Chapter 18
Although Elizabeth had been loath to imagine leaving Weymouth, as the days leading up to her departure for Pemberley passed, she began to wish she could leave sooner.
Darcy was in near-constant attendance at the house on Johnstone Row.
She found her heart sinking at the very sound of his footsteps, though she scolded herself for feeling thus.
You will soon need to see him every day!
However, it was good for Bennet to have his father spend time with him, and indeed, Darcy did, laughing and playing with him, even attending Merry while she fed him.
Elizabeth found herself much more inclined towards spending time with her sisters, though Lydia was too busy trying to secure Mr Rollings to do much else.
Elizabeth invited them all to a family dinner—it was odd to see Darcy at the head of her table, but propriety dictated it. She sat to his right with Kitty, and Georgiana was across from her.
“Lizzy, did Darcy tell you that Mary has a son?” Kitty said, giggling wildly. “She named him Fordyce, can you even imagine that?”
“Who is Mary’s husband?” Elizabeth asked.
Kitty stopped giggling immediately and cast Darcy a look. Beneath the table, Elizabeth felt Darcy reaching towards her. She moved her hand to where he could not find it.
“Mary has married Mr Collins,” said Darcy gravely.
“Mr Collins? Oh.” Elizabeth lowered her eyes to her plate. “So Charlotte…?”
“She died in childbirth. In September, it will be two years that she is gone.”
Tears immediately filled Elizabeth’s eyes. After a few minutes, she rose, saying politely, “Excuse me for just a moment.”
She hurriedly walked down the hall, hastening up the steps and entering into her bedchamber.
Once there, she threw herself face down on her bed and screamed into her pillow as loudly as she could before dissolving into tears.
Memories jumbled and crowded her mind: Charlotte playing games with her as a child, whispered secrets in the tree outside Lucas Lodge, stifled giggles in church, and a multitude of morning-after tittle-tattles following assemblies.
Ah, but she had always imagined they would be old ladies together, clucking and gossiping just like their mothers.
Evidently, none of that was to be. Charlotte was long gone, and Elizabeth had not even the chance to say farewell.
Then again, such was life, was it not? Whether she had been in Derbyshire, Weymouth, London, or Meryton, death was sudden and complete. She would not have been there.
She composed herself as quickly as she could, then descended to the dining room. The others were just as she had left them—it seemed no one had eaten much or even spoken in her absence. “Elizabeth, I am sorry—” Darcy began.
She interrupted, a bright, false smile on her face, saying to Kitty, “Our mother must be delighted that one of her daughters will take her place as mistress of Longbourn.”
Then to Darcy, she asked, “Is Lady Catherine happy to have my sister at Hunsford?”
Elizabeth still remembered Lady Catherine’s thoughts on her marriage to Darcy.
The lady, having long harboured wishes of acquiring her nephew as her son, was incensed that he had dared to marry, in the face of her disapproval and anger, a country nobody.
In a letter to her new niece, she had denounced Elizabeth and all her sisters as common harlots, wise in the ways of luring a man into marriage through the use of lusty temptations.
It had been a letter Elizabeth had thought on often during the dark days in London when Darcy rejected her.
Darcy cleared his throat uncomfortably. “For whatever Lady Catherine thought of the new Mrs Collins, hard on the heels of that announcement, our cousin Anne made her own announcement that she intended to wed one of Mr Collins’s friends.”
“Really?” Elizabeth did not know which part of this statement was more amazing—that Mr Collins had a friend or that Miss Anne de Bourgh had wished to marry him.
Darcy smiled faintly. “Yes, Mr Reece went to Hunsford to condole with Mr Collins after the death of his first wife. Reece has a small daughter, as he, too, had lost his wife in childbirth, though in his case, the babe had survived. Anne was immediately taken with the baby and had no objections to Mr Reece, and before anyone knew it, they were betrothed. Lady Catherine did not think it a suitable marriage as Mr Reece has neither title nor fortune, but it seems Anne did not much care about any of that.”
Elizabeth permitted herself a brief laugh that the other two ladies echoed.
Georgiana continued the tale, “Lady Catherine was so angry, she suffered apoplexy.”
“We do not know it was brought on by anger,” Darcy interjected.
“In any case, she was very ill for some time but did recover in all capacity except speech.” Georgiana hid her smile. “She cannot speak, and writing is somewhat difficult for her too.”
