Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife

by Linda Berdoll

  The stifled weeping Jane and Hannah had been issuing from the cranny beyond the chimneypiece ceased. All held their breath and feared the worst.

  “Lizzy!” he cried, and shook the mattress fiercely as if to awaken her from the clutch of eternal sleep.

  Jane and Hannah both ran to the end of the bed. He thought to put his ear to her heart. As if in answer to the percussion his fit of anguish incited, her chest again struggled to rise. Then again. He held her hand, laid his head next to hers, and began to sob.

  Jane sank to the floor. Hannah fled the room.

  *

  The house was deathly quiet, befitting the circumstance. Bingley and Jane occupied a bed in a guestroom, lying across it fully dressed save for their shoes. Fearing to move her, Darcy lay by Elizabeth’s side in the room of labour and held her hand to his cheek. But sleep was denied him, for every time he closed his eyes he dreamed, and his dreams were nightmares of screams: Elizabeth’s, his mother’s. They became indistinguishable and unbearable. He awoke, and then dozed, and in his exhaustion, he began to think he might be going mad.

  Near dawn, his dreams again awoke him. He reached out for her only to find Elizabeth was not beside him. In a panic, he blinked his eyes wildly in an attempt to see her in the darkened room.

  Where she had found the strength to rise, he could not imagine. Nevertheless, he saw the door ajar, rose, and peered out. His heart leapt into his throat when he saw her in a bloodied gown swaying unsteadily at the head of the stairs. Heart pounding, he walked to her quietly, fearing he might startle her. He took her hand.

  Elizabeth turned and, her voice echoing eerily, bid him, “Darcy, where is our baby?”

  In a choked voice, he said softly, “Come with me, dearest Lizzy. Come with me.”

  Gently, he lifted her into his arms and carried her back to bed. Then, a precautionary arm firmly draped across her, he lay down beside her once again, but dared not to enter even a tenuous slumber.

  When morning came and Elizabeth did not open her eyes, it puzzled the doctor. He intoned dire possibilities to Darcy. Much to the surprise of all, Darcy refused to listen to calamitous predictions.

  He knew her breathing to be shallow, but it was steady. He believed she simply could not bear to face what had yet to be reckoned, and waited for time to render her strong enough to accept what she could not change.

  44

  The baby was to be buried in the private cemetery next to the Pemberley Chapel used but for baptisms, funerals, and silent reflection. Thither came Elizabeth’s family. Unrehearsed in the rituals of sorrow as they were, the entire Bennet clan was uncharacteristically subdued. Obtuse as she sometimes could be, even Mrs. Bennet knew not to impose her position of grieving grandmother and solicitous mother upon those about her. Indeed, her lawn handkerchief remained unfluttered and consigned to her dress sleeve (except upon the occasions it was used to dab at the corner of her eyes).

  The dolorous climate of the house was unrelenting. Elizabeth was yet unconscious, and her husband stood tenacious watch over her. Other than to offer the briefest condolences, no one but Jane ventured conversation with him. It was only Jane who dared to embrace that impenetrable man. It was she alone who was admitted.

  The cemetery had rested the Darcy family members for centuries. But until that cold morning, few would have described its tree-canopied, vine-entwined location as desolate. When the baby’s tiny coffin was laid to rest there, however, that was the single description that came to those who sought to characterise it. The ritual was brief, but not just because of the chill. Words were spoken, prayers offered, the more ostentatious accoutrements of death having been eschewed by Mr. Darcy. Just a single death knell sounded. Nevertheless, it echoed an interminably long time.

  When the service concluded, all but Mr. Bennet and Darcy returned to the house. They paused at the lych-gate. The baby had been named Bennet Fitzwilliam Darcy and it was not lost upon Mr. Bennet that his daughter’s condition required such a decision to have been consigned to her husband. Mr. Bennet’s usual detachment abandoned, they stood silently for a time alone, the wind causing a chill far beyond what it should.

  In time, Elizabeth’s father spoke, but could not bring himself to look upon his son-in-law as he did, “I trust you to do whatever my Lizzy requires of you.”

