Chapter Seven
CHAPTER SEVEN
elizabeth
The fun part was fun.
The first time we waltzed into a shop and began stuffing our pockets full of sweets, I tried to pretend as if I wasn’t getting away with anything so as not to draw attention to myself, but I wasn’t very good at that, and I started laughing straightaway.
At first, people were too horrified to know what to do, so they just stared at us, aghast.
Then the shopkeeper began to yell.
And then we ran.
We did this same thing every day for a number of Thursdays.
Sometimes, the shopkeeper caught us, and if so, then Mr. Darcy paid him money and all was well. Sometimes, we evaded him and got away. We would then find various spots—under a bridge on the outskirts of town, walking along a path that took us back to the grounds of Rosings, a copse of trees to the south—were we would eat our ill-gotten gains and talk to each other of this aspect or that aspect of the caper and how we might improve it in the future.
The days began to settle into a familiar pattern.
I would wake, each Thursday, and make my way to the breakfast parlor, where Mr. Collins would tell me that Charlotte and Maria were out buying ribbons. I would eat breakfast and then greet Charlotte and Maria when they came back and then set off for my morning walk.
He’d be waiting for me.
From there we would go off on our adventures.
We stole sweets for a while, and then I said I wished to steal ribbons, and he said he wished to steal ribbons, too, that he thought it would be ever so fun to see people’s faces if he said he wished to have a very pretty bonnet.
It was.
We stole bread and then vegetables and then we descended upon the blacksmith’s shop and took horseshoes and daggers and we had a mock dagger fight in the middle of the grass whilst the townspeople looked on in horror.
We talked of other things in between all of this.
I learned that Mr. Wickham had never been denied some part of his inheritance, that he had willingly denounced the profession the elder Darcy had wished for him, and that he had indeed been given money in lieu of this and that he had squandered it and then come to go after Miss Darcy.
I was ashamed of myself for ever thinking anything complimentary of Mr. Wickham.
And I wondered at myself for thinking that Mr. Darcy had been such a grim and joyless man, for look at us now. We were like children, gallivanting about each Thursday, the entire world our play area.
We talked of other things.
My mother and her censure of me. My family’s lack of respectability. My own sharp tongue and the way it got me into trouble.
I began to realize that things could be worse here. I declared one day, after leaving the blacksmith’s shop, swinging the dagger we’d taken, “I don’t have to get married.”
“Mmm?” he said, smiling at me.
“I’m only saying, this life we have now, as much as it seems like a prison sometimes, there are good aspects to it, too. I’ve been freed from the burden of it, you see? I no longer need a husband to survive.”
“Oh, let’s not say the M-word,” he said, wrinkling up his nose.
“The M-word?”
“Marriage,” he said. “Let’s cease to think of that.”
“Yes,” I said, smiling widely, “let’s.”
“But it is true, what you say, Elizabeth,” he said, for somehow in the midst of our gallivanting, we’d quite gotten familiar enough to call each other by our first names, “there is freedom here. It may seem like a prison, but I feel free too.”
“And what are you free of?” I asked.
“Oh, everything,” he said. “All my responsibilities. Every single one. No tenants to see to. No investments to worry over. No servants to be master to. No sister to keep in line. No father’s reputation to live up to.”
“That’s rather a lot of responsibilities,” I said. No wonder he’d been so grim and joyless. He must have felt the weight of the world on him all the time.
“Yes, but I’m well shut of them now. Here with you, Elizabeth, it is always Thursday, and there is nothing I must do.”
So, we continued on.
Once we had tired of having mock dagger fights in front of the blacksmith’s shop, we began chasing livestock out of pens on farmers’ lands, running off with chickens and small piglets, trying to get cows to run—they wouldn’t.
But the farmers did seem so dispirited at our behavior that I lost interest in it quickly. It was not very much fun to visit suffering on someone, even if I knew it would all reset and they would not suffer.
Then I wondered at myself, not feeling anything for the shopkeepers when we stole from them except delight when they shrieked and shook their fists and ran after us.
“I wonder if this phase is ending now,” I said one evening.
We were sitting outside together, and we had some food we’d stolen earlier from town, meatpies we’d taken to eat for later.
“Ending?” he said. “Whatever do you mean?”
“It’s as you said,” I said, chewing on the delicious mixture of pastry, meat, and spices. “I don’t know if I like being the sort of person who delights in taking advantage of others.”
“Yes, but you said we weren’t really taking advantage, since nothing we do sticks,” he said.
“I know that, but it… I don’t like the way it feels.”
