Till Death Us Do Part (Pride and Prejudice Variations)

Chapter 1

“Darcy! Come in, my boy; come in! I was about to send for you.”

“Good evening, Uncle. How are you?”

Fitzwilliam Darcy looked at his uncle, Hugh Fitzwilliam, the Earl of Matlock and did not much like what he saw.

The Earl looked tired and worn. There were dark circles under the gentleman’s eyes, and he demonstrated a listless appearance very much unlike his usual form.

The man who all his life strode through every room as if he owned it now shuffled through his own library as if it would kill him.

The Earl answered tiredly. “It is a late hour on a dreadful day, at the tail end of a bad week, embedded in an awful month, near the end of a terrible year. How about you?”

“The same, Uncle,” Darcy said with a frown. “It is like the moment you realise you just rode your prize stallion off a cliff, and your favourite hounds are going to follow. I seem to have fallen foul of a compromise two nights ago. I am undecided about what to do, so I came to seek your council.”

The Earl frowned in turn, poured a glass of brandy, and handed it to his nephew.

“Misery loves company, son. As it turns out, I am greatly in need of your services so sit down. Mayhap together we can manage to make both our situations slightly less pitiable. If not, we can at least enjoy our shared misery and misfortunes.”

“That seems optimistic given our starting place but let us try. You first.”

“Ah, order of precedence?”

“Age before beauty.”

Both chuckled, primarily because their best excuse for wit would not pass muster with a five-year-old.

They took chairs in front of the fire that was barely up to the task of removing the late November chill. The Earl poured two more glasses, then plopped the brandy decanter on a table.

With a sigh, he began, “I am afraid, son, I must ask a Herculean task of you. Things are happening so fast it makes my head spin, and we have very little time to do some extraordinarily disagreeable things.”

Darcy was not at all certain whether he hated or loved the idea.

Obviously, anything an Earl considered difficult was likely to be unpleasant at best and impossible at worst. On the other hand, doing something-anything-anything-at-all that did not involve his precarious position vis-à-vis his marital situation might have some appeal.

“Is there any background I need while you work up the nerve for the big ask?”

The Earl chuckled grimly. “Let us start with the obvious. Jeanette’s babe was stillborn last night, and the doctor says there can be no more attempts. She will not be able to present the next Earl—now or ever.”

“Are you certain?”

“Absolutely! Or as certain as the doctors can be about that sort of thing. Apparently, the damage is extensive. She will live, at least for the moment; but she will never carry another child.”

Darcy frowned. He found his cousin, the viscountess, to be a typical lady of the ton, so he had never formed or needed a strong opinion.

She seemed interested in little more than fashion, entertainment, and taking advantage of the privileges of her position.

She likewise never seemed to care at all for her husband, which Darcy could understand, since he could barely stand his supercilious cousin himself.

She seemed entirely indifferent to the idea of children as well, and it took more than six years to fall pregnant after her marriage.

It had gotten to the point where people wondered if she was barren, the viscount was sterile, or they just could not stand each other long enough to get the business over with. Darcy favoured the latter theory.

Despite not really caring for his cousin by marriage, he did feel for her. “How is her health?”

“As well as you might expect under the circumstances. Other than any lingering disappointment about doing her duty, I understand she is well enough.”

“That makes succession problematic, and you do not have all that many years to resolve it. I suppose you will have to disown him or try for an annulment, but either will take years, and completely ruin both reputations. It will not do much for yours either, but I suppose it must be done if you want to keep the Earldom intact.”

The Earl gave a grim chuckle. “It is nothing as simple as that. It turns out that Malcolm visited one brothel too many, or perhaps a hundred too many for all I know. He has the French Disease. Quite aside from the fact that no woman of any sense would touch him, let alone try to bear him a son, we will also soon have to bear with the inconvenience of him being dead. The physicians judge he is unlikely to see another summer.”

“How is it possible I know nothing of this?” Darcy asked with a gasp.

