Chapter 13 #2
“I mean, after all, you have just removed me from Wickham because you say his selfishness makes him unable to care for a wife. Cannot Lizzy say the same of you?” She tossed herself back into the seat with a little flounce, pleased by her devastating logic.
He could not deny her charge. Whereas Wickham was ruled by vice, he had been ruled by temper and pride. In both cases, the outcome was ruination.
“If ever I find her,” he said, “I hope she will allow me to show her that I have changed. My heart is, and always was, hers, but the fault in my temper that disallowed it has been remedied.”
Lydia studied him for a moment, the movement of the carriage causing the massive bonnet on her head to dip and sway about.
At length she said, more gently this time, “I think it very likely she died, but if she did not and merely hides from you? I daresay you have little chance of finding her. Lizzy has always been very good at hiding, always in a place you would never imagine to look.”
Having returned Lydia to the house, Darcy went back to the place he had found her, entering the tavern beneath Wickham’s rooms. Wickham was at a gaming table in the back, no doubt losing money he did not have, and Darcy sat at a table to await him.
After nearly an hour, Wickham strolled over and sat down, leaning back and affecting a posture of great nonchalance and ease.
With a bored sigh, he said, “Will you challenge me? As you will, but she proved quite the disappointment. For all her education and supposed refinements, Georgiana was much more responsive. I guess all these jokes you hear about country girls have little basis in fact. I must say, I feel quite dissatisfied.”
Darcy disregarded the last and said, “Whether there is a challenge is up to you. I come here with an offer: passage to the colonies, Australia, the Indies, wherever you wish, and funds to get you settled into business once you are there.”
Wickham looked sceptical, so Darcy added, “I want you gone, but I would prefer not to kill you.”
“No?” Wickham raised one eyebrow. “That surprises me.”
“Consider this my final effort to see you as something but a schemer and a spendthrift.”
“How will you know? If I am in Jamaica…”
“You wish to go to Jamaica?”
“Sounds as well as anywhere else. Or perhaps Boston? I have heard lovely things about Boston.”
“Just inform me of your decision that I may arrange your passage. In any case, I shall not know how you behave. I can only hope.”
Darcy summoned the publican and settled Wickham’s bill, much to the man’s astonishment. Rising, he turned to Wickham. “Pray, do me this much, if you will. If, on your way, you should happen to see her…”
“Who?”
“My wife.” Darcy paused, clearing his throat.
“If I see her? Where? In Jamaica?”
“In the course of your travels,” Darcy replied impatiently. “Jamaica, America, Van Diemans Land. Should you see her, send word to me and me only, lest you forget our arrangement.”
Wickham stood, looking surprisingly sympathetic. “I can scarce recall what Mrs Darcy even looks like. I met her only once. Unless she was introduced to me again, I would have no idea who she was.”
Darcy could think of nothing but to nod in reply, and then he left.
By the festive season of 1813, Darcy, in the curious way of the bereaved, began to doubt that he remembered Elizabeth exactly.
Was her hair a chestnut brown? Or were there traces of auburn in it?
Her eyes, he could never forget, but how exactly was the sound of her voice?
Did she eat ragout? Were her feet small or large?
These and other things tormented him; he could not abide beginning to forget who she was, all the small intricacies of her.
But one thing he did remember: how he loved her. He remembered them laughing, talking all night, even their arguments—such precious, dear moments. Some days, the agony of missing her had numbed, but other days, it screamed within him. Oh, what his pride, his resentful temper, had cost him!
It was one such day when his cousin had the misfortune to meet him in his club. “Happy Christmas!” he cried, seeming a bit drunk despite the fact it was a Monday morning.
“What have you been into already?” Darcy asked suspiciously.
“Nothing at all,” Saye replied. “Cannot a man be happy for the season?”
“The season?”
“The festive season? Christmas, Boxing Day, making merry under the mistletoe, and pretty girls drinking egg nog?”
“Oh. That.”
“Yes, that.” Saye reached over and chucked Darcy under the chin, a habit that had vexed Darcy as a child and did even more so now. He batted his cousin’s hand away.
“Be nice, Darcy, for I have exciting news to tell you.”
“More news?” Darcy groaned. “I have already had it from Bingley that he will have another child soon.”
“Another one? Was not the first just whelped?”
“A girl. Elizabeth, but they call her Liza. She is six months old, I believe.”
“Well I know what I shall give Bingley for Christmas,” Saye said. “A packet of condoms. For his wife’s sake, if none other.”
“Elizabeth’s aunt, Mrs Gardiner, is expecting a child as well. As is her younger sister, Mrs Collins.”
