Chapter Two #2
He had all but decided that he was going to marry his cousin Miss Anne de Bourgh. His aunt, Lady Catherine, wished it, and his mother had professed to like the idea, and it was all very tidy and neat and kept the family money and property together, and he didn’t have any good reason not to do it.
But something about being at Rosings, remembering Elizabeth at Rosings, it was unbearable.
And anyway, he did not wish to marry his cousin, not least because she was sickly and it seemed unconscionable to get children on her and expect her to bear them and bring them into the world. He had no desire to kill Anne. He had no desire to bed her either.
If pressed, he would claim that his desire for Elizabeth had little to do with bedding her.
He wouldn’t deny he thought of her as an attractive and desirable woman.
She was very pretty and her body was shaped pleasingly.
There was nothing about Elizabeth that would put a man off the idea of having her in that way and much that would entice him.
Anyway, of course it wasn’t about that. That would be beneath him.
Certainly, the first time he remembered finding her attractive, it was after she had walked three miles to Netherfield and her face was flushed and her eyes were bright and her hair had been wind-swept, and he had thought of her flushed from some other kind of exertion, and that was the first of his perverse moments with this woman.
He would own that. He hadn’t even done much to conceal it at the time. She was pretty, Elizabeth was.
Of course, this was not the reason a man like him married a woman.
Certainly, yes, you were permitted to do that with your wife, but it wasn’t as if you were supposed to do it a lot.
Well, depending on the way the scriptures were interpreted, you weren’t supposed to do it a lot, period.
There was a whole great deal about how sexual intercourse was this sort of necessary evil that was only permitted within the bounds of marriage and all of that.
It was in the marriage vows. Marriage was a “remedy against sin.”
The thinking of it, as he understood it, was sort of that people couldn’t stop themselves from doing this terribly terrible and uncouth sinful behavior, so God had decreed that they could just get married, and then you could do it, but not very often and only to get children and only ever with that one person.
The way marriage seemed to work was that you soon wanted to do it with that person least of all other persons in the world, though, and this was probably according to God’s design, since temptation was so tempting and wrong and iniquitous and all of that.
Darcy would own, of course, this was not the only way that such things were interpreted.
For one thing, Darcy knew a number of educated men who didn’t seem to really believe the scriptures at all, viewing them as a kind of fairy story for people who were too stupid to handle the truth of the universe, which was that everything was sort of brutish and brief and nonsensical.
Sexual intercourse existed for the purpose of making children.
It was better for children to be brought up with fathers than not, so marriage ensured that, for it made it clear the paternity of babes and it meant that men would protect their wives and children.
There was nothing in that about temptation or sin or not doing it very often, just a certain kind of practicality.
For another thing, there were people who pointed out that if God had told the human race in the Garden of Eden to be fruitful and multiply, he had probably meant it, and this would imply there was no reason to feel that marital sexual activity was sinful at all.
What did Darcy himself believe?
Well, this was shameful, but he’d settled much more firmly on the side of the fence that thought that sexual intercourse ought to be done sparingly and only during marriage before developing this fascination with Elizabeth Bennet.
Mr. Darcy was, himself, a virgin, well, at least to the degree that he had never penetrated a woman there.
He’d kept company with women he met in taverns—actresses and the like—but he’d been very careful, abundantly careful, never to get any of them with child.
In case the practical way of thinking was the correct one, he supposed?
He didn’t wish to have left bastards here and there in the streets of London.
But even with this sort of behavior, he hadn’t indulged very often, and he’d said no to these women more often than not, had thrust bawds off his lap and given them stern looks and ordered them to ply their trades on other men who were more amenable.
He indulged when he was very drunk or very sad or very much in need of distraction from something unpleasant. Rarely, that was.
And he had never—never—pursued a woman of his class, a woman of gentle birth, because he had been thinking of her in that way.
Even the idea of it seemed wrong in some way, as if it diminished a woman to turn her into something on par with a courtesan, as if it tarred her with a brush of wickedness.