  Mr. Bennet’s shoulders betrayed a strong intake of breath, then he continued, stammering, “Elizabeth is a singular young woman…she loves you dearly.”

  Upon recollecting what Elizabeth had said to him when he questioned whether a man of such unpleasant temperament was a suitable husband for her, Mr. Bennet issued a brief smile.

  Turning to Darcy, he explained his unexpected humour, “She assured me once I came to know you as she did, I should find you perfectly amiable. I dare say she was right.” It was barely audible when he turned his gaze back to the small barrow and said, “Lizzy is always right.”

  Darcy felt a particular bond with Mr. Bennet, one beyond their shared love of his daughter. For he was certain that the aloofness so ingrained in Mr. Bennet’s character was a defence to buffer himself from the intemperate doings of certain members of his family. Detachment and restraint as a defence was something of which Darcy had intimate acquaintance.

  Mr. Bennet personified the man he might have become had he married injudiciously. Just richer and more arrogant. The thought infected him with an unlikely wave of empathy. The single man he had ever embraced had been his own father, but Darcy impulsively embraced Mr. Bennet then. His fatherin-law returned it, then coughed, obviously flustered by the unexpected gesture. Both stood in awkward silence for another half-minute, thereupon Mr. Bennet coughed again and then patted Darcy upon the back.

  “Come along then, son,” he said. “We must return.”

  Dismal days, small comfort.

  *

  Elizabeth’s continued lack of improvement set Dr. Carothers talking of leeches or searing. Having remained peculiarly collected until this notion seized the doctor, Darcy resisted with considerable vehemence, denouncing such measures as barbaric. He would not allow her to be bled nor burned.

  “Elizabeth will heal in her own good time.”

  Hence, it was less jubilation than a profound relief to him when Elizabeth awakened but a few mornings later. She announced her readmittance into consciousness and harsh reality with a simple act. She grasped her husband’s fingers as they held her hand.

  The Bennet family, with all good intentions, planned to stay at Pemberley until Elizabeth’s health was no longer in jeopardy. Once she was awake, Darcy was inclined to believe that Elizabeth would recuperate more quickly in quiet, for she was still quite weak. With Jane’s assurance that she would not forsake her sister’s side, Mr. Bennet reluctantly agreed. Darcy and Jane both knew Mrs. Bennet’s shrill presence would not benefit Elizabeth’s recuperation.

  The members of her family Elizabeth held dearest, Darcy found esteem for as well. Jane was a jewel, precious to his wife and therefore to himself. He had grown to be fond of her father, regardless of the breach of conjugal obligation Mr. Bennet -displayed toward his wife—for his wife was, after all, Mrs. Bennet.

  It was a trial, but he had even come to accept Mrs. Bennet (he did so only by employing the proverb about teaching a pig to sing). Mrs. Bennet was to be endured. Mary was plain and didactic, but almost tolerable. Catherine was still silly, but becoming more promising in Lydia’s absence.

  Lydia, however, was a young woman for whom he could find no redeeming quality whatsoever. And that assessment was not reached only for her being the wife of Wickham.

  This stern judgement was not to diminish.

  *

  Amidst the considerable dither, fuss, and ado engendered by the organising of the Bennets’ trunks, Lydia’s grating voice could be heard. So insistent was her whine, it caught the attention of someone quite determined not to listen.

  Darcy had been striding down the corridor, head down, hands clasped behind his back, staring diligently
at the pattern upon the carpet he followed. Lydia’s peevish complaints and Mrs. Bennet’s grating responses wafted out upon the landing and unto his ears.

  He stopped abruptly. As a personal rule, his step would have quickened under the threat of imminent convergence with Lydia or Mrs. Bennet. Therefore, it is understood that it was the nature of the discourse that compelled him to halt.

  “Mama,” pouted Lydia, “this simply is so unfair! I have just spent far too much upon confinement gowns [for Lydia was with child again] and now I have to have more made in black. Even if one may wear white weepers, I look horrid in black. And for what? ’Tisn’t as if my father has died, or my own child. The baby was not even really a baby, being born dead as it was, so why must we mourn so unrelentingly? Lizzy gives me hardly any money to help us as it is and you know we are always beyond our means. She probably will not even be well enough to see to funds for me and I have to dress in black as well! ’Tis all so unfair!”

