Chapter Eighteen
“YOU SAID,” MR. Darcy was saying, “the last time I was here, something about the dowager duchess bribing or threatening you with marrying Neithern, and then we got sort of, erm, distracted, and I didn’t find out more about that.”
It was three weeks later, and Elizabeth was pouring Mr. Darcy tea in the sitting room at Weythorn.
They had been writing each other daily letters, though they had not been seeing each other.
The letters veered in to the realm of silly love letters, but she liked them.
They had decided not to see each other in the letters—too tempting, after all.
Then, Mr. Darcy had appeared here without any warning, and she could not but be happy to see him.
“Yes, well, the salient point was that she wanted me to marry Neithern,” said Elizabeth. “For the preservation of the bloodline.”
“Yes, obviously,” said Mr. Darcy. “It does make sense, of course. She wouldn’t have known that Neithern wasn’t of her blood. When she found that out, it must have been quite a blow. You’ve heard the news of Sulles, I suppose?”
“I hear no news here at Weythorn, Mr. Darcy,” she said, handing him his tea. “Here, we are practically ensconced in Faerie itself, where time does not pass and it is eternal summer.”
He laughed, smiling at her. “My fey bride. Mrs. Exley may have been right about you, you know. You are bewitching.”
“No,” she said.
“Or, what did Larilane say about a charm being cast on you or something?”
“Stop it, Fitz.” She took a drink of her own tea.
“All right,” he said, shrugging, smiling at her. “We could speak instead of the way I have been thinking about the look of your knees or your thighs, or what is between your thighs?”
“Is that why you’ve come?” she said in a soft and teasing voice. “Are we to be spending a great deal of time employing our mouths in filthy endeavors for the whole of my mourning period?”
He gazed at her steadfastly for several long moments, and then he broke the gaze to peer into his tea. “So, then, how did it become a threat, then? With the duchess?”
She smiled at the subject change. “Well, I protested, of course.”
“Of course.”
“I don’t wish to marry Neithern, since I am spoken for. Besides, Neithern wouldn’t want something as soiled as me.”
He coughed. “I wish I had never said that to you.”
“You want me, though.”
“You are never soiled, and you know that,” he said.
“No, just filthy,” she said, giggling. “But I think you like that about me.”
He coughed again. “We are getting frightfully off the subject.”
“Yes, and I don’t know who it was who brought up removing my clothing, do you?”
He flushed, grinning easily, happily.
“Anyway, when I protested, she had another scheme, one that was a bit convoluted and strange. In it, you and I would marry—”
“I like it already,” he broke in.
“But you must convince your sister to marry Neithern, and then we must betroth our children. That way, the following generation would get the bloodline back on track.”
Darcy raised his eyebrows. “Well, from her perspective, I see what she is saying, but having been subjected to one of those cradle betrothals myself—”
“Nothing binding, though, which I think she would insist upon.”
“True, but you can always break a betrothal if you’re intent on it, Lizzy. You simply marry someone else, consequences be damned.”
She considered this and nodded. “I suppose you’re right.”
“Anyway, I don’t think we want to take that choice away from our children. She’s too old to understand, I think, the duchess is. Such things were common in her day, but younger people think there should at least be a semblance of something approaching romance in a marriage.”
“Oh, I quite agree,” said Elizabeth. “I would not confine our own daughter to a marriage not of her choosing.”
“Indeed not,” said Mr. Darcy.
“To say nothing of your sister,” said Elizabeth.
“Ah, yes,” said Mr. Darcy, sighing heavily. “My sister.”
“Is something amiss with your sister?” said Elizabeth.
He groaned into his tea cup. “I have her practically imprisoned in the household. She was staying in her own house in London, you see, with a companion, Mrs. Nable, but this proved too unwieldy, for she was escaping on her own at every opportunity—”
“Escaping to do what?”
“I know not!” Mr. Darcy set his tea cup down with a clatter.
“I only know she is in some kind of tizzy over the idea that she is not married. I have told her she is quite young and that she has ample time to find a husband, but she is convinced that since neither Wickham nor Neithern truly wanted her—”
“But Neithern does want her,” said Elizabeth. “At least, according to the dowager duchess, he does. He is convinced, however, that Georgiana will not have him since he is not actually of noble blood.”
“Well,” said Mr. Darcy, wincing. “It is… not ideal. But I have always said she must marry any man who will make her happy, and if Neithern is a duke—and, I must say, with the situation with Sulles, I do wonder if the duchess will change her tune with you and her threats, anyway. But definitely, she will be even more motivated to conceal his true parentage, I should think.”