So, he supposed he didn’t quite admit to himself that part of his fascination with Elizabeth Bennet was, erm, physical.
It wasn’t all that way, of course, because he found her dizzyingly intelligent and very self-possessed.
She was quick-witted and she could be rather cutting.
She did not defer to him, something that stirred him (although, perhaps that stirred him in that way as well), and she had a quiet strength that emanated from her, a way about her that was nearly regal, truly.
To think, she had refused his marriage proposal owing to her principles.
And this when he knew that her family would have benefited from it, that she herself had little hope of a good marriage otherwise.
She could ill-afford to refuse him and yet she had.
This made her more appealing to him, not less.
But even then, he couldn’t say the feelings he had towards her were ruinous and irrevocable. It happened later, in the woods, in the rain, Wickham’s hands all over her, saying that she was going to be his wife.
There had been a moment when Wickham had told Elizabeth to tell Darcy that she liked it, and Elizabeth had stared off into the distance and woodenly said that she liked it, and Darcy had never felt such helpless rage in that moment.
He would like to say it was because he felt protectiveness towards her or that he knew she was lying when she said it and that he’d wished to punish Wickham for harming her, that sort of thing.
It wasn’t as if that wasn’t part of it, but there were other parts of it.
There was jealousy.
There was possessiveness.
There was anger with her, for wanting Wickham and not him.
It was a tangle of all sorts of emotions, very few of them to his credit.
And after that, it had been all over. It would just be her, then, only her, and no one else, and he was certain of that.
Shamefully, he still wished to bed her.
Not that he ever would, of course, because she was married to Richard, his cousin.
So, when he knocked on the door of her bedchamber that evening, he was aware of the impropriety of it, of the perversity of it, of the intimacy of it. He felt all of those things wrap themselves around him and settle unsteadily to perch within his core, ready to unfurl at a moment’s notice.
She let him in, still wearing the dress she’d worn to dinner, complete with her gloves. “Mr. Darcy, it is you. You did say you would come to see me, I recall.”
“You had forgotten?” It was all he’d thought about, to the point that Georgiana had gotten cross with him because he wasn’t paying attention when she was speaking to him, and he had felt quite ashamed, because the point of all of this was meant to be social opportunities for his sister.
“No, no, not at all.” She smiled. “You are most welcome.” She crossed the room to the wardrobe and opened it up. “The letters are in my trunk. Have a seat at the writing desk and I shall fetch them for you to look at.”
He sat down and he did not watch her bending over to get letters from her trunk. Well, he might have seen her, but then he immediately looked away. His gaze did not linger. “So, Richard did what? Spirit you off in the night to marry you and then simply left you there and went off to the continent?”
She straightened, holding the letters. “You don’t sound entirely approving.”
He sighed heavily. “You noticed, of course, how long it took him to get around to marrying you. I went to him straight after our conversation, madam, and I made it very plain that I was not interested in you. I’m sure he told you what I said, and I can’t imagine it ingratiated me to you, but when I said that I thought you were soiled, I wish you to understand that I only wanted to make it very plain to him that he must marry you.
I knew it was what you wished. I could see that in your gaze when we spoke. ”
She swallowed. “Soiled.”
He groaned softly. “He did not tell you.”
“He tells me very little. And we did not talk overmuch on our wedding night.”
This felt like a blade going in under his ribs and twisting about. He let out a breath, and it almost sounded pained, to his chagrin.
She slapped the letters down on the writing desk in front of him. “What is it about me, sir? Why are you so interested in me?”
His jaw worked. “I am not. I have told you, that is all over between us. We are only amiable. Platonically amiable. If I thought there was something in me that still felt that way, I assure you, I would not come to your bedchamber alone.”
She regarded him, studying his face. “No, I suppose you wouldn’t. You are very honorable, are you not, sir?”
“I try to be,” he breathed, and he found he could not hold her gaze. He turned to the letters. “Let us leave this subject. You are married now, and you are his.”
She said nothing.
He glanced at her again.