The Earl hung his head. “He hid it from all of us, and even had I known, I doubt I would have burdened you with it. You have enough responsibilities of your own. I have no idea whether he passed the pox on to Jeanette or not. It is entirely possible she will follow him to the grave. He kept it thoroughly hidden from me. I have only learnt about it in the last fortnight.”

“That leaves you in a precarious position.”

“Oh, it gets worse!”

Darcy stared, but could not muster the courage to ask, so his uncle continued, “He has entered the madness stage.”

“How do you know? He was about half mad to start with.”

The words were not entirely accurate, but it had to be admitted that the viscount had always been a bit off.

He gambled too much, drank too much, cavorted too much, and the state of the Earldom had never been in particularly good hands.

Everyone in the family gnashed their teeth and wrung their hands but otherwise hoped for the best. Young men usually grew out of such behaviour eventually.

The Earl grimaced again. “I have him restrained, but the last six months he went on the gambling binge from hell. I have debts—substantial debts—that I cannot pay immediately. They will take years to pay off, and that is assuming we can keep the creditors off our backs for that long, which is not entirely certain.”

Darcy leaned back, and for the first time in his life, wished he was a woman so he could cry with impunity. That thought only lasted a minute though.

“Perhaps it sounds harsh, but his death will probably be for the best. Is that all?”

The Earl shook his head sadly. “Not by half. Catty somehow convinced some bankers of the less savoury type to give her a large mortgage against Rosings.”

Unable to sit still, Darcy jumped up from his chair, stalked back and forth in circles a few times, and finally settled for walking up to the wall and bashing his fist against it a few times, hoping against hope that it would wake him from his nightmare.

Finally, his ire cooled a bit while his uncle looked on with grim amusement and appreciation for gallows humour, waiting patiently for his nephew to sit back down and continue.

“It seems we shall have to wait it out. The family’s reputation is still good enough.

Malcolm was not much better or worse than the average heir to an Earldom.

An heir will eventually appear one way or another.

You have Richard next in line. One of us can go to Rosings and rein Lady Catherine in.

It will be difficult and unpleasant, but I suppose we have endured worse. ”

“It gets worse.”

Unable to say much more, Darcy just nodded grimly.

“We do not have as much time as we might think. I have cancer, so this is likely to be my last Christmas as well. You know I hate to leave such an unholy mess, but that seems to be how it will be.”

Darcy poured another brandy to give himself something to do. “Something tells me you are not finished.”

“Reginald got himself killed in a hunting accident.”

Darcy slammed the entire glass of brandy down in one gulp and cursed with language that would make a sailor blush, at length, and in detail.

His other cousin, Reginald, the much lamented second spare in case of deep trouble had always been a weak candidate, but since the Earl had his own healthy heir and spare, and a babe on the way, nobody worried.

The Earl had always been an optimistic man (overly so in Darcy’s opinion) and had never taken any further steps to secure his legacy.

Darcy never worried about it because he had enough problems of his own without borrowing trouble.

“I do not see the problem. You just need to recall Richard, get him married, and start grooming him for the role. He will hate it, but it must be done.”

The earl sighed. “Now we get back to it. You see—”

Darcy was surprised when the earl paused and took a deep breath like a boy plucking up his courage before jumping into a river.

“Richard has been captured, and let us just say, the French are understandably reluctant to return him.”

Glass shattered as Darcy hurled the brandy snifter into the fire, and then his uncle jumped when he slammed his fist down on the table to complete the point. It seemed obvious what the big ask was, but Darcy thought he may as well get it out in the open.

“Are you really about to ask me to negotiate his release?”

The Earl frowned ferociously. “They will only negotiate in person, and you are the only one I can trust with the job. I would go myself but cannot for obvious reasons. At the moment, they believe they have the spare. Imagine if they learn they have the heir.”

Darcy picked up another glass and filled it with brandy to give himself a minute to think. “What happens if I do not go—or more likely, go and fail?”