  Mrs. Bennet responded, “Dear Lydia! You look quite lovely in black! And now that Lizzy has returned to her senses, she will see to your stipend! Do not fret so, dear. It will leave you with a wrinkle betwixt your brows!”

  It was abhorrence aplenty merely to learn that Wickham’s loins and Lydia’s womb had united in begetting yet another offspring. But to overhear the additional vituperation clearly rattled Darcy’s notion of what physical harm a gentleman would or would not impose upon a female—even a female relation of his wife. As he stood in glowering contemplation of the possibility of throttling them both, he was espied by Lydia. The deterioration of the expression upon her countenance when she realised she had been overheard was swift. And to Darcy, quite exquisite.

  It was violence enough. He strode on.

  However, as he did, he shook his head. Lydia had revealed not just her condition, but that Elizabeth had been giving her money surreptitiously. This was of no particular vexation to him, for he knew well it came from her own modest income and not by way of Pemberley coffers. Elizabeth often had chastised herself for lacking Jane’s Christian charity. Although Elizabeth despised Lydia’s husband and knew well that her financial shortfall did not come by way of capricious chance, she helped her nevertheless.

  It displayed a level of generosity far grander than he knew he could have -mustered.

  With considerable restraint of temper by their host, the house cleared of most of the guests without incidental bloodshed. Jane, of course, stayed on, accompanied by Bingley. Fitzwilliam too felt the need to remain close at hand.

  *

  Col. Fitzwilliam stayed on at Pemberley in spite of the fact that Whitemore was but an hour away. It was as if he had lost his own will in the matter. It was clear he was not particularly needed. He stayed because of his own need, not another’s.

  Since his return from his sojourn in the Spanish peninsula, a debilitating gloom had overtaken him.

  The ferocity of the fight against the French in Portugal was successful, but the countryside and its people had paid a hefty toll. Under the pall of that misery, and suffering a lead ball imbedded in his rib cage, he had been anxious to return to the peace of Derbyshire County. There he meant to repair from both his physical trauma and the emotional tax of witnessing so much death and destruction. The peccability of surviving war when many fellow officers had not was intolerable.

  To return unwhole of body and mind, only to learn of the murder and mayhem that had occurred at home whilst he was gone, was devastating. And to come to understand that those he held most dear had been terrorised because of his inaction, lay waste to what little heartsease he yet had managed to squirrel away.

  In time, the piece of shrapnel worked its way out. Too, he eventually understood from whence his melancholia brewed. Such wisdom, however, was not obtained with dispatch. First, he would have to suffer considerable self-recrimination because he alone had seen the ogre Reed’s lascivious leer at Elizabeth and had not called him out.

  *

  Elizabeth’s convalescence was not brisk. The restoration of her health demanded she keep to her bed. Had it not, Darcy guessed she would have hibernated there regardless.

  Unable to mourn for her child, she did not once inquire of him. It took no professor of philosophy to convince her husband that she was still in emotional jeopardy because of that refusal. He knew they needed to talk of it, but had not the slightest notion of how to broach the subject, nor any words of comfort if he did. In his uncertainty, he reverted to the familiarity of reticence. He stayed close, but quiet, despairing for his failing.

  Gradually, her body grew stronger. Her spirit, however, did not. The eyes that had once danced so provocatively when they had lit upon him had turned leaden.

  Most frightening was the solemnity that had engulfed her. She sat in silence, staring through the lattice of the casement into the distance. She did not smile, nor did she weep. The one revelation of despair was the handkerchief she knotted ceaselessly about her fingers.

  With each of Jane’s attempts to draw conversation from her about the tragedy, she simply turned her head to the window as if she did not hear.

  As if he somehow refused Elizabeth’s mind to suffer more than his own, Darcy found new territory upon which to agonise.

  The baby had been large even for a month early. Dr. Carothers had said those very words. Darcy saw his own impressive height and frame, of which he had held himself quite proud, as accusation that he was the perpetrator of Elizabeth’s torment.

