The End of Equanimity #3
Darcy held his gaze for a moment but then, in a move destined to disturb Fitzwilliam far more than a raised voice or hint of aggression, merely looked away, tilted his head forward and pinched the bridge of his nose.
Fitzwilliam waited. He watched Darcy’s jaw working as he clenched and unclenched it, and still he waited. The fire went out, and still he waited.
When Darcy finally spoke, his voice was almost inaudible. “I love her.”
A woman was the cause of all this? Of all the possible scenarios Fitzwilliam had imagined, Darcy fancying himself in love had definitely not been one. If not that the man looked so damned wretched, he might have thought him in jest. “Who?”
“Miss Elizabeth Bennet.”
Miss Bennet? Cousin to Lady Catherine’s parson? “And you love her, you say?”
Darcy levelled a glare at him. “Since you found your way in, I assume you can find your way out just as easily.”
Fitzwilliam held up his hands. “I beg your pardon. It is only, after so patchy an acquaintance, I must admit to some surprise at hearing you speak of love. Are you sure it is not merely a fascination that will pass in time?”
“How long do you propose I wait to find out? A month? Six? Eight months, Fitzwilliam—eight—and still I am in as deep as the first day. I have never felt aught akin to this before. It consumes me.”
Fitzwilliam knew not what to make of such talk.
It was not that either of them had ever explicitly disdained the notion of love, but it had never occurred to him—and he was damned sure it had never occurred to Darcy—that they would ever be troubled by it.
Of course, he knew people who claimed to be in love.
Some of them were even married, though none of them to each other.
But that Darcy, who never caught a cold but that he planned it in advance, should be thus afflicted was… incredible.
He could not be satisfied until he had an account of how it came about.
As he listened to Darcy’s rather halting depiction of his association with Miss Bennet, it became clear there was even more to admire in the lady than he had observed for himself in Kent—aside, that was, from those most fundamental of virtues: connections and fortune.
No wonder the old chap was languishing in despair.
“Are you distressed, then, because you cannot have her?”
Darcy gave a bark of bitter laughter. “In a nutshell, yes.”
“Well, admittedly, there is little to be done about her relations, but you could surely afford the want of fortune.”
Darcy exhaled heavily. “I am marginally comforted to know your assumptions mirror what my own have been.”
“Pardon?”
“It is not her circumstances that hamper me.”
“What then stands in your way? Marry the girl!”
“She will not have me.”
“Pardon?”
“You heard. I offered for her. She refused. Emphatically.”
“But—why?” No answer was forthcoming. “Does she favour another?”
Darcy grimaced and lifted a hand to run over his face, only to catch the slash on his cheek, ripping a harsh curse from his lips.
“Pardon me. That was impolitic.”
Darcy dismissed his apology with a grunt. Past the hand with which he dabbed blood from his cheek, he mumbled, “She does not love me.”
“She does not what? She turned you down—Pemberley for God’s sake—for a want of love?”
“That was the gist of her reasoning.”
“Singular. I have not been used to consider love as high on most women’s list of criteria for a husband.”
Darcy sighed. “Elizabeth is not most women.”
That much was becoming clear. “But you are friends. Was that not enough for her?”
“We were never friends,” he said stiffly. “In that, as in so much else, I was mistaken. She despises me.”
“Surely not!”
Yet apparently, it was true. Darcy’s expression said it all.
“I gave her no reason to like me. I slighted her. I ignored her. I quarrelled with her.”
Fitzwilliam raised his eyebrows. “An interesting approach to courtship.”
Darcy paused, drank and sneered. “I all but laid the path for Wickham’s damned lies.”
In this new light, his insistence upon revealing Georgiana’s misadventure with the miscreant back in Kent made eminently more sense.
“Devil take the scheming bastard! I ought to have known he could not be in the same town as you without causing some manner of difficulty. Would that I had insisted you lean on him when first we learnt he was there!”
“It would have made no difference. Her sympathy for him only made for a more heated rejection. She made it perfectly clear she would have refused me anyway.”
“Your manner offended her that much?”
Darcy returned to staring at his drink, shadows once more obscuring his downcast face. “You may as well know the whole of it. Last year I took steps to discourage an alliance between Bingley and Elizabeth’s eldest sister. She somehow got wind of it. As you might imagine, she took a dim view.”
