4
The Master of Pemberley Is Displeased
Mr. Darcy’s lips were further pursed (were that humanly possible) by another undertaking. This one was required of him by his patriarchal duty. It did not lend the same astonishment of the one gifted to him by his wife, but it still took him quite unawares.
***
No sooner had he settled into his new role of fatherhood and begun to bask in its glow, he was informed that it was imperative that arrangements be set in place for a wedding for his sister, Georgiana, and their cousin, Col. Geoffrey Fitzwilliam. As his glower suggested, the specific nature of this event invited Mr. Darcy’s most severe indignation. This abhorrence, however, did not fall to any inherent dislike for his sister’s intended groom. Indeed, Col. Fitzwilliam was one of the few men he deemed worthy of Georgiana’s hand. His displeasure was not because of the haste of the nuptials, but owing to the delicate condition in which Georgiana would be taking them.
Indeed, the same injured expression gifted to Darcy’s countenance by reason of his newly apportioned bed was duplicated upon learning of his sister’s indecorous indisposition. So great was his distaste for this particular brotherly duty, his aspect was further aggrieved by the adornment of gritted teeth. This was not without due cause, for he believed himself additionally abused in that his sister had been compromised under his very nose.
Her deflowerment had undoubtedly come about during their summer’s quarantine on the Continent. Their party had consisted solely of himself, Georgiana, and Col. Fitzwilliam. The colonel had been grievously wounded in a battle near Quatre Bas, Georgiana his dedicated caretaker. Indeed, her entire reason for absconding after his regiment had been to look after him were he wounded. It had been inevitable that the foetid army hospital where Georgiana had nursed Fitzwilliam would beget disease. Regrettably, Darcy had been unsuccessful in expediting their return to England before a general quarantine had been mounted throughout the region. They had been quite isolated by the threat of plague, abiding in a vacant cottage with borrowed servants. At the time he had thought the delay egregious—fraught as he was with anxiety to see his loved ones safely home.
It galled him still to realise that he had left his wife to chase halfway across Belgium to rescue his sister from the gates of hell, when she had flitted off on a romantic adventure, thinking herself in love with Fitzwilliam. Darcy had been furiously worried for her safety when she left and furiously relieved when he found her amidst all the chaos. Her behaviour had been so indecorous that he had been beside himself with reproach, yet so unconditionally happy to find her safe that he had been unable to bring himself to chastise her with the proper vehemence. Seldom did he redress himself, but hindsight saw he should have extended a rebuke—for thereafter her conduct did not improve. He gave not a fig if she called herself a nurse—the familiarity with which she tended to Fitzwilliam was unseemly. He had disapproved of her engaging in her nursing activities even when exacted upon the ill inhabiting Pemberley’s lands. But due to the seriousness of Fitzwilliam’s condition, Darcy had always held greater concern for her sensibilities than her virtue. He could not stop from snorting contemptuously at the realisation that his beloved sister’s deflowerment was a fait accompli whilst he strode about worrying for their very lives.
He had been compleatly unaware of their intimacy throughout their stay on the Continent and journey home. To be so compleatly insensible of what had clearly come to pass between them was a considerable blow to the ego of one who believed himself most wise in the ways of the world. It was Elizabeth who had the unhappy task of enlightening him to just how solicitous Georgiana’s care of Fitzwilliam had been. Not only was Darcy incensed to have been so compleatly duped, he was of the opinion that having one’s sister ruined was good reason to call the colonel out. That Fitzwilliam’s blood was not spilt was due only to Elizabeth’s earnest intervention—and undoubtedly, her insistent reminder that due to Fitzwilliam’s situation as an invalid, Georgiana had hardly been coerced.
Uncertain whether or not that was a comfort, Darcy grudgingly gave his blessing to the union.
