“Perhaps our conduct has been too unrestrained, but hardly unforgivable. You are too harsh upon us.”
Upon her use of the collective, he looked at her directly. In a determined little fit of coquetry, she turned her head slightly akilter and smiled fully. Which amused him, for it was clear her entreaty was a presumptuous tease. Yet, he stood his ground. His hands reached out for her, but they only cupped her face, his thumbs tracing the curve of her cheeks.
“Your father would have good reason to run me through.”
“And lock his daughter in the attic for good measure,” she countered, both knowing the unlikelihood of either occurrence.
But their remarks announced a return to better humour. Hence, they turned toward the security of Longbourn House, a habitat that would quash any disinclination toward propriety. Her virtue was not compromised in deed, Elizabeth knew, but it was besmutted considerably by her own intentions.
It was difficult to concede any issue to Lydia, but Elizabeth knew she would have to reassess her heretofore unwavering stance against Lydia’s imprudent, unmarried cohabitation with Wickham in London. She yet believed it impossible of herself to expose her family to the same degradation and ruin as had Lydia. It was now, however, much easier for Elizabeth to understand the very violence of the compulsion to do it.
Elizabeth did not grant Darcy clemency that day. There was no culpability with which to hold him, for she was not affronted. They were promised. Lessers with such an understanding would have been hockling merrily in the hayloft as soon as the match was made. Those weddings often only occurred when a baby was too high in the belly to be denied. Granted, they were not lessers and merry bouts were out of the question. However, she would gladly have granted her intended full immunity would he kiss her just the way he had again, now that she no longer feared that she would abandon caution and indiscriminately bite his lip once more.
She knew she would not. This happenstance occurred not by virtue of her inciting indiscretion and his counter remaining out of topic for them. She would not because, when he drew her so firmly to him, however entertained her attention was by his lips, her thoughts had wandered from them. With absolutely no cognisant endorsement from her, they travelled thitherward to that unfathomable part of his body that she felt pressed so hard against her leg.
*
As surely and as certainly as the sunrise, Bingley rode to Longbourn the next day, but he rode alone. Only a letter accompanied him, tucked neatly into his vest. It bore Elizabeth’s name in Darcy’s unmistakably precise script.
5
At the age of eight and twenty years, Fitzwilliam Darcy had neither professed love nor fallen victim to it. It was simply not in his nature to entertain frivolity. Stealing kisses or bandying for some damsel’s affection was insipid. As it happened, prior to his acquaintance with Elizabeth, he had never once pursued a courtship. Hence, neither sweet nothings nor the whispering of them were within even marginal propinquity of his sensibilities.
His affairs had been cursory and to the point. That point being carnal gratification, not romance.
A compliment may have been paid upon a woman’s beauty whilst in her embrace, but even those were more observational than adulatory. He simply had no tongue for flattery. Truth be known, he had not the wherewithal for expressing amorous feelings at all, so foreign were such inclinations to him. Whereas love had captured him quite decisively, reticence to revelation was not an easy transformation—not even when addressing the object of his new and exceedingly vigorous regard. Truly, he wanted to shower Elizabeth with every manner of tribute. Had he been able, he would have celebrated her every virtue, extolled her beauty, blessed her goodness, kissed her toes and the ground upon which they trod.
However sincere the aspiration, he simply had not the means to explain the shades of his love. To feel such fierce emotions and yet be unable to profess them adequately was ghastly. It occurred to him that he should plumb Netherfield’s library (the books were not Bingley’s, they came with the lease). His poetic inclinations favoured Pope, but he believed Blake might offer some inspiration.
That is, if he could keep his wits about him long enough to concentrate upon reading. For howbeit his voice was unable to pay her tribute, his body was announcing his desire for her in a most ungentlemanly manner.
When, in the throes of that increasingly amorous kiss, she bit his lip, it incited him to an exercise of his passion the extent of which he had not thought possible. Hitherto, such a loss of self-restraint would have been inconceivable. To have to turn away just to keep his arousal from being revealed was an outright mortification. He had stood, his back to her, desperately seeking to redirect his thoughts. The weather, scripture, anything but Elizabeth standing behind him lush and desirable (and undoubtedly mortally affronted).
