Chapter 8
EIGHT
UNDESERVING OF HIS LARGESSE
Darcy was quickly admitted to the house in Gracechurch Street with the same efficiency as he had been only hours before.
Another one of my failures, he thought dully as he followed the housekeeper to the parlour.
To think these people so much beneath me that I could not marry their niece because of it.
For the Gardiners, he saw, were prosperous and fashionable.
He had noted it absently before, but his mind was not truly comprehending the details of it.
Now he considered that Mrs Gardiner was an attractive woman not so much older than himself.
And then there was Mr Gardiner—who appeared to be awaiting someone or something in the parlour—who appeared, similarly, a man of prosperity and fashion, a man who could not have been older than thirty-five.
He had been on a green sofa by the window, a book unopened on a table beside him. He rose to greet Darcy, immediately apologising for any irregularities in the household conduct.
“Do not make yourself uneasy,” Darcy assured him. “Everyone has treated me with the utmost respect.”
They both took seats, Mr Gardiner resuming his position nearest the window. “Things are in a bit of turmoil today,” he explained. “My niece has taken ill, very ill, and I await the physician.”
This was a surprise. “Miss Bennet is ill?”
Mr Gardiner nodded. “She was caught in the rain yesterday for quite some time and is now stricken with fever and a cough.”
“I am very sorry to hear it.” From what the man said—and did not say—Darcy suspected he was unaware of the true peril Miss Bennet faced. “I ought not to have called; I was not aware of all that was happening herein.”
“Think nothing of that,” he said with an abstracted geniality. “We are honoured, sir. But you did not call to see me, I am sure.”
“I needed to speak with Miss Elizabeth,” Darcy said. “On a matter pertaining to…Kent. I would imagine she is busy with her sister, though, so I can always come back another time.”
“We would not have you running back and forth from your home. Allow me to summon her.” Mr Gardiner went to the door, opening it and speaking to someone just outside, likely a maid, about asking Miss Elizabeth to come down.
Then he returned to the parlour and sat with Darcy. “Would you like some tea?” he said. “Or perhaps something stronger?”
A demurral was on Darcy’s lips by rote, but he stopped himself, finding that the notion of something stronger was appealing. “The latter might do well.”
“I was hoping you would say that.” Mr Gardiner rose and went to a sideboard, withdrawing from it a bottle. “Pray do not ask me how I got it.”
A fine Cognac, Darcy recognised. From Croizet, the year prior, already known as an exceptional vintage. “You need not answer to me, sir. I have a cousin who consorts regularly with a known smuggler so that his brandy supply is not interrupted.”
The Cognac was every bit as delicious as had been reported, and Darcy felt he drank it embarrassingly quickly.
He thought he ought to refuse a second, but Mr Gardiner poured it and it would have been a shame to waste it, and so he enjoyed a second, this time sipping slowly. Elizabeth entered the room as he did.
Though it had been mere hours since he left her, she looked as if she had been awake for days. I suppose having the weight of the world on one’s slender shoulders is tiring, he thought as he rose and bowed.
Mr Gardiner excused himself with vague promises of leaving doors open and sending in a maid which Elizabeth heard with a half-hearted smile before turning to Darcy. “As you might already have inferred, he does not know…”
Darcy nodded. “But it seems your sister has taken ill?”
Elizabeth nodded. “A fever, a cough,” she said. “You were at Netherfield last autumn, and you saw how she is affected by colds. There is something within her and my sister Kitty that makes it more difficult for them to chase off even the commonplace maladies.”
“I am sorry to hear it. I am certain she will recover and be well.”
She only nodded again in an unconvinced manner.
He wanted, with a force that surprised even him, to take her hand. He did not. Instead he shored up his resolve and said, “I have come directly from my meeting with Bingley.”
“From your aspect, and the fact that he did not accompany you here, I must conclude that meeting did not go as anticipated.”
“It did not, I fear. Bingley denies that anything untoward happened between him and your sister.”
“He would call her a liar?”
“He believes her mistaken,” he said gently.
She absorbed this without visible reaction. He thought, not for the first time, that she had more composure than she was ever given credit for—that people saw her liveliness and mistook it for lightness, and did not see the iron beneath the silk.
“I hardly know what to say. Why would Jane say such a thing if it were not true? It is certainly not to her advantage. Not to the advantage of any of us.”
Darcy nodded sympathetically. “I confess he has gravely disappointed me. He will not acknowledge any responsibility. He has convinced himself, or is attempting to convince himself, that the situation cannot be as it is.”
She nodded, her eyes still downcast. “It is an inconvenience for him to be sure. I suppose we, neither of us, can be surprised.”
“I am surprised. I believed him better than that, to do as he had done and refuse to own it.”
She turned her head to look out the window, sighing heavily.
“Elizabeth?”
