Chapter 1 #2
“I am aware of your prowess, Mother. I simply do not require your assistance.”
“Do you not?” She lifted her brows. “Fitzwilliam, I should like to have the Mount Street house opened before Georgiana comes out.”
The house on Mount Street had been his father’s gift to his mother, hers to use for her lifetime.
It was smaller than Darcy House, with fewer bedchambers and no nursery, but large, grandly decorated rooms made especially for entertaining.
There was more than enough room for Georgiana, a few guests, and all the servants the house would require.
She had not yet removed to it, for she was mistress of this house while he remained unmarried.
Darcy House, he was aware, was better suited for a family, and his mother was anxious for him to begin one—but he had not, until this autumn, understood how anxious.
He had told her before that she ought not to wait on him, but she had scoffed at the idea.
“I have in my immediate circle yourself, Richard, and Milton, all of you highly eligible and yet unmarried.” She lifted the teapot, discovered it was empty, and set it down again.
“Lady Ralston asked me, with a great deal of sympathy, whether there was some difficulty. Sympathy, Fitzwilliam. From Eleanor Ralston, whose own daughter I placed three seasons ago.”
He felt this bore repeating, and so he asked again. “Have you ever considered that none of us want to be matched?”
She looked at him steadily. Then she said, with less composure than she had yet shown, “Milton is heir to an earldom, and I have not known him to even look at an eligible lady twice since he came of age. Richard speaks of his horse as though it were a wife. And you have just spent six weeks in the company of a handsome, accomplished young woman with twenty thousand pounds and have come home a fortnight early because she frightened you.”
“I did not return early because of Miss Bingley. Why should I be frightened of her?” This, at least, was true. It was not Miss Bingley who had frightened him.
“Of course she frightened you. When you are frightened and do not wish to show it, you are painfully polite and then withdraw.” She shook her head. “When you were younger, it made you say the most impolite things. Thank goodness you have outgrown that peccadillo.”
He did not trust himself to answer at once. There was, in fact, no answer to give that would not have been a lie, because he had not outgrown it at all.
His mother was an extraordinarily intelligent woman, and that was likely to make the next several months of his life very difficult indeed. He would have to be careful not to reveal the true source of his distress.
“I look at the three of you,” his mother went on, more quietly, “and I see men I love, good men who ought to be married and building their nurseries. And I cannot shake the conviction that if no one intervenes, none of you shall have the happiness you deserve. Milton shall be godfather to half of England and father of none. Richard shall have married his horse. You shall become a hermit at Pemberley and be spoken of in whispers at parties you have declined to attend. There shall be no Fitzwilliam heir, and no Darcy heir, and when I arrive in heaven I shall have to account to your grandmother for how I permitted it to happen.”
“Mamma,” he said fondly.
“I am willing to concede that I sound a little ridiculous. But I am not wrong, Fitzwilliam. Something is the matter with the three of you. I am the only person in this family who appears to have noticed, and I would like it very much if one of you—any one of you, I am not particular—would prove me wrong by the end of the coming season.”
He was quiet for a moment. “And you thought I would like Miss Bingley as a wife?”
“I thought that, as you spent so much time with her brother, she was a reasonable place to begin.” She considered her empty cup and set it aside. “I have a theory, Fitzwilliam, and this theory is well-founded, because it is the story of my own life.”
He settled back. He might as well be comfortable.
“Your father was the brother of my good friend Miss Darcy.”
“Yes.” This was his aunt, who had married a Neville and lived in Bath.
“I met him because Eleanor and I were inseparable from the age of fourteen. I knew your father four years before I understood what I felt for him, and by then I knew him entirely—not the man he appeared to be, but the man he was. That is a very rare thing, and it happened because I came to know him through a connection I already trusted.”
“I have never been informed that the manner of locating one’s spouse is handed down like an inheritance.”
“Everything is an inheritance in this family.” His mother’s smile was wry. “So you understand,” she continued, “why, when your closest friend has an unmarried sister—”
“Bingley has always had an unmarried sister. When I first met him, he had two, in fact.”
