Chapter 25
To Elizabeth’s bewilderment, Lydia held out a hand with a golden wedding band on its fourth finger.
“It is a fine ring, is it not?” her sister chuckled. “Henry will get me something much more splendid if My Favourite Girl does well, but this will do for now.”
“Your husband?!” Elizabeth choked, unable to comprehend what she was either seeing or hearing.
“What is the meaning of this, sir?” Mr Darcy demanded of Mr Michelson. He stood staunchly at Elizabeth’s side and spoke as indignantly as though Lydia were his own sister. “If this is a joke, I do not find it funny.”
“It is no joke, Mr Darcy,” the other man replied. “You know how Lydia is, laughing at everything — it is just the way she is made. Do not take offence where it is not needed. No, we were married in the local church yesterday, all properly with licence and witnesses, in the sight of God.”
“Married?!” Elizabeth now repeated, no closer to understanding and glad for the unsolicited support of Mr Darcy’s arm as well as his words. “How can you be married?”
“You were the one who gave me the idea, Lizzy, with your talk about actresses leading wretched lives and never finding a husband,” Lydia told them flippantly. “I sent Henry to London to get a common license the very next day, didn’t I?”
The theatre manager nodded, casting Lydia a smile as admiring as those she used to receive from the young officers of the militia regiment not so long ago. Dear Lord, was the man actually in love with her?! They barely knew one another.
“But you cannot marry someone just like that, Lydia,” Elizabeth protested. “There should have been permission from Father and a marriage contract and all kinds of things. There are laws in England. This is madness!”
“Oh, do calm down, Lizzy,” groaned Lydia, “You sound as bad as Mother when she has an attack of the vapours, and it makes my head ache. Look, after thinking things over last week, it was obvious to me that marrying Henry was the right thing to do, and so that is what I did.”
Elizabeth and Mr Darcy looked at one another in consternation, neither of them as satisfied with this explanation as Lydia and Mr Michelson seemed to be.
“A young girl acting on a reckless whim is one thing, Michelson,” Mr Darcy put to the apparent groom. “What is your excuse for this sorry tale?”
“Well, Mr Darcy, I don’t see it as any kind of sorry tale,” the theatre proprietor returned with some spirit, seeming to find his self-assurance again now that the big secret was out. “When Lydia explained things to me, I had to agree with her. It was all for the best.”
“I fail to see what explanation could possibly be adequate to this recklessness,” Mr Darcy replied coolly.
“Well, I do need a wife, and Lydia has the makings of a fine actress,” Mr Michelson told them.
“She can’t drag the Bennet name down either, if her name is now Michelson, so your side of the family should be happy too, Miss Bennet.
When I got your note about changing Lydia’s name, Mr Darcy, I thought you’d rumbled us, and we had to arrange things even faster. ”
“Now that I have a good husband, there is no need to bother that being on the stage could ruin my prospects,” Lydia expanded with enthusiasm on Mr Michelson’s points.
“My husband can protect me from any of the nasty men you warned me that actresses encounter, Lizzy. So, as Mrs Michelson, I can stay in Brighton and do as I like. Do you see now, Mr Darcy?”
Lydia’s audacity was jaw dropping. Elizabeth was temporarily stunned all over again, both with the shock of what she was hearing and the knowledge that she must soon relay it to the rest of her utterly unsuspecting family.
“Are you aware of Miss Lydia’s age, Michelson?” Mr Darcy demanded sternly. “Sixteen is very far from one-and-twenty, and Lydia’s parents have not given their consent to any marriage. This all sounds illegal to me. With Mr Bennet’s consent, I shall have my lawyers on the case by the morning.”
At the pronouncement, surprise at last perfused Mr Michelson’s face.
“Sixteen?!” he repeated, looking at Darcy’s face, Elizabeth’s, and then Lydia’s again. “I thought she was almost one-and-twenty, and a few months wouldn’t make a difference to anyone right-minded. That was what you told me, Lydia. You said you were almost one-and-twenty!”
Lydia giggled heedlessly, even talk of lawyers failing to shake her.
“Well, it’s true enough, Henry. I am almost one-and-twenty, for I am almost seventeen. And to be seventeen is to be nearly eighteen. That means that to be eighteen is to be almost nineteen, to be nineteen is to be almost twenty, and twenty is almost one-and-twenty, when you think of it rightly!”
“How could you both be so naive and careless over something as important as marriage?” Elizabeth scolded them.
“Don’t you realise that if you gave false statements to the church authorities about having parental consent, our parents can have your marriage declared invalid?
Mr Michelson could find himself in jail, Lydia. Is that what you want?”
Lydia bristled and held more firmly to Mr Michelson’s arm, making it clear that she intended to stand beside him.
“Just because you are too stupid to get yourself a good husband when you have the chance, Lizzy,” Lydia retorted, her eyes glancing to Mr Darcy, “it does not mean that everyone else is so slow. You want to ruin my fun and Mr Michelson’s life, too.
Well, I shan’t let you do either. If you try, you’ll be sorry. That goes for you too, Mr Darcy.”
Although Elizabeth attempted to protest this characterisation of their natural and reasonable concerns, Lydia would not be interrupted until she had finished saying her piece.
“We are married and we’re going to be happy together, and my first show opens this week, whether you like it or not, Lizzy!”
As she made this final assertion, the girl looked at them with a triumphant and challenging tilt of her chin that exasperated her older sister, despite familiarity with Lydia’s intemperate moods and outbursts of irrational feeling.
At such thoughtless, heedless defiance, Elizabeth’s own reason began to desert her, and she actually stamped her foot on the floor.
