Chapter 15 #9
Bingley recoiled. ’Til that moment, there had seemed a world of difference between a swollen belly under a travelling cloak in a public house in Liverpool and a living, breathing child of such import as to make the Titan spit and rage.
Amelia’s remark about forsaking his child suddenly became the most heartrending thing in the world.
With what callous disregard had he sent his own child away!
With what unspeakable indifference had he almost taken Darcy’s!
He collapsed into the chair and looked up at his friend, who was all but panting with emotion.
Yet, to Bingley’s dismay, it was no longer fury suffusing his countenance, but profound anguish.
“They are the two most precious things to me in all the world,” Darcy said in a voice low and hard. “Have you any idea what it would do to me were I to lose either of them? I would rather see Pemberley razed to the ground.”
Something turned over in Bingley’s gut. Never before had he seen his friend thus, and therein lay the rub to all his senseless presumptions.
In his very own words, “If one were to dub inscrutability the harbinger of indifference, Darcy could be labelled the most unfeeling of all men.” He did not disdain Elizabeth. He loved her!
A nauseating torrent of remorse overtook him.
How could he have thought so ill of this man, whose rectitude he had ever aspired to emulate—who had ever been the most stalwart of friends?
How could he have been so wilfully blind to his own iniquity?
“Forgive me, Darcy. I have been an absolute cur, but none of it has been consciously done. It is as you once said. I am impetuous. I do not think of consequences when I act.”
“And now you have been careless with my family, and I will not tolerate it.”
Bingley’s heart reared up into his throat. He gulped it down and pressed himself back into his chair as far away from Darcy as possible. “Do you mean to call me out?”
“I suppose you would ask that,” Darcy spat disdainfully. “I ought to, for you have used me in the most despicable way imaginable. But I do not share your recklessness. I shall not risk my family’s interests to gratify my abhorrence of you.”
Bingley could not recall a single time when Darcy had spoken severely of him.
It wounded him grievously to hear it now—not because it was untrue but because Darcy was the very best of men, and in treating him thus, he had carelessly, foolishly, irrevocably squandered his friendship. “What would you have me do?”
Darcy sneered. “Still, you are asking me that?” He stalked to the door. “Leave. After that, I care not as long as I never see you again.”
He left the room, and just as Bingley thought his day could get no worse, Jane appeared in the doorway.
Fitzwilliam ceased talking when the door was pulled violently open. Mrs Sinclair, Jane, Georgiana and he all looked at Darcy as he exited the antechamber.
Darcy looked at him. “Get him out.”
He nodded, but it was his grandmother who spoke.
“Oh, you have not killed him then? How disappointing. Young men nowadays never seem to want to do anything properly.”
“Have at him,” Darcy replied. “I have better things to do.” He turned, offering Georgiana his arm. “Come. There is somebody I should like you to meet.” He left without a backward glance at either of the Bingleys.
Fitzwilliam turned to do Darcy’s bidding, only to discover that Jane had anticipated him. He made to stop her, but Mrs Sinclair laid a hand on his arm. “This I should like to see.”
He grinned by way of assent and leant against the outside of the open door to observe how the encounter would go.
“Good day, Charles,” Jane began.
“You are bleeding!” he replied.
Mrs Sinclair shook her head and muttered that he was an imbecile.
“Oh, no,” Mrs Bingley explained, “that is not mine. I helped Lizzy birth her baby…but you are hurt.” She knelt before her husband and peered at his rapidly closing black eye.
“I cannot believe you care.”
“I have never stopped caring.”
“I am a fool for never seeing it.”
“I am a fool for never showing it.”
“They are both fools. Hallelujah!” Mrs Sinclair huffed impatiently. “We could have told them that a year ago and saved ourselves all this bother.”
“How better could you have shown it than by coming here?” Bingley said.
“I wished to stop you going away with…” Mrs Bingley succumbed to a few sobs before choking out, “with Miss Greening.”
“Who the devil is Miss Greening?” Fitzwilliam hissed to his grandmother.
“The maid from Netherfield with a likeness to Lizzy. The dolt got a child on her.”
Fitzwilliam shook his head in disgust. There truly was no end to Bingley’s blundering.
“I never planned to go anywhere with her,” the idiot prattled on. “I meant to send her away to prevent her ever coming between us.”
“Ah, now I see!” Noticing his grandmother’s querying look, Fitzwilliam explained, “Long story, but this means Darcy will no longer have to kill Ashby.”
“I am quite sure your brother did nothing to deserve such a reprieve,” she retorted and returned to watching the simpering ninnies beyond the door.
“I wrote to you in London to tell you I would be back this week,” Bingley informed his wife.
“I was not in London. I was at Netherfield.”
“Speaking of letters,” Mrs Sinclair said quietly, “did you ever get mine? All Lizzy’s seemed to go astray.”
“I did.” He grinned at a sudden thought. “Though not ’til after Darcy found a most enlightening one from Bingley.” Leaning close to his grandmother, he whispered the Bennet Ballad into her vastly appreciative ear.
“Why did you come back here?” Jane enquired.
Fitzwilliam reached the line about Mary Bennet’s chastity, and Mrs Sinclair sniggered.
“For you. I heard you were coming here,” Bingley replied, drawing a sob from his wife.
Fitzwilliam reached the line about Jane’s vapidity, and Mrs Sinclair snorted with mirth.
“Can you ever forgive me?” Bingley pleaded.
Fitzwilliam reached the line about Elizabeth’s virtues, and Mrs Sinclair burst into gleeful laughter. “Oh, that is superb!”
Both Bingleys looked at her with mixed consternation and mortification.