Fitzwilliam’s stomach dropped like a stone. “Gads, Darcy. I think that might have been my doing.” His cousin looked up sharply. “Well it came up in conversation, you see—the whole Bingley fix. I could not be more sorry. Had I but known it was her sister, I—”
“What’s done is done. In any case, it was wrong of me to intervene. Elizabeth had every right to be angry.”
“But it is easily rectified. Surely, you could—”
Darcy shook his head. “I have already spoken to Bingley. He returned to Hertfordshire a fortnight ago.”
“Well then, I do not see that you could not also.”
“He has the advantage of not having proposed as I did.”
“Granted, but now you have corrected Miss Elizabeth’s misapprehensions about Wickham and sent Bingley back to her sister, she might be amenable to a second offer.”
“No, I mean, he has not offended her as I did with my proposal.”
“Upon my life, how did she contrive to take offence from a proposal of marriage?”
“Because in the course of my address, I catalogued the countless reasons why I should not marry her.” His voice dripped with bitterness.
“I scorned her situation—waxed eloquent on the degradation such a connection would afford.” He gestured wildly as he spoke, heedless of the drink splashing from his glass, his voice rapidly gaining volume.
“I made damned sure she understood how hard I had fought to repress my feelings and accused her of pride when she took offence. I might, at one point, have mentioned that I loved her, but only to exemplify my generosity, because regardless of the loss to my fortune, society’s contempt and my family’s disgust, I would take her anyway because I am that great!
” He bellowed the last and pounded his fist on the arm of the chair.
Then, all was still but for the sound of him breathing heavily through his nose.
“Good God,” Fitzwilliam said quietly. “What the devil possessed you to express yourself thusly?”
“Would that I knew!” He threw back the contents of his glass and thrust it out for more, which Fitzwilliam moved hastily to provide. “I am the greatest fool that ever was. It never even occurred to me that she might say no!”
“I really think that is the part you ought least to regret! It is not unnatural that you should expect a lady of lesser consequence to accept your offer of marriage.”
“That does not excuse the way I vilified her family’s condition in life. I cannot think on it without abhorrence. It is insupportable that I have occasioned her such pain—any pain! She wept, Fitzwilliam. I brought her to tears.”
“Women cry all the time.”
“Not by my hand.” He leant forward to stare into his drink again. “What have I become?”
“There is naught wrong with what you have become! One poorly handled courtship does not make you a bad sort of person.”
“Would that were the extent of my mistakes,” he mumbled, his words now distinctly slurred. “But she held a mirror to me, and I did not know myself. She has properly humbled me.”
“That she most certainly has, my friend.”
Darcy discarded his glass carelessly on the table and put his head in his hands. “I am so in love with her. What the hell am I to do?”
There was nothing to be done and nothing more to be said. All Fitzwilliam could offer was a strong arm to haul Darcy to his bedchamber and a word to his valet to have a tincture ready for the morning that would ease his sore head, if not his bruised heart.
Knightsbridge
20th May
Georgiana,
Distress yourself no longer. Have duly admonished your brother for conceding injury to anyone other than yours truly and threatened matching slash on opposing cheek should he attempt it again.
Be assured—naught ails him that time will not mend.
Col. Fitzwilliam
Wednesday 20 May 1812, Hertfordshire
Jane started when the parlour door was flung open, and her mother swept in.
“Ah, good, you are both here,” said Mrs Bennet, dropping into her favourite armchair. “Come closer, girls. I would speak with you.”
Jane looked enquiringly at Elizabeth, who returned a look of equal bemusement. Both set their work aside and moved to sit on the sofa.
“It is clear after yesterday,” began Mrs Bennet, “that you are both in dire need of some direction. Jane, I shall begin with you. Mr Bingley arranged that picnic in your honour, yet you spent most of the afternoon sitting out of games and refusing to speak to him. He will think you are not interested if you continue to be so unforthcoming.”
Her mother could not have made a more distressing observation, for Jane was all too conscious that the easy friendship she and Mr Bingley once enjoyed had been eclipsed by awkwardness and reserve.
“You like him, do you not?”
“I love him!”
“Then you must show it, or he will never offer for you.”
Jane gasped.
“I think what Mama is trying to say,” Elizabeth interjected, reaching for Jane’s hand, “is that perhaps Mr Bingley needs a little encouragement. If you only spoke to him a little more—”
“Oh, as you do?”