She turned to look at him. She was not crying at this latest blow, but the bleak look in her eyes was, in some ways, far worse.
“I believe you and I believe your sister. Something happened that night that he must answer for. I shall not rest until I can make that happen.”
She smiled at him in a way that nearly took his breath away. “You are too good, Mr Darcy, but…but this battle is not yours to fight. It is my family’s trial, and we must do as we can to save Jane and our family reputation, even if now it seems impossible to do so.”
“I am not innocent in this. It was on my advice—”
“You must not blame yourself. You did what you thought best with the information available to you. Mr Bingley is a grown man. It was his decision to take your advisements and his choice to neither return to the house which was legally his nor to write to anyone in Hertfordshire and enquire after her or our family.”
“My efforts with Bingley are not exhausted,” he vowed. “He will admit his wrongdoing and make it right.”
She did not appear to have heard him. “I do not know what will become of us. I cannot see what any of us are to do. Once Jane recovers—and I know she will no matter how desperately ill she seems now—we will go to Longbourn and tell my mother and father what has happened. And then?” She looked at him, and for a moment the composure slipped entirely, and what was beneath it was very raw.
“Then who knows what will happen? It is unimaginable. It feels like the end of all I have ever known.”
The end of all she had ever known. He supposed in some ways it must be.
“I hope I do not sound overly proud when I say that Mrs Darcy, and the family of Mrs Darcy, will be far better placed to endure scandal than Miss Elizabeth Bennet and her family may be. I do not mean to turn this tragedy into an advantage for myself. But I love you and I wish to marry you.”
“It will not do.” She reached out and laid her hand on his own, her gaze upon him earnest. “You deserve far more than to be covered in the Bennet family shame.”
He flipped his hand over so that it was holding hers. “We could take her to Pemberley,” he murmured. “Let it be known that she is a widow, a distant relation of mine or yours whose husband died in the war. It is a common enough tale.”
He watched her comprehend what he had said, the plan he had hastily concocted on his way to Gracechurch Street.
“I could never do that.”
“Why not?”
“I should be a hypocrite if I did,” she said. “Only two days ago, I would have said I did not much like you. Yes, it was an opinion formed on lies and half-truths…but also my vanity, I am sorry to say.”
“Vanity?”
“I heard you, as I believe you know, on the first night of our acquaintance, when Mr Bingley teased you about dancing and urged you to ask me to dance. I was determined from the moment I heard your reply to not only never dance with you, but to dislike you thenceforth. What else could I do? All my friends and neighbours teased me for it, so I had to be impudent about it, or else feel the weight of my mortification.”
Deep regret pierced him. How was it he never considered that, how his rudeness must have affected her? Was he, in his own way, just as thoughtless as Bingley?
“I beg you would forgive me. I am ashamed of myself for speaking so.”
“I do not mean to drag such things forth, not at a time like this, not amid all the kindness you have offered to me,” she said.
“I only mean it to say that for me to accept your generosity seems…grasping and unfair. I have not been a friend to you for many months now, and such a hasty reversal amid my family trials…it is not right. I am not deserving of your largesse.”
“Do not think of that.” He leant towards her. “We can begin anew and forget what happened back then.”
“I must,” she said. “For it would be disingenuous, nay dishonourable, of me now to pretend my feelings have undergone so material a change as to permit you to do so much for me. For my family. My feelings for you have changed—how could they not, knowing what I now know, understanding you better than I did before—but I will not use you, or your family name in this way. I will not take advantage of your feelings to my own material advantage, not when I have offered you nothing but impertinence and spleen all the months we have known one another.”
It was a fine and noble sentiment, and he thought that he never could have admired her more.
She might have easily grabbed onto the deliverance he offered, if even marrying him to spare herself from the disgrace of the Bennet name.
Instead, she chose to stand beside her sister and walk bravely into the fire because it was the right thing to do.
With a sigh, he capitulated to her. “Nevertheless, I am not finished trying, not with you and not with my friend. Bingley has said what he has said, and perhaps he even believes it. But he will be prevailed upon to do what is right.”
He rose. “You are likely wishing to return to your sister. I will see myself out, but might I call tomorrow?”
She smiled and nodded as she, too, rose and led him out into the hall. She then turned towards a staircase as he went the other way towards the door, hoping it would not be rude to neglect to bid farewell to Mr Gardiner who was nowhere in sight.
Darcy stood on the step a moment longer than was necessary, and then he turned and walked back out into Gracechurch Street.
His mind was already working feverishly, sorting through possibilities and contacts and the particular advantages of knowing everyone worth knowing in London.
Beneath that, steady and insistent, was the memory of her face when she said, ‘It feels like the end of all I have ever known’, and the corresponding and absolute clarity of his own intention, which was simply that he would not allow it to be.