Pride / Prejudice

by Ann Herendeen

  “Very well,” Fitz said. “It was not nice in the least. It was horrid. It was hot, crowded, dreary, noisy—and noisome.”

  “You mean it stank?” Charles was diverted. “Now you’re teasing. Explain yourself.”

  Fitz stretched his long limbs on the bed, artfully displaying the beginning of tumescence over the curve of a muscular thigh. “Come here, you provoking creature, and I’ll explain at length.”

  Charles let his arms fall to his sides, and his mouth drooped. He was not hard—a disturbing and unwelcome development. “You know, Fitz, I’ve been wondering if we’re getting too old for this.”

  Something pierced Fitz’s heart, and it wasn’t Cupid’s arrow. He willed himself into control. “What do you mean, my dear?” he asked.

  “Surely I don’t have to recite your lessons back to you,” Charles said. “This. Us. All that Achilles-and-Patroclus, Damon-and-Piteous stuff you talk about.”

  “Pythias,” Fitz corrected. “What is it, Charles? Do you doubt my feelings for you?”

  “No, never,” Charles said. “But Fitz, you always called it a youthful love.” He paused, looking down at himself, as if the question had arisen within his body, in his chest, covered with silky hair, or his slim waist with its trail of that same dark hair leading to the dense thatch at his crotch. When he spoke again, his words tumbled out in a nervous rush. “That beautiful girl tonight. Miss Bennet. She made me think that maybe it’s time for me to put aside childish things.”

  Fitz took several breaths and counted to ten, then to twenty and backward to one. “I see,” he said, when he had his voice so modulated that his desire to commit brutal murder did not leak through. “A scheming, mercenary female, who from the look of her is on the cusp of becoming an old maid, finds that Providence has dropped a handsome, unattached young man with a considerable fortune into her sphere. Even before her first dance with this savior is finished, she has so poisoned her innocent victim’s mind with thoughts of matrimony that he—”

  “Stop it!” Charles shouted. “Just stop it! It’s not amusing in the least.” He strode to the door, yanked it open with such force that he almost struck himself in the face, remembered he was naked and slammed it shut again. “Just let me find my dressing gown and I’ll leave you to your poisonous thoughts.”

  Fitz had already risen to the occasion. He wrapped Charles in a strong embrace, pressing what was left of his by now dwindling erection against his friend’s equally flaccid member. “My dear,” he whispered. “My dearest, sweet man. Forgive me. I think only of you, of your welfare. You know I never wish to hurt you.”

  Charles tried to free himself but was no match for Fitz’s strength. “Let me go, Darcy,” he said. His voice was icy, as Fitz had never heard it.

  Fitz released Charles and stepped back, as one does instinctively from attack. “Please, Charles,” he said. “Let’s not quarrel over this.”

  “It’s too late,” Charles said. “We already have. Haven’t we?”

  “Not if we don’t allow a trivial exchange to enlarge into a disagreement,” Fitz said. “Whatever I said was meant in kindness to you. And I humbly and deeply apologize for any unintended affront to your beautiful Miss Bennet.” This time his voice shook with the lie, but it worked to his advantage.

  “Oh, Fitz,” Charles said, remorse flooding him at last. “You know I can never stay angry with you.” He lay down on the bed.

  Hallelujah! Fitz thought, blasphemously and with Low Church vulgarity.

  “She is lovely, though, isn’t she?”

  “What?” Fitz’s hand was involuntarily arrested on its path to Charles’s lovely thick cock.

  “Miss Bennet. Isn’t she the most beautiful lady you’ve ever seen? And do you want to hear what’s even better?”

  “Please,” Fitz said, the last vestige of arousal draining from him like bilge from a beached ship’s hold. “I’m all aquiver with curiosity.”

  “She has the sweetest disposition of any woman I’ve ever known,” Charles replied, oblivious to any sarcasm.

  “She would, naturally,” Fitz muttered, but softly, so Charles heard nothing of the words.

  “Let me tell you everything she said,” Charles said, nestling into Fitz’s arms, resting his head on Fitz’s shoulder as if they had already fucked themselves into exhaustion instead of having stopped everything dead from some sort of willful perversity.

