Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
AN UNREASONABLE PRESENCE
A t the road, Mr Darcy stepped off my curricle and came around to my side where he took my hand.
The ending of our private meeting—coming out of the darkened forest and into the light of a public road—made it glaringly obvious we should never have been alone in the first place. To lessen my acute feelings of embarrassment, I lightly asked, “What is the end of Plato’s verse?”
He did not take his eyes from my face as he spoke.
“This flute of mine
Shall pipe the softest song it knows to sing,
And to thy charmed eyelids
Sleep will bring.”
“Oh,” I said in a small voice with pinking cheeks, for the words and the way they had been delivered were awkwardly romantic—in effect, precisely the aura of intimacy I wished to avoid !
“Thank you for your forbearance,” he said kindly. “I have long wanted to say what I did today.”
I smiled down at him. “Might we at last declare a truce?”
“What, and ruin what we now enjoy? I would think the prospect of polite friendship a poor exchange.”
I longed to ask—but did not dare to discover—what, if not friendship, did we have?
“Good day, sir,” I said instead, and I drove away in a mildly flustered condition that required several miles of concentrated focus on the gait of my ponies to remedy.
Many weeks later when I wished to chuckle, albeit mournfully, I had only to think privately that I had enjoyed two additional halcyon weeks of London’s cholera outbreak. Alas, only my father would appreciate this sort of coffin humour, and I could hardly share the sentiment with him lest I reveal more than I wished about my private, intriguing, and sometimes whispered encounters with the gentleman from Derbyshire.
I enjoyed these two additional weeks specifically because the party at Netherfield Park had remained in Hertfordshire for that duration, as did the Gardiners at Longbourn.
While I tried to convince myself that my enjoyment was primarily because the heat had subsided and my relations from London were still visiting us, I saw Mr Darcy occasionally and felt a surge of interest with our every meeting, no matter how brief.
Well, perhaps it was not interest precisely, but I felt pulled towards him as if by a strong tide. What I would not have given for a chance to speak unrestrainedly to him for any length of time, to indulge in earnest the quarrelsome, intemperate teasing—or whatever game it was we were playing— that so perversely tempted and delighted me far more than I wished it would.
My chance came one day in September. Mr Bingley had organised a picnic on his grounds. Lydia and Kitty squeezed onto the bench beside me, and I whipped the air over my ponies’ ears bringing my curricle to a slightly flourishing stop beneath a tall Scots pine at the edge of the field where, on an elegantly set table, our rustic feast stood ready for us. A groom stepped up to the horses heads, and while I was distracted handing over the reins, Mr Darcy suddenly appeared, helping first my sisters and then me to step down.
“How gallant, sir,” I mumbled with a roll of my eyes.
“Hardly,” he replied under his breath. “I only wished to ask if you chose this particular spot to place your curricle as a tribute to me.”
My reply was necessarily pert because try as I might, I could not always be an angel.
“I am sure I would have if I had the slightest idea of what you mean. Surely, you know I live to pay tribute to you.”
“’ Neath this tall pine’,” he prompted with a glance at the pine tree above me, and with a jaunty tip of his hat, he then sauntered away and left me to stew.
I could not say I loved not having the last stab in any joust with Mr Darcy. Nor could I honestly declare I did not enjoy being bested with such confidence. As my aunt had so wonderfully reassured me, I could poke fun at a person who was willing to poke back with some semblance of humour.
The gentleman left me dangling, itching for an opportunity to reciprocate, and sensing he knew this by the casual hint of a smugness around his mouth that was almost a smile, I stiffened my spine and denied him any further satisfaction by cleverly placing myself between Lady Lucas and my aunt Philips. When I finally felt compelled to move, Miss Bingley aided my cause by always placing herself bodily between Mr Darcy and me. I found her strategy almost painfully amusing, and lest I laugh aloud at the absurdity of it all, I went in search of Jane, who was wandering a little disconsolately in the shrubbery.