Elizabeth had many uncharitable thoughts running through her mind regarding the poetic justice of such a fate, but she merely said, “How unfortunate.”
“But seen in a providential light, it is fortunate as well,” said Darcy with a sly look.
“Likely, had she not lost her speech, Anne and Reece would have moved her into the dowager’s cottage at Rosings, but with such an affliction, they allow her to remain.
Mary and Anne have become intimate friends, and I believe it is a happy situation for all. ”
Elizabeth smiled at the thought of that. “How do Jane and Bingley get on? Have they a child yet?”
Kitty snorted, and Georgiana lowered her eyes. “They have two,” said Darcy. “A daughter and a son. They are but a year apart.”
“I long to see my dear Jane and her family. I can scarcely believe she is a mother, but then she will likely feel the same of me.” Elizabeth smiled a bit wistfully, looking down onto her plate.
“She is no less eager to see you, I am sure,” said Georgiana. “Perhaps they will visit us at Pemberley?”
“Are their children as amiable as Jane and Bingley? I picture two smiling little cherubs.”
“Baby Elizabeth is all that is smiling and amiable, as you might guess,” said Georgiana. “Their son—”
“Thomas Archibald Bingley,” Kitty interjected. “Which turned out to be an unfortunate name because he was, and remains, rather bald.”
“You were bald too,” Elizabeth informed her. “Mama despaired of you. So do not tease, else it should be inflicted on your own children.”
“Thomas is very sweet,” said Georgiana. “But much more serious and sober-minded than Baby Liza.”
“Oh Lizzy!” Kitty interrupted. “Our aunt Gardiner has had another baby too! Also Elizabeth, but they call her Beth!”
“So many Elizabeths!” Elizabeth said with a little laugh. “Like they all thought me dead!”
She recognised her error immediately. Indeed, most people probably did think her dead, and her chuckle turned into a frown at that thought.
So much hurt and grief surrounded her! Friends and family lost and mourned, people she would never see again, people who believed they would never see her again.
As so often happened in these past few days, she felt the enormity of the task ahead of her.
Could she ever be who she once was? Would that life ever feel like ‘her’ again?
She would not think on it now. With a nod to Mercer, she rose. “Let us have coffee in the drawing room, shall we?”
When all of the stories had been told, the time in Weymouth with Darcy grew difficult.
There were many times Darcy would try to apologise or speak of them and their marriage, but Elizabeth saw no point to that.
Nor did she think it needful that he know what she had done these two years past. It was done, why discuss it?
She was in Weymouth because of happenstance; there was no more to say of it than that.
Conversation thus languished, and their interactions became painfully polite. They could not be anything but awkward as Darcy attempted to further a reconciliation, and Elizabeth tried—politely, but with utmost certainty—to keep her distance from him.
Her feelings for her husband were conflicted.
She loved him, but she hated him. She missed him, but she wished he would go away.
She yearned to be held by him, yet his touch made her skin crawl.
Her thoughts and feelings were in such a tumult that she could hardly make sense of it.
She felt as though she was accosted by a new and unexpected emotion every five minutes, and in reality, it was sometimes all she could do to simply survive the day.
More than once, she would resolve in her mind that she could not go forward with this plan of reconciliation.
She would decide it very firmly, prepare herself to inform him…
and then she would get stuck. She would see Bennet and realise she had to move forward, or she would see Darcy and feel unable to disappoint him.
It was during one particularly difficult afternoon with him that she proposed a recently conceived notion.
They had spent their time in near silence, the discomfort between them nearly palpable.
Elizabeth found herself unnerved by nearly everything Darcy did.
His habit of twisting his signet ring made her tense, his tendency to gaze at her made her want to scream, even the sound of his breathing seemed like it was rubbing her raw. Had he always breathed so…so oddly?
She invited him to walk with her along the shore, and he agreed, because all he ever did was agree to whatever she said. Perversely, it vexed her.
“I do not think I can manage it.”
“Manage what?”
She swallowed heavily as her eyes roamed the shore.
Such familiar, dear sights were before her: the sea bathing machines, the esplanade, the gulls, all of it!
It was impossible to think of leaving. “I had an idea,” she began slowly, “that we might live at Pemberley for the autumn, town for the Season—or some of it—and then I could remain here with Bennet for the rest.”