There were far more sombre matters that attended Darcy’s homecoming than scandalous liaisons. Darcy learnt of the death of Elizabeth’s father, not from her, but in a private moment with Jane. His countenance darkened at the news, but he only consoled Jane perfunctorily. It was a lapse she ignored, for it was apparent that his thoughts had already returned to Elizabeth. Jane watched him as he stood silent for a moment before entering her bedchamber. Although Jane knew he needed a moment to collect himself, she did not fear he would not find words of comfort. He had experienced the loss of his own esteemed father and knew just how deeply Elizabeth must be injured by such the untimely death of hers.
His peek into the room saw her asleep but stirring. Although he crept quietly, she opened her eyes and turned to him. He knelt beside her and took her hand. The smile that had begun to overspread her face faded. However unintentional, his aspect betrayed that he knew of what sadness had come to pass.
“So,” she said with finality.
To be spared the necessity of telling him was her only consolation. She had dreaded that. As the painful recollection revisited her, tears filled her eyes and she turned away.
“My heart is heavy for you, Lizzy,” said he, smoothing her hair with tender care.
She wanted to respond, to offer him words of reassurance, but she had a catch in her throat that made it impossible to utter a sound. So choked was she, that she feared any attempt to speak would have her break into huge gulping sobs. Indeed, she dared not look at her husband’s face, fearing that too would send her into uncontrolled weeping. Her bereavement was not new. It was self-indulgent to suffer so deeply still. Her husband had not been home a day. Her husband’s happy homecoming should not fall victim to her own disorder. With that silent vow, her chin began to quiver and she knew keeping her countenance was lost. Hence, she gave way to the weep that was determined to have its way with her. She withdrew her hand from his and covered her face in a vain attempt to hide her distress.
Knowing that she sought to spare him her hurt, he drew her into his embrace. Pressing her tearstained face against his neck, he kissed the top of her head.
“Shush, dearest Lizzy, pray do not weep,” he murmured. “I am here. I am here.”
That reminder gave more consolation than any other she might have imagined. Directly, her tears ceased. She did not, however, give up her place against his chest and from thence she told the entire history of her father’s death and those sorrowful days that followed. Common thought was to discourage the bereaved from lamenting a death in detail, but Darcy decided then to be of a different mind. Clearly, Elizabeth had pent up her wretchedness for some time. He thought it best to allow her to have her say and did not endeavour to quiet her again. He petted her and soothed her until at last, spent of emotion, she slept. He was happy to be home and to have the employment of chief consoler. He was happy too that office was aided by the two small nestlings whose constant care demanded she not surrender to melancholy. Although he believed the timing of their newborns a godsend, he knew better than to make any insipid platitudes upon the transference of life.
That truism was quite evident.
Thrust into this melange of despair and beatitude was news of quite another sort. For word had arrived too of the supposed battlefield casualty of George Wickham, the scoundrel husband of Elizabeth’s sister Lydia. This information, however, occasioned a feigned bereavement that was very nearly as oppressive as had it been real. All this equivocatory posing sent the Darcys’ barely tethered sensibilities reeling to such a degree that they were eventually rendered again upright.
A reinstatement of his equilibrium was essential for Darcy to embark upon a reckoning of a peculiar type. This duty was less conspicuous than any other, even covert, but of no less importance. It was a surreptitious trip to Kent that he embarked upon one day not long afte
r his return. In that Darcy was a man who held matters of family in the highest of regard, his intention to levy an unequivocal threat upon his cursed aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh was a weighty one indeed. Although his mother’s sister, Lady Catherine had been responsible for distress to his wife, an injury Darcy put higher than any other.
Although this too was long in coming, it would not have come to pass in so timely a fashion had his aunt not threatened Elizabeth with eviction from Pemberley had he not returned. He seldom found himself suffering a misjudgement, but he believed keeping his own counsel on what provisions he had made for Elizabeth had been a mistake. Clearly, if he had not gone so far as to make Elizabeth aware of that which pertained to her well-being, it was unreasonable to expect his aunt to be. It was a lesson he learnt well. In face of the deaths their family had weathered of late, he observed how very quickly the pale horse of death could overtake anyone, regardless of the eminence of one’s circumstance. It was imperative to bring his aunt to heel. He had to remind her that it was not she who stood at their family’s helm.