It was miraculous that she had seemed neither angry nor insulted. As it happened, she bore no greater pique than a raised eyebrow and a rather peculiar expression. But the encounter had rendered him so out of sorts, he had taken his leave almost immediately. Upon thoughtful recollection, he understood that howbeit her bite heated his blood, it was her passionate response that fanned his flame. And that aroused no little compunctious self-examination.
For her demeanour and her circumstance claimed Elizabeth an innocent. She was chaste and it was his duty to protect her honour, not take privileges. But the volatile combination of their love, her innocence, and his lust was inciting his once sternly controlled mettle to unprecedented heights.
This would not do. It was insupportable to take such a liberty no matter how cussed the temptation. He was a gentleman, she a lady, their courtship could be affectionate but absolutely circumspect. His passion would be tethered, regardless of the provocation of her eyes, at least until their wedding. Certainly he could wait that long to kiss her throat. Smell her scent. Caress her body. His better judgement, clearly, was not only beclouded, it was very nearly trampled by desire.
It had not always been thus. There was a time, a very long time ago, when things were quite simple.
*
By the time he was nearly fifteen, little beleaguered Darcy. Already reaching a goodly portion of the height he would eventually realise, his bearing reflected that advantage. He was a hand-span taller than Wickham, who was more than a year older, thus inspiriting considerable ill-will from that young knave. Wickham’s disposition fancied slight at every turn and took umbrage no less from God above than mortal man. Contrarily, Darcy’s cousin, Geoffrey Fitzwilliam, was older still but had not the height of either. Yet if his ego suffered it was unapparent.
Wickham’s, however, flailed about quite unreasonably. Though his own height would eventually almost equal Darcy’s, Wickham was then most displeased, their rivalries intense. Wickham was quick, even anticipatory, but Darcy’s height advantage was solicitously enhanced by superior strength, thus feats of agility were not a close contest. That the outcome was hardly a factor did not render the competitions any less wicked.
In time, Fitzwilliam accepted his limitations and (discretion being the better part of valour) abandoned both Darcy and Wickham to their races, clashes, and bouts for the arena that equalised all men: the back of a horse. In Fitzwilliam’s stead, Wickham and Darcy strove onward, the latter in the happy circumstance of a natural winner. In defence of his continually abused ego, Wickham eventually (if petulantly) announced he was too old for boyish games. Lacking Fitzwilliam’s good sense to stomach the inevitable, the height affront nettled Wickham’s conceit of himself considerably.
Wickham had considerable ego to fester. Upon the death of his father, Mr. Darcy’s steward, the elder Mr. Darcy became Wickham’s benefactor. The adolescent Wickham had come to live on the upper floors in Pemberley. Having all the benefit and none of the attendant responsibility of station, Wickham’s self-regard was distended beyond all proportion. Whilst engaging in bootlicking the elder Mr. Darcy, he deliberately fostered the impression that his position was entailed higher than it was
to servants and villagers alike. Some were taken in by his swagger, others were not. Young Darcy was not, but neither did he understand that beneath Wickham’s unctuous bearing festered substantial treachery.
The single advantage Wickham held over Darcy was by reason of age. He regaled Darcy with tales of scullery, chamber, and serving maids at Pemberley from whom he had been able to obtain favours biblical in nature. Already a practised cynic when it came to what tales Wickham told, Darcy’s newly aroused libido, nonetheless, instructed him to listen more keenly than independent reasoning would have thought prudent.
Even as persevering a Lothario as was Wickham, there was further gall at Darcy’s unwitting hand to be endured.