I met the gentleman from Derbyshire at church soon after. Upon this occasion, Mr Darcy pretended to have backed into me, and under cover of an apology, he looked appraisingly at me and purred, “Charming. Have you combed your hair perhaps?”
I choked very slightly. My word, was I blushing? Good lord! I then levelled a look of sober goodness at him and spoke with the cherubic politeness befitting a church.
“Indeed I have, sir. I am meticulous in my habits and do so once a week. And you? Polished as a new penny, I see?”
“Guinea.”
“What? Are you claiming you are made of gold?”
“There are those who believe I am.”
“But I am not one of them, sir.”
“Thus, your appeal,” he said mysteriously.
I could have endured many more months of this irreverent, disrespectful treatment. However, the weather cooled considerably, and autumnal rains did their work. Cholera faded and was, in the slums of London at least, superseded by the usual complaints of pneumonia and consumption—in other words, ailments common anywhere people sleep in cold and crowded conditions. Not suffering any of these miseries, the metropolis was therefore deemed to be safe again by the privileged class.
Uncle Gardiner was anxious to return to the city, and our aunt was no less so. She longed to be settled at home again and to resume the pleasures of her regular society. Lydia, it was decided, would go along.
My youngest sister was slowly thawing, but she was yet a fragile unknown in my mother’s eyes. Between the two of them was a constraint that had never existed. Mama was overly anxious for Lydia’s comfort and doted upon her to excess, but poor Lydia dreaded her caresses out of guilt, or so it seemed to me. She did not want to be cherished as much as she wanted a good scolding with which to clear the air with her parent. I was helpless to affect any sort of an understanding, and did not feel it my place in any case, so I helped my mother to believe that the most compassionate act she could undertake on her youngest child’s behalf was to relinquish her to Aunt Gardiner’s care for the nonce. Even she could not deny that Lydia’s prospects for happiness were greater in town than they were in Meryton.
Jane, meanwhile, had an open invitation to go along. She vacillated as to whether she should stay or go, and I suspected she did not wish to leave Hertfordshire while Mr Bingley remained in the county. While she would have denied this, I witnessed their every casual exchange. On the street in the village, before church, at Lucas Lodge, and at a tea party given by Miss Bingley and Mrs Hurst, they met with excruciating awkwardness. The matter of their feelings for or against one another was so miserable, I could not bear it and at one interval when we were all convened at Lucas Lodge once again, I managed to speak to Mr Darcy.
“Might you do me a service?” I asked, standing next to him at the window.
“Anything.”
“Ask Mr Bingley to declare himself or leave. My sister is dying a thousand deaths. ”
“As is he.”
I looked up at him sharply, allowing my expression alone to demand an explanation for such an enigmatic uttering.
“He does not know what to make of her discomfort and?—”
“Then he is an idiot!” I whispered between clenched teeth.
“He is uncertain if his feelings are reciprocated,” he began, and then haltingly spluttered out a disjointed explanation. “By inclination, he would—well, I should not speak for him. Only his sister has made plain her opinion that your sister is not…” His voice dwindled into silence before turning a gimlet eye upon me. “I do not know how it is you regularly force me to say more than I ought.”
“Well, he is your friend, and you ought to do something!” I hissed. “His presence is unreasonable!”
Mr Darcy searched my face as he spoke. “If he leaves, so must I.”
“Oh,” I said as my eyes fell to the floor.
Taking half a step closer to me and with just the tip of his index finger, Mr Darcy touched my hand lightly. “It is enough that you are downcast by the thought of it, my Zephyr. I should not linger in any case. My sister deserves more of my time.”
After a fulsome pause, I whispered, “I shall miss our unfriendly talks.”
We were rudely intruded upon by John Lucas. “Well, miss? What are you telling Mr Darcy? Are you bragging about your little gig?”
“I would not dare, John. He thinks it is silly. But come,” I said, leading him away by the arm, “tell me when your high-perch might grace our lanes.”