“Can you ever love me?” Jane said more quietly to her husband.
“How could I not love somebody who still loves me after what I have done? I know not why I ever stopped loving you.”
“Because ennui struck and witless rent ye!” Mrs Sinclair announced triumphantly.
Bingley instantly turned red. His wife looked confused to the point of wretchedness.
Shaking his head at his grandmother, Fitzwilliam put an end to the Bingleys’ lamentations by instructing them it was time to leave.
Jane’s protests were unceremoniously deflected.
If Elizabeth wished to see her, she would no doubt write.
Until such time, her welcome was exhausted. Bingley had the sense not to object.
“I am truly sorry, Fitzwilliam,” he mumbled as Jane climbed into their carriage. “I never meant to use Darcy so ill.”
“You will be sorely disappointed if you hope for some great speech of exoneration from me, Bingley. This cannot be fixed with a trifling apology. Leave this place and my cousins be, or I shall finish the job for which Darcy had not the stomach.”
Bingley paled, nodded, and climbed up after his wife.
Fitzwilliam instructed the driver to ensure they left the park, then went back inside.
He found his grandmother in the Spanish saloon, sipping a glass of gin and chuckling intermittently, much to the bewilderment of Georgiana, who had joined her there.
“Is Elizabeth well?” he enquired of the latter.
“Perfectly so,” she replied.
“A toast then!” he declared. He poured two measures of sherry at the sideboard and handed one to Georgiana. “To Darcy!”
Mrs Sinclair raised her glass. “Aye. Hail the man who wed the second!”
Georgiana frowned.
Fitzwilliam began to regret arming his grandmother with the damned ballad. “And Elizabeth!” he said, raising his glass a second time.
Mrs Sinclair raised hers also. “Aye, for she is the jewel, alluring and—”
He coughed loudly.
She gave him a look of affected affront but capitulated nonetheless. “And their son,” she said instead.
Fitzwilliam smiled broadly as he earnestly echoed her toast. “And their son.”
Elizabeth lay at Darcy’s side, her head on his chest and his arm firmly about her as they both gazed upon their son, nestled in the crook of his father’s arm.
Every feeling of joy and relief was hers to be united with the two people most precious to her in all the world.
Darcy’s stillness was expressive of his prodigious emotion.
She almost did not wish to obtrude upon it but felt too much to remain silent.
“He looks so much like you. See how he is almost smiling. ’Tis you to a T.”
She felt Darcy’s lips curl into a mirroring expression against her temple.
“What do you think pleases him?” he said quietly.
“I daresay he is laughing at his papa for always imagining such theatrical misadventures for his mama.”
Her head jumped slightly when Darcy gave a brusque little laugh.
“Tease if you will, woman. I am too happy to care.”
She looked up at his dear face, suffused with delight, but tired. “You are happy now, but I shall not tease, for you must have been very worried.”
He hushed her gently. “All that matters is that you are both well.”
There came a sweet little gurgle from the bundle in his arms, distracting them both from weightier matters for a while.
Elizabeth’s heart felt fit to burst as she looked upon her darling child, blinking at the world as though surprised to see it there.
Tiredness blurred her thoughts, and she drifted for a while in dreamless sleep, yet her head was too full of things she wished to say for it to last. “You know that I did write, though, do you not?” she whispered.
“I do. Now cease fretting.”
“But it troubles me, Fitzwilliam. It was such an awful time for you. I cannot bear to think of your waiting for words of comfort that never came.”
“I was more concerned for your safety than your condolences, but it is all explained in any case. Bingley stole your first letter, the second likely arrived at Rosings after I left Kent, and the third almost certainly arrived in London after I left there, for we departed at dawn on Sunday.”
“He stole my first letter?” She sighed angrily. “His duplicity knows no bounds!”
“Think on him no more today, love. I mentioned it only to ease your mind, not to make you angry.”
“Very well,” she agreed, too fatigued and too happy to speak long of aught unpleasant. She placed her palm on her son’s belly and spread her fingers, gently soothing him through the swaddling. He was so warm, so tiny, so perfect. “I promise to write more often next time, though.”
“That will not be necessary. I was in earnest when I said I would never leave you again.”
She smiled up at him, a tired but joyful smile.
He looked at her with the greatest tenderness and pulled her more tightly against him, rubbing his hand gently up and down her arm. “You are exhausted, love. What I endured is of no consequence in light of what you must have suffered.”
“That matters not either, for look at my reward.” She stroked her beloved son’s tiny hand. He immediately clamped it around her finger, stirring a fierce swell of emotion that bade her exhale unevenly. “How I love you both!”
Darcy pressed a kiss to her temple and one to their child’s forehead. “Dearest Elizabeth, you have given me everything. You are everything to me. I am so in love with you.”
Satisfied that everything necessary had been said, Elizabeth surrendered to her tiredness and fell asleep to the blissful sounds of her son’s sweet snuffling breaths and her husband’s strong, steady heartbeat.
Darcy watched with heartfelt delight as his wife and son both drifted to sleep in his arms. Nothing he had endured—not his aunt’s passing or his fearful passage from London or Bingley’s treachery—could detract from his elation.
His son was miraculous—hale despite his early arrival, perfect in form and gratifyingly like him in appearance. His feelings towards him were unlike any he had known before. Towards Elizabeth, his feelings were unchanged—immutable, immeasurable, profound. He loved her more than life itself.
Let the rest of the world go on with its deceits and misfortunes. He cared not for any of them. He and Elizabeth had their own family now, and they would continue as sublimely content as they were this day for all their days to come—in no way mistaken as to their happiness.
The End