“Ah, yes, this is about the way I felt when I realized I was only going about asking women to marry me because I wished to take liberties.”
I sat up straight, blinking at him.
“Did I… not make that plain to you?” He cringed, stuffing his mouth full of pie.
“That’s appalling, Will.”
“Mmph.” He nodded. He was chewing.
“I don’t think that’s true anyway,” I said. Because it had been a number of Thursdays, many, many Thursdays. I couldn’t say how many, but probably two months worth at this point, and he had never attempted anything untoward with me, never at all.
He’d even stopped saying those strange and confusing things to me, about how he found me pretty and all of that.
He swallowed. “Yes, but as I have said, I’m not that sort of man. So, I stopped. I think, before, in the first phase, the very hopeless phase, it seemed permissible, because all things were permissible, you know?”
“Well, they are not,” I said.
“No, I see that,” he said. “I wouldn’t like myself if I had done that to a woman, even if she wouldn’t remember it the next day. It would be a stain on me somewhere. Anyway, I’ve always wanted to wait.”
“Wait?” I said. “Wait for what?”
“Well, to be married, obviously. I know there are a number of men who have this odd way of interpreting scripture, as if men are the exceptions to all of God’s rules about such things, but it’s really quite clear. Men are to cleave to their wives, not to dally with mistresses and actresses and all manner of those sorts of women before settling down and having children. I believe that’s the right way to do it, to wait, and that’s what I intend to do.”
“You mean for… for that ,” I said softly. “Oh.” I tilted my head and looked him over, and… oh, dear.
When had Mr. Darcy become handsome?
Of course, I suppose I had thought him pleasing enough upon first being introduced, but then he’d been so reliably horrid, his countenance had soured somehow. And then, well, we’d been trapped together for all this time, and I had grown used to him, but it hadn’t been that way, not in weeks and weeks of Thursdays, because we never even said the M-word. I had thought of him as a friend or a brother or a…
“Apologies,” he said, wiping juices from the pie from his hands. “I should not discuss such things with you, I don’t suppose. Not a proper sort of conversation to have with a woman like you.”
“But we aren’t being proper,” I said. “And anyway, I think it does you credit. I approve.”
He gave me an easy grin. “Do you, then?”
I grinned back, taking another bite of my pie. I was eating mine much more slowly than he.
“I think I’ve somehow succeeded, against all odds. I’ve made you like me.”
“That happened a long time ago,” I said, shrugging.
“Well, considering you’ve no one else, I don’t know that it means anything.”
“I don’t wish to chase animals and make farmers angry tomorrow,” I said.
“All right,” he said. “We can do something else that’s fun.”
“Yes, something that doesn’t hurt anyone.”
“Shouldn’t be too hard to think of some innocent fun,” he said. “There are a number of fun things that don’t involve getting away with something, after all.”
“Just so,” I said. I tried to think of something. There was eating sweets, but that was sort of getting away with something, wasn’t it, because you weren’t to indulge in that all that often, because it wasn’t good for you. There was indulging in leisure, but that was also sort of getting away with something, because you weren’t meant to indulge all the time.
“Dancing,” he said. “Dancing doesn’t hurt anyone.”
“Yes!” I said, nodding.
“We need music, I think. We’ll have to convince someone to play for us.” He made a face.
I ate more pie. “Oh, I’d rather not do that.”
Currently, we awoke in the morning and met for our walk and then simply kept clear of everyone else. They were looking for us, obviously. Sometimes, we ran across servants or other members of the household calling for us or searching here or there. But over time, we’d gotten quite good at dodging these people.
So, if we were to go back now, for instance, and attempt to convince someone to play the piano-forte for us to dance to a tune, that likely wouldn’t work. They’d all be angry with us. I would be compromised, of course, and it would be quite a headache.
“We could just… find a ball,” he said. “Someone’s got to be giving a ball somewhere today.”
“Someone in Kent?” I said. “Surely we would have been invited.”
“Maybe we were. Maybe there’s an invitation and no one said anything about it. I know where my aunt keeps letters like that. I shall sort through them before I come to find you tomorrow, all right?”
“All right,” I said.
fitzwilliam
I handed the invitation to her.
“Where is Tiewater Hall?” she said.
“It’s a bit of a hike,” I said. “But we can make it, I think. We simply need to leave early, sometime around two in the afternoon, I believe. We may not wish to do it today, because we may need to figure out how to get ourselves ready for the affair. I have an appropriate suit, of course, but then men’s clothing is much less interesting than women’s, so I could wear the same thing as I wear to dinner. You, however, need a dress.”