“Oh, you foolish, wicked….” she began to cry out at her youngest sister, but before she could get much further in this furious tirade, Mr Darcy drew her aside into a corner of the room.
Elizabeth did not resist the gentle but determined force of his hands, knowing that if he had not acted, she might even have been tempted to strike Lydia. She had not slapped anyone since earliest childhood, but today the aggravation was extreme.
“How could she? Oh, how could she do it?” Elizabeth exclaimed, “and how could Mr Michelson make himself party to such a debacle? How is this mess ever to be undone, Mr Darcy?”
In contrast to Elizabeth’s helpless fury, Lydia’s confrontational declaration seemed to have resolved Mr Darcy’s mood into something calmer, if no happier.
“We must consider very carefully what we say and do now, and how we advise your parents afterwards,” he said soberly. “I do not believe that this can be undone without real harm, and it may be a better situation than the one we previously faced.”
Elizabeth frowned, still too angry to think straight and only realising belatedly that Mr Darcy’s hands had remained resting lightly on her upper arms, his fingers on her bare skin below the short summer sleeves.
“What do you mean?” she asked warily, her breath catching slightly in her throat.
“A theatre owner might not be the husband your family would have chosen for Lydia, but Mr Michelson is at least a man of property and income, and he also seems genuinely enamoured of Lydia,” Mr Darcy set out, the words making sense logically but doing nothing to soothe Elizabeth’s ire.
“Enamoured? If enamoured means prepared to do anything for Lydia, no matter how foolish or wrong, then yes, he is enamoured.”
“Love does change how people see the world,” added Mr Darcy with a small laugh. “Things that were once madness become reasonable. Things that were once reasonable begin to seem like madness.”
“But this is madness! Pure madness. Lydia is only sixteen. She has no real idea what she has done yet in terms of the law and her future. She cannot know it. She cannot!”
Madness indeed to be standing there, talking of her sixteen-year-old sister’s unsanctioned wedding to the owner of the Hyperion Theatre in Brighton. Madness too, perhaps, to be almost standing in the embrace of Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy and looking up into his deep blue eyes.
For his part, Mr Darcy was looking at her as steadily as ever. “Still, if Mr Michelson is prepared to sign some kind of marriage settlement with Mr Bennet after the fact,” he told Elizabeth evenly, “I would have to advise your family to accept the fait accompli.”
Elizabeth stared back at him. Was Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley — the man she once considered the proudest and most correct gentleman of her acquaintance — really suggesting that she and her family ought to accept this precipitate and lunatic marriage, and Lydia’s chosen career along with it?
“Accept the unacceptable?” she questioned sharply. “How can any right-minded person do that, Mr Darcy?”
“Situations change, Elizabeth,” he said, even more earnestly, his use of her Christian name not feeling improper in this strange moment. “People change. I know this because I have changed and do not see the world as I once did, nor feel as I once felt.”
These statements gave Elizabeth pause for thought as well as sparking an odd frisson in her stomach. Had she not also changed in the time that she had known Mr Darcy, perhaps even for the better?
She certainly hoped she was no longer the same headstrong young woman who had given George Wickham the benefit of the doubt over Fitzwilliam Darcy, largely on the basis of a public amiability that turned out to cover only immorality and licentiousness.
Yet, whether Elizabeth had compassion for personal change or not, Lydia’s particular transgressions were surely too large to be overlooked or massaged into a shape that the Bennets or society at large could accommodate. Or were they?
“Lydia’s marriage is a fact that cannot be undone,” Mr Darcy continued. “In fact, greater harm and reputational damage could be incurred by trying. The tale would be across Brighton and London in a day if something like this came to court. Then, what if there were a child to consider, too?”
At this last thought, Elizabeth briefly closed her eyes.
That had not even crossed her mind, but the marriage had taken place yesterday, and she strongly suspected that Lydia had spent the night at Mr Michelson’s house afterwards.
Elizabeth thought again of the evasive laughter of the girls at Mrs Browns’ who could not tell of Lydia’s whereabouts earlier that morning, understanding their looks and words much better now, to her sorrow.
“Yes,” she said with some difficulty. “I wish you were not right, Mr Darcy, but I fear that you may be. Oh, but what shall become of my wretched sister? I cannot simply abandon her to this fate.”
“Lydia has chosen a life that neither you nor I would have chosen for her, but we go too far in calling it wretched. Think how much worse it could have been.”
“If Lydia had not married Mr Michelson, you mean?”
“There are far worse fates than marrying someone of slightly lower social status,” stated Mr Darcy, uttering words that surely once would have been anathema from his lips.
“Imagine if your sister had run away with a rogue like George Wickham, for example. Imagine if there had been no marriage at all. That would have been a real scandal and cause for misery, would it not?”
Elizabeth gave a rather miserable laugh as he raised this awful hypothetical. Yes, Lydia’s present escapade likely was better than the scenario Mr Darcy sketched out, but that was saying very little for it.
“So, we are to celebrate Lydia only somewhat degrading her reputation and that of our family, rather than entirely ruining it?”
Mr Darcy’s face did not change as he nodded.
“Your mother need only admit to her friends that her youngest daughter has married a theatre owner in Brighton. It will be merely a piece of idle gossip — briefly interesting, and then quickly forgotten. Your oldest sister is marrying well, and that will balance out any minor social injury to your family. In a year or two, I doubt that the prospects of Lydia’s other sisters would be affected at all. ”
People certainly did change extraordinarily, if this was genuinely now the view that Mr Darcy took. Could he really believe what he was saying, or was he only trying to comfort her? Elizabeth looked straight into his eyes.
“Tell me, Mr Darcy, as a man of fortune, education, and status, would you be willing to marry into a family where a daughter had run away to join the theatre, as Lydia has done?”