Young Master Darcy’s burgeoning masculinity graced his countenance with unusual fondness, bestowing a handsomeness that perhaps did not exceed Wickham’s, but certainly rivalled it. Hence, unbeknownst to him, Wickham’s tide-pool of romantic opportunity was being eroded by defection. (Hampering Wickham too was a complexion that had a tendency to inflame under stress. The more his skin pustulated, the greater his vexation. Altogether a nasty turn of luck.) Because Wickham spent so very much of his time admiring his costume and feathering his bangs, he was blind to the understanding that one unaware of his own beauty always exacts more interest than he who preens. And whilst Wickham picked at his skin and patted his hair, Darcy looked in a mirror only to make certain he had no unsightly food stuck betwixt his teeth.
The stage was set for a battle as old as time.
*
For a time, the various intended prey of Wickham’s foul designs admired Darcy’s lack of self-regard from a discreet distance. However, one Abigail Christie, chambermaid, soon put herself into the young master’s path. A year less than twenty, she possessed fine skin, a retroussé profile and pretty auburn hair. If her countenance suggested innocence, however, it was deceiving. A weakness for male attention had compromised her virtue more times than the vicar wagged his finger. Upon occasion she lifted her skirts to Wickham, but even she knew he had little to offer beyond his over-promoted position (and she immediately recognised his own sceptre of love was not half so inflated as his opinion of it). Still, a bum-tickle with the son of a steward was a considerable step up from a bit of hay beneath the under-gardener.
As a veteran of amorous rites, she considered herself quite the doyenne upon the appraisal of male pudenda. When she heard house gossip that Master Darcy’s virilia was exceedingly well favoured by nature, her interest was…piqued.
It was difficult for Darcy not to have taken notice of Abigail over her half-year’s employment. Wickham belaboured the various attributes of any of the female servants remotely close to child-bearing years (that being over twelve and under fifty; Wickham was nothing if not democratic in his lechery). Darcy’s curt opinion, however, initially saw Abigail a bit too snub-nosed and thick-waisted. He began to reassess his position after experiencing a few unusually close brushes with her body.
That these encounters with her invariably happened in an otherwise spacious environment was quite myopically overlooked.
’Tis noted that it was more by her own design than caprice of fate that she found many chores in the bedchamber of young Mr. Darcy, frequently dawdling about her tasks in order to linger near. To an objective viewer of these doings, it would not have been a surprise when Abigail deposited herself in his room one quiet mid-afternoon. Darcy, however, was taken quite unawares when he bechanced her there and his expression betrayed this. With dispatch, his surprise was usurped and converted forthwith into excited apprehension. Clearly, she had not come into his room merely to change the bedding.
Again, she walked near him and stood idly twirling a copper ringlet that had escaped her cap. Shifting nervously from one foot to the other, he reddened, then frowned in a vain attempt to appear unruffled. His colour certainly did not abate when she, with an audacity he had yet to experience, asked if he had ever touched a woman. At that, he dropped his eyes to the floor, not wanting to admit he had not. That reaction, of course, announced the very thing he hoped to hide. When she took his hand and placed it upon her bosom, the size of her waist was little impediment to her desirability.
Abigail’s inexpert genesis of this seduction would have warned a more experienced lover that, however practised she was in the basics of amour, she lacked finesse. The youthful Darcy was oblivious to such nuances, however, and her clumsy seeking of his manhood easily provoked its attention. That garnered, Abigail simply laid back upon the bed and drew up her dress (this being a wordless and universal sign of invitation). And, as a lad of considerable vigour and no little heat, he needed neither encouragement nor instruction (yea, some instincts are, indeed, stronger than others). He mounted her, spent (far too quickly he was certain), and, undeniably ignorant of the protocol under such circumstances, rolled away.
She rose, smoothed down her dress, adjusted her cap, and kissed him full upon the mouth.
“Will Aye find you here to-morrow?”
He nodded emphatically. She did, then, and for several days thence, Darcy not tardy once.