  “Yes, do,” Fitz said. “Tell me everything.” He might as well get it over with, he thought, giving the night up for lost. Dawn was almost here anyway, and they’d have only a precious couple of hours of sleep. Pity what little time they had was wasted on hearing that, amazing as it seemed, this aging country maiden was possessed of every virtue and free of every vice.

  In the end, Charles allowed Fitz one quick romp before snuffing out the candle, but it was an unsatisfying, hasty business, and Fitz was so discomposed by the insipid narration preceding it that it turned into a dry bob instead of the real thing. He could tell Charles’s heart and soul were far away, across the meadows in the neighboring village of Longbourn, where this damnable Miss Bennet was no doubt lying equally chastely in her sister’s arms and enumerating dear Charles’s considerable and genuine good qualities…

  Which was what led to his body’s failure, Fitz realized later. The sister’s beautiful eyes had intruded on his mental vision just at what should have been the height of pleasure. Fitz imagined her watching him, those innocent but wise orbs staring unblinking while he groaned and sweated over Charles’s firm buttocks, and he lost whatever meager strength he had regained.

  “Never mind, love,” Charles said. “It’s late. You’re tired, that’s all.”

  “Yes,” Fitz agreed, taking the path of least resistance. “But I am sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” Charles said, stroking Fitz’s damp hair back from his high brow. “It’s only what I said before. We’re too old for this.”

  This time the voice in Fitz’s brain rang its clarion warning, unmistakable: Get out now. Take Charles and get away.

  He gave thanks every day since that he hadn’t listened.

  Two

  UNFORTUNATELY FOR FITZ’S resolve, the situation improved, in a dangerous but subtle way that left him completely unguarded. Over the next several weeks, the gentlemen of Netherfield and the ladies of Longbourn came into frequent but public association—dinners, card parties, and the like—in which any sort of private conversation was impossible. Charles’s continued praise of Miss Bennet grew tiresome, verging on the insupportable, but as it was all based on so insubstantial a foundation Fitz didn’t attempt to argue his friend out of what could only be hardened into obstinacy by opposition; so fragile a structure would crumble easily enough on its own once the chance at greater intimacy was achieved and the lady’s shallow character was exposed.

  This occasion arose unexpectedly. Fitz, with Charles and his brother-in-law, Mr. Hurst, had gone to dine with the newly arrived officers of the local militia. Fitz had been greatly looking forward to this outing, a chance to spend an informal evening in the company of men, no need to watch his every word—and, if he was very lucky indeed, he might find someone compatible, more than likely in the all-male world of the military, a surrogate for Charles when he was in one of his moods, which were becoming increasingly frequent. Not that there could be a substitute for love. But for mere sport, what harm in that?

  The ladies, left to themselves, and indulging their brother in his partiality, invited the eldest Miss Bennet to dinner, and what must the bitch do but travel on horseback, uncovered during autumn rain, and deliberately, as it seemed, catch cold?

  It would be inhuman to send her home—even Fitz was forced to admit that—and the next day her sister felt obligated to see how the invalid was doing. And that’s when the trouble began.

  The woman walked—walked—the entire three miles, through the mud and dirt, residue of the rain that had laid her sister low. She tripped daintily into the breakfast parlor, her eye
s bright, her delicate complexion rosy and translucent. Fitz was aware not only of her face but of her body, her chest expanding and contracting with deep breaths, so slender and light she could be a boy. But no boy had such trim ankles, or little budding breasts with those sharp peaks of nipples pointing through the thin muslin of her gown; and no boy could look so graceful in the damp folds of drapery; and no boy had ever smelled quite like that…

  “Did you see her petticoat?” Louisa Hurst exclaimed in glee after Elizabeth Bennet had been directed upstairs to her sister’s chamber.

  “My dear!” Caroline Bingley replied. “Six inches deep in mud. And her shoes!”

  “Sweating like a plow horse,” Louisa said.

  “Louisa, Caroline.” Charles, his courage steeled by first love, dared to admonish his formidable sisters. “Miss Elizabeth’s concern for her sister, if nothing else, demands our admiration, not our censure.”