“You never did tell me the situation with Bishop Sulles,” said Elizabeth.
“Ah, well, he’s dead.”
“Dead?” said Elizabeth.
“Tragic accident, fell from a balcony in Neith Abbey.”
Elizabeth blinked.
“Yes, I did wonder about it all as well,” said Mr. Darcy. “I wouldn’t think the duchess would kill her own sons, but it seems that the other one died in a fall as well.”
Elizabeth shook her head slowly. “Yes, well, no mother would do that. She is not made entirely of stone. When I met her…” She thought about it.
“I don’t think so either,” said Mr. Darcy.
“For, as I have said, it makes her position materially more precarious. If anyone were to challenge Neithern’s position, the dukedom would now go to…
oh, I don’t even know. You’d go up to your father’s generation, did he have any brothers, that sort of thing.
The new duke would just as likely send her packing, I shouldn’t wonder. ”
“Well, she never had any interest in exposing Neithern,” said Elizabeth.
“No, of course not, but she would be twice as motivated to keep it all a secret now,” said Mr. Darcy. “And so, I think you can ignore her threats and make threats of your own.”
“Yes,” said Elizabeth, nodding. “She cannot say she won’t give me a penny, for I shall threaten her with exposure, and it would be much worse for her than me at this point.”
Mr. Darcy tapped his chin. “Neithern is in love with Georgiana, you say? I don’t know. He is so young, too young to marry himself.”
“He is my age,” said Elizabeth tartly.
“Yes, but it’s different for men,” said Mr. Darcy.
She shrugged.
“To some ways of thinking, I’m a bit young for it,” said Mr. Darcy, sighing. “It is only, however, if she were to marry a duke and become a duchess, it would be quite a distraction from my marrying you before your mourning is over.”
Elizabeth blinked at him. “What is this?”
“I can’t wait, Elizabeth,” he said, shaking his head. “I simply cannot. It’s been too long as it is.”
“Truthfully, Fitzwilliam, it has been only a few months since that first proposal of yours,” she said.
“Yes, but it feels as if it has been twenty years,” he said. “And we have both been through so very much in the meantime.”
“Well, but we must wait,” she said. “It is our penance, you see, for doing this to Richard.”
He thought that over. Nodded. “I suppose I can see that.”
It was quiet.
They both sipped at their tea.
“Perhaps he would wish us to be happy, however?” said Mr. Darcy. “He would not wish us to spend all our time mourning over him?”
She snorted. “He most certainly would, I think. He would have wanted us to shed quite a number of tears, each and every day for months on end, and to profess often and loudly that we could barely comprehend the thought of living without him.”
Mr. Darcy’s smile was tender. “Ah, yes, I suppose that is our Richard.”
“I did love him, you know,” she told her tea.
“I know you did, Lizzy.” A long pause. “I wouldn’t have engineered your marriage if I hadn’t seen that you loved him.”
She looked up at him. “I suppose you did engineer it, didn’t you? You went to him and told him to do it. He did it because you pressed him to do it, not because he wanted to.”
“He wanted to marry you, Lizzy.”
“He wanted to bed me,” she countered, and now she was up on her feet, feeling the same twisted notions of her attachment to Richard Fitzwilliam run all through her. “You wanted to marry me, Fitz.”
He got to his feet. “No, I promise you, Lizzy, I know my cousin, and I know he was in love with you.”
She shrugged. “I think he loved me the way he had loved a number of other women. He told me of all the widows he had bedded, bragged that he was quite good at knowing how to pleasure a woman, and I was no more than one more of his conquests, and he had to be talked into taking me on, and then he married me in haste, in secret, and I was a source of some shame to his family at his death!”
He came for her. He caught her by the shoulders and made her look at him. “Did I do this, then?”
She tried to look away. “No, Fitz, I should have resisted him in the first—”
He took her chin between his thumb and forefinger. “Lizzy, you know that isn’t fair to you. This is all my fault.”
“Oh, you blame yourself for everything,” she moaned.
“Yes, but of course, this is why it all went the way it did, isn’t it?
” he breathed. “Because I blame myself and think of myself as so poorly and feebly made that you could never have wanted me, that it must have been him, that of course you were in love with him, that I must procure him for you, and…”
“And?”
“Well, this is going to sound frightfully arrogant, I think, but you needed me. I was the right man for you. I’ve always been the right man for you, and I should have fought harder for you.”
She shook her head.
“No?” He smiled at her.