“Of course, in the manner of all things from France, the sheaths can be rather inconstant in their utility.”
“The whole world is moving on,” said Darcy wistfully, “without Elizabeth to be here for it.”
“Which brings me to my brother’s news.”
Darcy jerked immediately from his gloom. “What?”
Saye chuckled gleefully, then leant forward and spoke in hushed tones. “Miss Marianne Thorpe…”
“Merchant’s daughter?”
“Wealthy merchant’s daughter. Her fortune is fifty thousand.”
Darcy raised his brows with surprise but said nothing more.
“She seems to be in a state, and my dear brother is reportedly the cause. So Father is off to the archbishop, and we shall have a wedding just after the New Year.”
“Good lord! I am all astonishment,” said Darcy. “Fitzwilliam did not drop a word of this to me.”
“It has all happened rather quickly,” Saye acknowledged. “But quickness is needful in such cases as these.”
“And his lordship? Is he enraged?”
Saye shrugged. “He might have wished for someone with better connexions, but Miss Thorpe’s father is very wealthy and well-placed. And you know he is ever mindful that if the jig has been danced, the piper must be paid.”
“And Richard?”
“What about him?” Colonel Fitzwilliam had arrived at the table unseen by his cousin and brother, and he tossed himself into a chair. “I gather you have told Darcy my news?”
“He has,” said Darcy. “I must congratulate you.”
“She is a sweet girl—”
“And very pretty,” said Saye. “I feel she might have done better than a gnarled old soldier.”
Fitzwilliam offered a half-hearted, obscene gesture to his brother before saying to Darcy, “I daresay we shall be very happy together. At my age, no sense wasting time. Unlike my brother, who will be forty and still haunting Almack’s.”
“God forbid,” said Saye with a noisy slurp of his drink. “It is not my fault the ladies of London are so dull. The sameness of them all! Darcy, once this one is done being shackled, I shall insist you and I go off adventuring. We shall find me a bride in the back country, or by the sea perhaps.”
Fitzwilliam married Miss Marianne Thorpe in a modest and rapid ceremony just after Twelfth Night. Anyone who looked askance at the rapidity of the matter was told firmly that there had been an understanding in place for some time.
In February, in a decidedly less modest fashion, a ball was given to introduce the new Mrs Fitzwilliam to the Matlocks’ circle, a group comprising several hundred or so.
It was at this ball that Miss Lydia Bennet met Mr Wallace ‘Jolly’ Rollings, a gentleman from Dorset who had been at school with Darcy.
Jolly was a large, oafish sort of fellow who somehow always contrived to look unkempt despite having fortune enough for both an excellent tailor and valet.
Lydia proclaimed that she found him unattractive and silly and red hair was her least favourite on a man.
Yet somehow her heart was captured. “I cannot stop laughing when I am with him,” she told them all at the breakfast table one morning. “He is ever so much fun, and everyone likes him. I daresay that we would never want for diversion.”
Jolly came upon Darcy one early spring day as he walked in the park with Georgiana and Saye during the fashionable hour. Kitty and Lydia, being less inclined towards exercise, had not wished to accompany them.
“Ho, Darcy!” called Jolly when he saw them. “I was just on my way to call at your home.”
“Were you?” Darcy asked drily. “How unfortunate. Only the young ladies are at home right now.”
“It was you I wished to speak to,” Jolly said. “You simply must bring Miss Lydia to Oakdale Park after Easter.”
Oakdale Park was the seat of the Rollings family. Although Lydia had initially dismissed it as being near to ‘dreary Dorset’, as she had deemed it, learning it was quite near the fashionable Weymouth soon made her more interested in seeing it.
Darcy’s immediate notion had been to refuse, but Lydia, it would seem, had accepted for them all.
In any case, it had been some time since he had been in that county, and while he doubted he would find Elizabeth anywhere near there, neither could he rule it out.
Moreover, he was certain Kitty would also wish for the visit.
If there was one thing he had learnt about Elizabeth’s youngest sisters, it was, when their interests were roused, there was scarce that could stop them.
They paused a moment; two young boys went tearing by, the smallest of them careering directly into Darcy, then bouncing back onto his bottom.
He was too shocked to cry, and Darcy bent, helping him back to his feet.
A red-faced, angry governess was upon them in a moment, full of apologies for Darcy and promises of the switch for the boy.
There was something about the whole scene that made Darcy feel rather wistful.
“Darcy? Will you come then?” Jolly pressed, returning him to the present.
“Very well,” said Darcy. “Consider it done.”