  Caroline, not at all chastened, turned to Fitz. “I’m sure, Mr. Darcy, you noticed her deplorable state.”

  Fitz had one of those moments, rare for him, of spurious inspiration. “All I noticed,” he said, allowing his voice to purr just a little, “is how the exercise heightened the glow in her very fine eyes.”

  That gave those two cats something to think about. Oh yes.

  BUT IT WAS Fitz who was burdened with some rather troublesome thoughts after a day or two of the Bennet sisters’ enforced stay. However dull the elder, the younger was unlike anything Fitz had encountered among the supposedly highest level of cultured society in town. Elizabeth Bennet seemed determined to make an impression. Not content with proving her country fortitude by walking, she took every opportunity to show off her unique and often contrary views on any commonplace subject that arose. She spent her time with her sister rather than enjoying the conversation in the downstairs parlor and chose a book over a game of loo, yet disdained the notion that she was any great reader or preferred reading to all other pastimes. She took on Fitz at every turn, matching each of his attempted witticisms with her own adroit turn of phrase.

  What astonished Fitz more than anything was that her words were clearly original. He had never heard anything like them in the salons and ballrooms of London; she was not repeating the voguish phrases and the manner of forming them that prevailed in the fashionable soirées, nor was she likely to have spent enough time there to have studied them. And although she was undoubtedly well educated, Fitz had read widely enough to know she was not following any strange conversational plans out of some obsolete primer.

  On the second day, when the mother and younger sisters visited, exhibiting their lamentable and pitiable lack of intelligence, grace, and good manners, Fitz was jolted rudely awake from his unwary fascination. Mrs. Bennet was an unmitigated horror, and the thought that she had produced five daughters, three of them as empty-headed and shameless as herself, was enough to make Fitz give up the notion of having any more congress with females for the rest of his life. “There is quite as much of that in the country as in town,” she said with vulgar frankness, appearing to read Fitz’s thoughts, and relishing the amount of immorality to be met with in her small village, before going on to boast of dining with twenty-four families as if it were some great number.

  Seeing Elizabeth so quick to divert attention from her mother’s worst lapses by serving them up as humorous vignettes of country life, Fitz could only turn away in sympathetic mortification. It was bizarre, revolting, like catching sight of a cripple or a leper, made all the worse by the contrast with her wit and feminine form. When the deformed creature is in other respects a beautiful woman, Fitz discovered, one’s disgust is infinitely magnified.

  Once the mother and sisters were gone, however, Fitz found himself forgetting the distasteful incidents, surrounded as he was by all the new charms. It was when Elizabeth, innocently as it seemed, touched on his natural concern for Charles that Fitz at last became rattled. He had been startled but amused at her rejection of poetry as encouragement to love, intrigued by her assertion that “a puny love could be entirely starved away by one good sonnet.” By then, no doubt encouraged by her mild success, and overconfident of her audience’s goodwill, Elizabeth drew poor Charles, already in well over his head, into a pathetic and endearing assertion of his own headstrong disregard for caution. Charles declared, with a fervor that he no doubt fancied was showing himself as one of these fiery, passionate souls celebrated in the latest poetry and popular novels, that were he to resolve to quit Netherfield he would be gone at once, with no second thoughts. Despite Fitz’s misgivings that he was making too much of insignificant chat, he couldn’t help stepping in.

  He heard the scorn in his voice, the affectionate criticism, but was unable to suppress it, as he reminded Charles that, in fact, were “a friend” to request that he change his mind, he would acquiesce.

  Charles had been abashed then defiant, and Elizabeth had come to his defense, as if Fitz had been attacking him, when his only intent had been to prevent Charles from looking ridiculous.