She ignored his pique. “When that sister is accomplished, elegant, and perfectly suited by temperament and education to the kind of establishment you would provide, then yes, Fitzwilliam, I made a modest effort. I do not apologise for it. I do apologise for whatever I said to Miss Bingley, which was perhaps more encouraging than it ought to have been. That was careless of me. But the intention was sound.”
He was quiet a moment. What he said next required choosing his words with care.
“Miss Bingley,” he said, “is indeed accomplished. But she also is the sort of woman who lays out her accomplishments before any potential suitor like the silver on her table and expects them to compliment her on the shine.”
His mother frowned.
“In all our time at Netherfield,” he said, “I did not hear her laugh once at anything she thought I would not find amusing. She had no preference that was not an echo of mine. She plays well, she speaks French, she draws designs for screens, she embroiders—and all of it is done with a sort of grim determination rather than any enjoyment.”
His mother was listening intently.
“My reservations,” he said, more quietly, “have nothing to do with her family’s connexion to trade. Both you and Father have always said the trading families would be the making of the country, and I am your son. I am not troubled by the origins of her fortune. Only by her.”
She regarded him for a long moment. “Very well,” she said at last, as though conceding a minor point in a larger argument, which Darcy suspected it was. “I had not understood her as you do.” She sighed. “Fitzwilliam, I only wish to—”
“I know.” His interruption was gentle. “I know exactly what you wish. And I do not doubt that it is for the right reasons. What I should like is for you to allow me to find a wife in my own way, in my own time, without attempting to control the conditions.”
“Has it not occurred to you,” she said, measured and reasonable, “that the conditions sometimes require a small amount of planning?”
“It has occurred to me that you believe so.”
She pressed her lips together, refusing to smile, but she was amused even if she would not admit it.
He stood. “I should like to refresh myself and rest before dinner.”
“Of course.” She did not return to her correspondence. Instead, she waited as he crossed to the door, and when he was nearly through it she said, “Do you know, I had a charming letter from Lady Macomber last week.”
Darcy stopped with his hand on the doorframe. He turned.
She was looking directly at him. Not with a mother’s apology, but with a matchmaker’s clear, mild attention.
“Amelia has come out since you saw her last,” she said. “By all accounts, she has grown into a pretty, sensible young woman. Lady Macomber has recently brought her to town.” The pause that followed, he suspected, was entirely for his benefit. “I have invited them to dine on Monday.”
“I beg your pardon?” Had she heard nothing he had said?
“Only a small party, Fitzwilliam. Family. My brother and nephews, Georgiana of course, and the Macombers, and I thought perhaps the Hursts. Of course not Miss Bingley, who will be otherwise engaged. Lord Cavendish’s cousin is giving a card party that evening for which I shall procure her an invitation. ”
“You intend to arrange Miss Bingley’s evening so that she will not be at your dinner?”
“It would be unkind to introduce you to Miss Macomber in her presence.”
“You are not even going to pretend you have listened to me?”
“Listening is not the same as accepting.” She held his gaze. “Monday is only the beginning, Fitzwilliam. I thought you ought to know.”
He opened his mouth. He closed it. There was, he realised, nothing he could say that would not make the situation worse. “I will excuse myself, if you please.”
“Of course, dear. We will speak more this evening.”
Once he entered his rooms and shut the door behind him, Darcy leaned back with his hand still on the knob.
It was a mercy, he reflected, that Miss Elizabeth Bennet was safe in Hertfordshire, and a greater mercy still that his mother had no occasion to meet her.
As long as that was the case, she could not fix her attention where it was dangerous to do so.
Provided Darcy was in London and Miss Elizabeth remained in Hertfordshire, the matter would resolve itself through simple distance.
He had no notion how a man secured forgiveness from a woman he had insulted twice. But as he was unlikely ever to see her again, the question was, he supposed, academic.
He went to change for dinner.