“The long habit of living does not lend us indisposed for dying,” he reminded himself on that singular trip to Rosings Park.
Darcy had been apprised beforehand of his trip that a retaliation of sorts had been issued at the time of offence. It was but a small one, granted, but one that was exacted at great injury to such a proud woman. Had Elizabeth not confided to him about the particulars of her confrontation with Lady Catherine, his actually doing her bodily harm might still have been a temptation. But as it happened, Elizabeth, although alone and with child, was not without her own defences. Indeed, in protection of herself and her unborn, Mrs. Darcy discharged a cautionary pistol shot in Lady Catherine’s direction. Although the primary victim was only the ostrich plume in her ladyship’s bonnet, the intent of the shot was met. Either through the agency of an intimate look down the muzzle of Elizabeth’s pistol or its deafening reverberation, her ladyship had added to the insult of unmitigated fright that of an unfortunate fit of incontinence.
As his aunt’s chastening was compleat and the carpet long burnt, Darcy was in want of only one further commination. With the low voice that only considerable umbrage can engage, he advised his aunt that was she again to trouble his wife, he would see to it that she would find herself trussed and bound, and fast on her way to becoming the newest inmate in the Lyme Institute for the Indigent Insane.
She was most unamused at the notion, but of this, he was unaware. Before she thought to shut her gaping jaw, he was back on his horse and homeward bound.
5
Seduction of the Willing
It was pleasantly warm for so early in the day and the sun had by then worn away the morning dew. Therefore, lying in the grass beneath a small stand of trees, wearing no more than a knee-length linen smock, Mrs. Darcy had no complaint of the air or the damp. Indeed, well above a month after the rigours of childbirth, Elizabeth could not think of a single obstacle to mar the exquisiteness of the moment. She was quite happy to resituate the pair of breeches that she had rolled into makeshift pillow and bask in what was a supreme contentment. She looked lazily up through the swaying branches of a particularly handsome specimen of Spanish chestnut. After a moment, she became aware of an intermittent glare caused by sunlight playing peek-a-boo through the leaves. It bid her use the back of her hand as a shield. She closed one eye and covered the other with her right hand, first widening and then narrowing her fingers to create a sort of simplistic kaleidoscope. Only then did she realise that she had been humming.
“Darcy,” said she.
“Mmmm,” he replied.
There was nothing that she was actually in want of inquiring of him. She simply sought reassurance that he had not fallen asleep. His response suggested that had he not been actually dozing off, it had been a contemplation.
It had been within the first few months of her marriage that she had come to understand that amorous congress begged sleep of her husband. As well-intentioned and considerate a lover as he was, she chose to believe that need to be a masculine inevitability quite beyond his regulation rather than to claim it as an insult against her company. Moreover, as his drowsiness came upon the heels of his rendering her unto the throes of exhilarating rapture, she thought it only fitting that she conceded him a rest. Occasionally, however, either playfulness or caprice would provoke her to rouse him.
This day she did not feel particularly impish, but she had just been the grateful recipient of those extraordinary attentions that turn up the corners of a woman’s mouth and she was still feeling its after-glow. Her spirits in high flutter, she could not quite allow herself to leave him in peace. Perchance that was because their voluptuous connection had been over almost before it began. She could not fault their ardour for being so inflamed, for their separation had been so lengthy that their anticipation was excited beyond all reason. Regardless, she could not quite surrender to that male proclivity for post-coital sleep with magnanimity when it countered her own predisposition so decidedly. Thus, she eyed him closely to determine if it might be necessary to call his name again.
They had come to this coppice by her design. She admitted freely that she had nothing less in mind than an outright seduction (if, indeed, a person quite willing to be taken advantage of could consider himself seduced). Although it was she who lured him, by the time they arrived, just who was the governor of whose libido was unclear.