  It was intolerable, Fitz thought, as he realized that she was laughing at him. A mere chit of a girl, not a beauty in the established mode, with a meager portion and a most tenuous position on the lowest rung of the country gentry. And with the sharpest tongue off a London stage he had ever had the pleasure of being assailed by. And the most striking dark, large, and luminous eyes. And a very fetching, petite figure. Fitz could hardly keep his eyes off her. That was a disgrace, more his fault than hers. After all, he was an experienced man of the world, whereas she—

  It was not until the third day that Fitz understood she was flirting. How slow he had been! Her unorthodox tactics had almost outmaneuvered him. The revelation had come when Miss Bingley enticed Elizabeth into strolling up and down the room, as if for exercise. Poor Caroline had so little finesse that she readily and happily fell into Fitz’s trap, begging to hear his interpretation of why the women did better to walk without him. He had enjoyed confronting them with the truth, that they either wished to tell secrets or show themselves off before the gentlemen.

  Elizabeth had striven hard to avoid any such easy capitulation, and it was clear to see that the ignominy of Caroline’s surrender had provoked the stronger mind almost to rudeness. “Mr. Darcy has no defect,” Elizabeth said in the odd discussion that followed, a deliberation on what minor sins constituted allowable targets for her arrows of wit. “He owns it himself without disguise.”

  Fitz tried to dwell on this slight, to hold its venomous barb deep in his flesh until it festered and turned black, in hopes of effecting a rough cure from the dangerous attraction. After six years of town life, he had despaired of finding a woman who was both pretty and intelligent, whose mental abilities matched her physical allure. The fact that the younger daughter of an impoverished country gentleman was weaving such a spell proved merely that he had set his ideal too high, and had disqualified any eligible contestants from the start. But, oh, it was hard to resist. Fitz could only hope for the elder sister’s swift recovery, and release from the bonds of enchantment—both for himself and for Charles.

  THAT FIRST NIGHT of the eldest Miss Bennet’s stay, Charles was awash in agony and terror that a serious illness afflicted his inamorata, and the second night was little better. But by the third day, when it seemed that she would, in fact, recover from a head cold, Charles was suddenly up again, in ecstasy with his love, and with no other means to express it, receptive to Fitz’s attentions as he had not been in weeks.

  “Oh God, Fitz,” Charles said, lying in Fitz’s arms, sweaty and dirty and so adorable Fitz could have licked him clean for the sheer joy of soiling him all over again, “I’ve missed this.”

  “It was not by my choice that you took aversion to our pleasures,” Fitz reminded him.

  “I know.” Charles lifted his head from where it rested on Fitz’s chest and stared into his friend’s hooded eyes. “I hope you don’t take it the wrong way that—that—” He stuttered on the dangerous admissi
on he was about to make. “—that this resumption of my—our—love is because of her.”

  “Miss Bennet?” Fitz asked. “In other words, you allow me to do with you what you’d rather be doing with her, if the rules of society allowed it?”

  “I wouldn’t put it so crudely, but yes.”

  “Naturally, I wish you to desire my love for its own sake,” Fitz said after contemplating his answer. “For my sake, and for the sake of our friendship over this past year and more. But I do want you, and will take you in whatever way, and for whatever reason, I am permitted to have you.” He paused, watching his protégé for any sign of shame or discomfort. Heartened to see no reaction, good or bad, he decided to try an experiment. Give Charles a taste of his own medicine, see how he liked that. “If it makes it easier for you, I confess that the sister has had a similar effect on me.”

  “Elizabeth?” Charles asked. “That’s excellent!” He lay down again, but on his back, hands behind his head, a prudent distance from Fitz. “Do you mean you imagine it’s her you’re fucking when you fuck me? Or do you mean that you’d like to have us both, together?”

  Fitz laughed. Although he might have preferred a little jealousy on Charles’s part, some wounded pride, still, it was going to be all right. “My dear Charles! Such depravity! No, not the two of you at once. At least, not until I’ve had a chance to try her alone.” Little danger of that. One of her most appealing qualities was her rock-solid virtue. Playful she might be, flirtatious even, with a quicker wit than any female Fitz had ever known, but there was not the slightest appearance of immodesty.

  No, she was safe. Utterly, delightfully safe. He could enjoy the look of her dark, wide eyes and the surprising, arousing delicacy of her slight form and slender figure—such a contrast to the blowsy, overripe sister—and feel immune from any worry that she might seduce him, tempt him to “ruin” her, and blackmail him into keeping her. And she had more than enough sense to know that, on such very different social levels as they were, there was not the least possibility of marriage between them.