“I have dresses,” she said.
“I have seen the sorts of dresses you have,” I said.
She thrust both of her hands on her hips. “Just when I was beginning to like you, Will Darcy. You say something like that.”
“Well, I’m only saying, wouldn’t it be more fun to steal a dress from Rosings?” I gestured in the general direction of the house. “Tell me you don’t wish to go traipsing around through all the wardrobes there, hmm?”
She slowly smiled at me, lowering her hands from her hips. “There can’t be a number of dresses there that are not woefully out of style and not going to fit me.”
“Perhaps not, but we should look, shouldn’t we? Just to make certain? Besides, it might also be very fun to find a number of outfits from years past and try them on together, mightn’t it?”
She giggled, nodding. “Oh, yes, like playing dress-up? We are perpetual children, Will.”
“Is that what we are?” I waggled my eyebrows at her.
“With no responsibilities and with our only task to have fun? How can we be anything else?”
“So, that is what we should do today,” I said. “But we shall need to be quite careful, for roaming about in Rosings itself means we will have ever so many servants to dodge.”
“All of which are looking for us,” she said.
“Indeed,” I said.
“So, anyway, I think what I should do is go in myself now, and then you hide yourself by one of the other doors, perhaps on the west wing? And when all is clear, I shall let you in.”
She giggled again. “Oh, the sneaking about makes it even more fun.”
I grinned. “Definitely does.”
She furrowed her brow. “But… is that because we’re getting away with something?”
I furrowed my brow. “Hmm.”
We were both quiet for a moment. I was thinking through the implications of that. It couldn’t be that doing things wrong was the only way to have fun, now, could it? I would not believe such a thing.
“Oh, never mind it,” she said. “Let’s go play dress-up!”
It took us three Thursdays to succeed.
That day, the first day, we got caught by one of the servants sneaking in the door on the west wing. Then we were obliged to go and explain to my aunt that we were not, in fact, doing anything untoward together, and that I was just trying to help Miss Bennet find the piano-forte.
“You did say I could come and practice any time!” piped in Miss Bennet.
Then, we were trapped for nearly an hour with her laboriously playing, and then we got roped into eating luncheon at Rosings, and before we knew it, the day had gotten away from us.
The next day, we were similarly accosted, though we made it further into the house when it happened, having known not to enter in the west wing, but instead on the east wing.
The third day, we entered on the east wing, and then we avoided the servant who found us, and then we finally got to go through the old clothes hanging in the wardrobes and closets.
But then…
Well, she selected a dress to try on, and she looked at me, and I looked at her.
“You’d have to help me with my buttons,” she said, looking startled, looking at my face with an expression I’d never seen on her face when she looked at me, and that stirred something in me, and…
“Well, we can hold the clothes up,” I said.
“Quite!” she said. “It will be just as fun that way.”
If it was obvious to both of us that we were not, in fact, perpetual children, neither of us mentioned it.
Later that day, we did find a dress that wasn’t entirely out of fashion. I thought it might have been made for Anne. It was very light pink, with tiny little embroidered flowers on the skirt. It had lace at the sleeves.
“I can’t take it home with me,” she said. “It will just reset here.”
“Yes, just so,” I said. Which made me think of the pocket watch, the one that had somehow ended up at the parsonage. How had that happened?
That had been some time ago? Why was I just thinking about it now?
Oh, yes, when she’d given me the pocket watch, she’d seen fit to transport it in the most obscene manner I could imagine, though I supposed she never did bring a reticule when she went on a walk and maybe had no other idea of where to put it.
But even so, how could she have done that?
She knew that I…
That we…
Well, no, that was before, so maybe she hadn’t realized then.
“Will?”
I jerked my gaze up to her face, realizing I’d just been staring at her bosom. My face flushed with heat. “I shall get the dress tomorrow and bring it to you. I shall give it to you on the morning walk.”
“That would work,” she said.
“And then we shall sneak out after luncheon to the stables to get a carriage and go to the ball.”
“So, we should be dressed for the ball at that point?”
I considered. “No, let’s not. Just bring the clothing and we can change in the carriage.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“Separately!” I said. “I’ll bring us servants, shall I? I’ll bribe them. My valet and someone for you, someone to serve as a lady’s maid.”
“All right,” she said. “Tomorrow, then.”
“Tomorrow,” I said.
“Well, today,” she said, looking at the dress. “Because, after all, it’s always today.”
“If we like it, we can go to this ball again,” I said.
She nodded. “Yes. We can do anything. Anything at all.”