Chapter Eighteen
After this, we all turned out for a walk in the gardens of Trawlings, which were quite well tended and pretty at this time of year.
Elizabeth and her brother ended up walking ahead of everyone else, heads together, talking privately, and none of us interfered.
I walked, instead, with the Bingleys and Lady Susannah, until she settled herself on a bench and waved us off with her cane.
“I shall sit myself here and not exert myself further,” she said. “You young ones go on with yourselves.”
We all stayed and argued politely with Lady Susannah for several moments until she convinced us to go on without her, and the three of us continued on our way.
“Oh, she is going to talk to him the entire time,” said Caroline. “We can not even see them any more. They have gotten so far ahead of us. And if I am to be charming a man like that, how am I to do so when I cannot even get close to him or speak to him at all?”
“You are speaking of Mr. Bennet and my wife, I assume,” I said. “I wonder if you notice that he seems reticent to speak to you at all.”
“Mind your business, Mr. Darcy,” said Mr. Bingley mildly. “He does not seem reticent.”
“Oh, everyone seems reticent to speak to me,” said Caroline. “But I must say, I cannot understand it at all. There are no whispers about her, none. How is it accomplished? What have you done, Mr. Darcy?”
I touched my chest. “Me?”
“Well, near as I can understand it,” said Caroline, “you swoop in and marry the girl who is not going to be allowed to be married because otherwise she cannot inherit. Except, she had already run off to elope with someone else—”
“You told her of this?” I asked Bingley. “Or did she hear it elsewhere?”
“I told her,” said Bingley. “I daresay she is right and no one has breathed a word about your wife’s little escapade since the two of you have been married.”
“Yes, and why is that?” said Caroline. “This is what I do not understand. Why does everything work out so well for her? Why does she get to marry you and have the attention of her brother and behave entirely badly—”
“She does not behave badly,” I broke in.
Caroline scoffed. “I hardly know what to say to that. I think she must have bewitched you.”
I turned to look at her. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I have conversed with you, Mr. Darcy, on a number of occasions, and I would guarantee that is not the sort of woman you wished to marry.” Caroline put her hands on her hips.
“You have spent quite a bit of time enumerating the things that you want from a wife, and she seems to fulfill exactly none of your requirements.”
Perhaps she was correct about that. “Love is a strange thing, Miss Bingley,” I said. “It sweeps in and takes you right out to sea, I suppose. But it is lovely. She is lovely. We are very happy.”
“I should think all you would do was argue,” said Caroline.
“We… have disagreements from time to time,” I said. “But that… we…” I could feel my face heating up.
“Oh, so it’s like that,” said Bingley in a knowing voice.
“It is not like anything at all,” I said.
“At any rate, I am growing concerned,” said Caroline. “You told me that you thought I might expect a proposal from Mr. Bennet, but he has issued nothing like that.” This was directed at her brother. “Do you think he has changed his mind?”
“I know he has not,” said Mr. Bingley. He shot me a pointed look. “And I’ll thank you to keep your counsel, Mr. Darcy.”
I huffed.
After some time, we ran into Elizabeth and her brother coming back along the path, and we turned and all walked together.
Bennet pulled me to the back of the company to speak to me, and he and I lagged behind the rest and talked in quiet voices.
“She tells me that the two of you are working things out,” said Bennet. “But I have to say, when she returned here, it was as I feared, that you were trying to strip away everything about her that is what makes her who she is.”
“I was not,” I said. “But I suppose I can see how it looked that way.”
“She says, however, that you have expressed your disgust with my lifestyle with Bingley.”
“I don’t know if I said it was disgusting,” I said. Of course, it was disgusting. “I am sorry, but we all know this is sinful behavior, that is all that I am saying. And it goes against the nature of things.”
“I don’t think it does go against nature,” he countered.
“I have seen too many male dogs mounting each other to think otherwise. But I will agree that it goes against our social norms and structures. However, there have been societies who approved of it in the past. We all know of Patroclus and Achilles, after all.”
I let that sink in for a bit of time. There was an argument on the tip of my tongue, that the pagans were wrong about everything and that we had the true and infallible word of God to guide us, but I did not make it, for I was truly unsettled by what he had said.
I needed to sort through that before I made any kind of response.
“I do not say this to convince you,” he said. “It is only that I hear that you think I am not a good influence on my sister, and that you blame the aspects of her character that you find objectionable on me.”
“Again, that is really not exactly what I said,” I broke in.
“I think you should allow my sister to travel with myself and Bingley and stay home,” he said.
I turned to him in shock. “What?”
“And if you will agree to that, I will agree to steer clear of Elizabeth the rest of the time. You may take her off to your country house now. Bingley says it is called Pemberley. You can take her away and the two of you can have your lives together. But come August, you will let her come with us on a trip abroad, for two months, and you will stay behind and leave me my sister.”
“Leave you your sister?”
“I am convinced the only way I shall have her the way she used to be is out of your influence,” he said.