The spot was idyllic for a tryst. It had been a favourite destination upon languid afternoons as she and Darcy rode stirrup to stirrup across the vast park that surrounded Pemberley. It was not unusual for them to dismount in this particularly secluded dale, for the surrounding trees with low-hanging limbs afforded ample privacy. Although the very act of turning in that direction made it a given that they would linger, the precise cue would be when she let go her reins and began to remove the pins that anchored her hat. He would throw one long leg over the pommel of his saddle and drop to the ground, then, with gentlemanly care, allow her to slide from her horse into his outstretched arms. She could not be certain (and knew it to be unlikely, even chimerical to think it), but she hoped it was upon one of these rendezvous that she had been brought with child.
She had not ridden a horse since giving birth, but she thought it only fitting that she and Darcy revisit this bucolic (perhaps historical) setting to sate those passionate longings that had been forced by nature and happenstance into frustration. He had been so adamant that she keep to her room if not her bed, to greet him on horseback was the most conspicuous announcement that she could devise to prove to him her nether-regions were quite willing and able for a turn of another kind as well.
It had been a long, arduous trek to regain some semblance of normalcy. The single obstacle in his return to her side being the most rhapsodic moment of her life was the unhappy mischance that it occurred at the very culmination of her lying-in. Of life’s many travails, few left one’s appearance more compromised than childbirth. It may have been an abominable conceit to be concerned for such a triviality, but she knew that her ordeal left her more than a mite dishevelled. She had dreamt and meditated on every possible aspect of their reunion, but no scenario included her looking a fright. It was, she supposed, to her great fortune she had the two most beautiful infants ever born to mankind to distract him from her lack of comeliness.
Although the very sight of him inflamed her passionate regard most decidedly, she had been so weak the notion of libidinous commingling was not entertained. In the next few weeks as her strength returned, her emotions flew about quite without regulation. One day it was all she could do not to leap upon her husband’s virile figure and smother him with her wifely inclinations, the next she was full of nothing but motherly devotion. There was no greater indication of her changeability than her initial impetuous promise never to allow either child to leave her side. Ere long, sleep deprivation drove her to reconsider. The thought of time
with her husband unattended by infant or nurse had not been the driving force behind this alteration, but it was an unintended windfall. Or at least should have been. For a shared bed, in cases such as these, did not promise connubial reward—particularly when one occupant not only slept intermittently but was so wretchedly sore that the very thought of physical congress was abhorrent.
Initially, so intense were her maternal inclinations that she feared they might compleatly usurp her womanly ones. In due time, as her body healed, so did her sensibilities. She began to take notice of her handsome husband lying beside her each night and watch with admiration as he arose from their bed each morn. He kissed her quite soundly, but made no other attempt at intimacy. To forgo more than affectionate nuzzling was becoming increasingly difficult. As was to be expected, time influenced maternal affection and marital ardour to find harmony within her increasingly lustful breast. Ever more frequently she had found herself gazing lovingly down at her infants only to have her thoughts invaded by recollection of those amorous acts from which they were created. She had begun to recall those deeds with unsettling regularity. But with the same unsettling regularity, her husband kissed her upon the forehead and bid her goodnight, seemingly unaware of the hand that she shamelessly allowed to linger upon his person. If he did not take a hint, she concluded that it was necessary that she make an overture that could not be misunderstood.
This was precisely the course that brought them to be lying side by side in the middle of a glen in the middle of the morning—in decided déshabillé.
For all her mooning and dreaming of how she might lure him, the specifics had all been done quite on impulse. Had she given it more thought, it was doubtful she would have kept her nerve long enough to come to him beneath the window wearing a riding habit that included a pair of his breeches that she had pilfered from his garderobe. They were a pair of knee-pants, hence the length suited her but she had fashioned a belt about the waist to keep them up. She had little defence for choosing such attire (she did not admit to the desire to astonish him) beyond that it enabled her to sit not side-saddle, but astride Boots. If one were to race, a better seat was imperative. And it was a race that she sought both to engage in and to win. But to lure him, she had to catch him unawares. Hence, not long after dawn one morning she came below the window of their bedchamber. He was used to her arising at odd hours to tend to the babies whilst he still lay fast asleep. She had attempted to awaken him by employing a little-used whistle, but it was so feeble she had to resort to calling out to actually awaken him.
Darcy & Elizabeth Page 3