This embarkation into the rites of amour was not only inspiriting, but quite illuminating. Betimes, even off-putting. Upon the culmination of his second coupling with his newly designated paramour, said lover rather vocally reached achievement. Wickham had, in his many oratories, explained to Darcy there was a great deal of thrashing about whilst undergoing this act. However, Abigail’s crescendo was of a magnitude to persuade him she had seizured in some manner. Hence, he was quite horrified he might have to explain her demise. To his considerable gratitude, her recovery was prompt. That his uppermost concern was not her possible death, but the scandal it would invite, should have warned him he was not actually in the throes of deep, abiding love.
Nonetheless, with their next assignation, she asked him if he loved her. He said, yes, he believed he did. (As this declaration was proffered post-insertion, pre-emission, one supposes the true depth of his adolescent affection must be taken with a grain of salt. His loins ached, and if he believed it was for her alone, Abigail was not one to argue the point.)
Nary a word of any of this did Darcy tell Wickham, but he thought of little else. And though Darcy was himself discreet, Abigail was not. Word spread post-haste (with more philanthropy than precision) of the young master’s virility. From the objectivity of time, had Darcy been privy later to those whispered comments, he would undoubtedly have allowed that virility in that specific instance was possibly confused with youthful enthusiasm.
Beyond her undying, virginal devotion, the one thing Abigail had not offered to Darcy was that she had been sharing her favours with Wickham. But, once eliciting a profession of love from young Darcy, Abigail refused to lay with Wickham. He was not amused, even a little. Wickham called her several names that were not complimentary. She spat out some rather harsh character complaints herself.
“Muck slattern!”
“Deknackered dung heap!”
Trading unpleasantries with Abigail did nothing to appease Wickham’s insulted ego. To be spurned for the younger, wealthier Darcy was gristle he refused to swallow. With the air of a true Samaritan (and no little haste), he went directly to Darcy’s father and told him of the exact nature of his son’s latest avocation.
Darcy ranked his father’s good opinion far higher than any other, and when called to answer for such carnal indiscretion, he was mortified to his very bones.
In his first formal discussion of manly honour and integrity, Mr. Darcy told his son that his position was one of such import that he must never be ruled by anything other than the highest of motives and the worthiest of principles (trysting with -servant girls, obviously, was neither). He told him he must never exploit his circumstance nor use it selfishly (trysting with servant girls was both). It was not revealed, nor did he ask, how his father learnt of his improprieties. Darcy never suspected George Wickham, for his conscience could not be entirely convinced divine judgement had not exposed
him.
If there was any divine intervention, it was visited at that time only upon Wickham. For there was a hasty realignment of the female servants at Pemberley. Wickham was extremely vexed to see that all the newly-assigned chambermaids were great with girth and age (averaging ten stone in weight and two score ten in years). In his humiliation, Darcy noticed neither this nor that Abigail disappeared from Pemberley compleatly.
This episode unquestionably altered Darcy’s life, introducing a lifelong pattern of stern self-control. As he grew older, his natural reserve became a buffer, leading some to believe he felt himself above their company. If his manner came to be led in pride and conceit, it was borne of a perpetual stream of obsequious deference from men and women alike. In adulthood, he was known as a man of clever intellect and superior understanding. His manners were impeccable, if somewhat haughty.
Darcy was not vain, but he was proud, expecting perfection of himself, and would not brook less from anyone else.
His reserve was already firmly in place when he and Wickham left for Cambridge. But once there, he found concealed in his belongings a piece of paper bearing a London street address written in his father’s hand. He came to learn Harcourt was a house of good Mayfair address, known to most men of means. It was a place they could discreetly pass company with a woman possessed of both beauty and refinement. This lady required no commitment beyond a few hours of one’s time. A major rite of passage would have been for his father to escort him to such a place for his introduction to manhood. As that horse was already out of the barn, so to speak, his father chose to guide his son thusly.
With the single lecture his father had given him still ringing in his ears, Darcy had every good intention of taking his studies quite seriously and he set the address aside. Even with the caterwauling Wickham underfoot in constant search of his next conquest, Darcy strove to seek the moral high ground. So often did he rebuff Wickham, who constantly prevailed upon him to join in his rounds of drinking and wenching, Wickham took to calling him the “Archbishop.”
Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife Page 4