“Well,” I said, “since we are issuing dictates on the other’s behavior and what we think each other should do, I think you should tell Miss Bingley what your relationship is with her brother before you propose to her.”
“Oh, you do?”
“I think it is only fair to allow her to know what she is giving up if she marries you.”
He made a face, looking away.
“Yes, I can see that you are uncomfortable with it. When she fawns over you—”
“It is dishonest, yes,” he said. “But I cannot go about telling everyone about that.”
“Well, she will conceal your secret,” I said. “It would ruin her brother else.”
“That is true,” he said softly.
“I cannot agree to surrender my wife to you to travel without me,” I said. “I cannot simply say I shall do that.”
“I wish she had not married you,” he said. “If she had married Bingley—”
“You cannot mean that,” I said.
“She is in love with you, that much is clear,” he said. “And I think you love her, too, in whatever way you are able to come by love.”
“What does that mean?” I demanded.
“But the two of you are not meant to be together. You are opposites and you want different things. If you keep her too close, you will stifle her. And if you do not, the two of you will always be at odds.”
“We are not at odds!” I exclaimed.
“I have just spoken to her all afternoon on this walk, and all she speaks of are every little thing that the two of you disagree about.”
I looked at the back of her head as she was speaking to Mr. Bingley and his sister. I did not feel as if we were at odds. Did she truly feel that way?
“Your brother thinks we are at odds,” I whispered to her, later, in the darkness of her bedchamber.
“Let us not talk about my brother right now,” she whispered back, running her forehead against my bare chest.
“It is not about your brother,” I said. “I do not feel as if we are at odds. In this moment, right now, in fact, I feel as if we are rather one flesh. I feel ever so close to you, and even when we are at odds, there is some quality to it, something that seems to draw us together in its own way.”
She hummed into my skin. “Yes, yes, I quite agree.”
“Good,” I said, shutting my eyes, running my hand over her bare spine, feeling at peace with it all.
“Perhaps that is what it is between us, the thing that gives our union such spark and movement,” she said. “It is because we are not always in agreement, because there is such a passion to our differences. You like me because I am not like you, and I like you because you are not like me.”
“Perhaps,” I said. “After all, it would be quite boring to be in the company of someone exactly like yourself.”
“Yes,” she said, “and have you noticed how easy it is to hate things in others that remind you of things within yourself?”
“Indeed I have,” I said. “I think that is one of those odd truths that we all wonder about. Why is it so? In my case, I suppose it is obvious that I do not like myself—”
“That is not at all obvious,” she said. “Of all the men on earth, you seem to be the one with the highest opinion of himself.”
I gasped. “That is not at all the case. How could you say that?”
She giggled into me. “Oh, Lord, Will, you are entirely self-important and you have such ideas about what is right and wrong, and you will not change any of them—”
“This is about your brother again.” I sighed heavily. “We cannot but have a discussion of him, it seems.”
“It has absolutely nothing to do with my brother,” she said. “Why, if someone were to say to you that they knew a number of accomplished ladies, you should say that you know only three dozen, and—”
“Three dozen?” I scoffed. “Perhaps half a dozen. There is such a to-do made over women’s accomplishments, truly, but I rarely find it so impressive as all of that.”
She laughed helplessly into my chest. “Ah, yes, half a dozen, how could I think otherwise?”
“You, of course, are remarkably accomplished.”
“I am not.” She lifted her head to smirk down on me. “My mother is likely more accomplished than I am. You know I have only a passably pleasing voice, that my piano-playing is a bit awful, and that I do not even speak French.”
“You are perfection, however,” I said, toying with the edges of her hair. “You blind me with your brilliance.”
“You are only saying that because you are in love with me.”
I laughed softly. I was floating again. “I do love you,” I murmured. “Most ardently.”
“And I love you,” she said. “But my brother…”
“Oh, I thought we weren’t going to speak of him.”
“He does not like you.” She put her head back on my chest. “It is odd, you know, because he was always the sort to see the best in everyone, but he is so very protective of me.”
“I think he is angry because you would not give up all your happiness to marry Bingley.”
“No, he understands I could never have done that,” she said, sighing. “I do wonder about all our plans to travel, though. Will the two of you be at each other’s throats?”
I sighed heavily. Well, there it was, wasn’t it? She would rather I not come along with them in August. I could hear it in her voice. I continued to toy with the edges of her hair. “He has said I should stay home and allow you to go without me.”
“Allow me?” She groaned. “And this, you see, is why I was convinced never to get married in the first place, all of this ordering me about, trying to rule over me, and do not tell me that it is natural for you to rule over me, or I shall likely go mad.”
“I do try to rule over you,” I said in a silky sort of voice. “Much good it does me.”
She was smiling. “Ah, all right, Will, all right.”
“It is as I say, Lizzy, we are not at odds. This is part of it between us, I think. At least, anyway, I like it.”
She let out a very noisy breath, snuggling into me. “Oh, yes, I like it, too.”
“Then everything will turn out right in the end,” I said. “We can count on that, I think.”
“Yes,” she said. “Our love is unbreakable.”