being a childless lady of a certain age, is very fussy about her furniture. I am sure Mary will be thrilled to return to Longbourn and share it with your quiet widow. I assume she is quiet?”
“Only when not beaten at croquet,” he chuckled.
“My father has been rather curious about receiving rent for several months for an empty property.”
“Mrs. Neville has been travelling,” he said, “she decided she wanted to see something of the world having been confined to a Birmingham suburb for the past forty years.”
“I am not sure I will be able to live with such a saint,” she poured more coffee and snatched the last third of the choux bun off his plate, “I used to find you so proud, selfish, and unbearable and now I feel as if I’m engaged to some amalgam of General Booth and Francis of Assisi.”