  Hence, he tortured himself unremittingly with the notion he had impregnated her with a baby too large for her to deliver. For the first time, he thought of Elizabeth as not simply the woman he loved, but the woman who had to bear his children. He had always thought of her as nothing less than healthy and robust. Her rosy complexion and full bosom might suggest her hardy and nubile, but he knew well too, she was also fine-boned and narrow-hipped. The succulent tightness of her womanhood from which he had so revelled in pleasure should have forewarned them of this danger. But he had been too blinded by desire. Would he have had the self-constraint to practise withdrawal or even abstinence had he known the future? That was not a question he pondered, for regret and remorse demanded all his time. He was terrified yet that having another baby might kill her. He could not bear to query the physician if Elizabeth might have been able to have born the baby safely had it not been breech.

  Eventually Darcy understood that Jane’s solicitous attentions, not his, engendered a more expeditious convalescence for Elizabeth. The hovering spectre of his private anguish aided her recovery no better than it had her labour. Thus, for a few hours at a time, he allowed himself coaxed from her bedside. Bingley and Fitzwilliam were bent upon a little sport in the field upon his behalf.

  They knew little else to do. Even in the knowledge of how deeply Darcy loved Elizabeth, neither would have believed that Darcy, a man of strength and fortitude beyond any other they could name, could be so broken by the tragedy.

  Whilst they awaited his company one evening, they talked of it.

  Bingley said, “’Tis not that this is not the most grievous of all life’s many sorrows, for it certainly is. But Elizabeth survives, and they shall have other children.”

  Only he and his brother had survived from their mother’s four births, hence Fitzwilliam hesitantly agreed, “True, no one knows of a family, neither earl nor cottager, that has not lost children.”

  It was unspoken, but both knew as perilous as infancy was to a baby, childbirth was to the mother. It could be surmised that Darcy and Elizabeth might look upon it as fortunate, under the circumstances, that Elizabeth was not taken too. In a particularly philosophical turn, Bingley very nearly remarked that Darcy’s seeming obsession about the loss of the baby and Elizabeth’s health, which was obviously improving, might stem from never having been deprived of anything he had ever wanted. Fortune allowed him to glance to the darkened doorway. Darcy’s visage was shadowed, but discernible. Bingley held his tongue.

  Fitzwilliam
observed the alteration in Bingley’s expression and his eyes moved from Bingley to the door at his back. Darcy stepped into the room. The men were silent. Darcy did not reveal whether he heard their remarks or not, but spoke just of the weather, Bingley’s daughter’s latest words, and asked Fitzwilliam when he might be well enough to return to his regiment. After a leisurely partaking of a glass or two of claret, the gentlemen decided to retire. Fitzwilliam took the stairs but Bingley had not yet quit the room, howbeit he had taken steps in that direction, when Darcy called after him. When Bingley turned, the look upon his friend’s face very nearly made him flee. But not in fear.

  “You are right, Bingley, I have Elizabeth, or at least she is alive. However, unless you have had to endure what we have, I should think it most impolitic to make judgement to what lengths grief should be taken. I pray you and Jane never have reason for better understanding that the frequency of a tragedy does not diminish the wound when it is your own.”

  Bingley was shaken. He did not fear his friend’s wrath, not really fear it. But to know something could so easily overtake a couple’s happiness, as it had for a union as strong as that of Elizabeth and Darcy, made him shiver in apprehension for Jane and the next birth she would face.

  *

  “What was it?” Elizabeth bid matter-of-factly.

  “What was it?” Darcy repeated, uncertain he had heard her correctly.

  “Boy or girl?” she asked.

  “A boy,” he answered quietly, “named for your father.”

  With studied deliberation, she replaced her teacup into its saucer. The censored subject was finally accessed. Daring not let it slip away, he asked if she wanted him to carry her to the gravesite. She nodded once, thereupon the wall of composure she had so diligently maintained shattered into a maelstrom of tears. As she fell face down upon the mattress, sobs began to rack her body. She was heaving as he picked her up and turned her to him, holding her tightly to his chest.

  It was a not an unwelcome phenomenon. Anything was welcome to release her from her relentless melancholia. As she clung to him, Elizabeth had no notion that the weeping was not hers singularly.