Chapter One #2
There was some danger in how he treated the child. She would grow up wealthy and able to demand nearly anything. There were many people whose characters were spoiled by such a situation.
Her mother had been one.
Darcy’s father would have birched her twice during the afternoon that had just passed. Poor motherless little girl. Darcy could not do it, not even if it would have been better for her.
He sincerely hoped that pain was not the only way to instil good virtue.
From all that he had seen of the world, with the children of both strict and indulgent parents sometimes turning out well and sometimes abominably, perhaps nothing he did to his daughter, whether beating or bribery, would change her fundamental character or how she would act when independent as an adult.
Emily’s general conduct suggested to Darcy that her essential nature was as good as his or Georgiana’s.
She shared quickly; she was always concerned whenever she saw someone who was hurt; she insisted that they help nurse a baby bird which had fallen out of a tree; she had sobbed for an hour and refused to eat sausage for a week when she learned that a pig she had tried to befriend on the estate farm had been turned into her bacon.
When Rose entered the room holding Emily’s writing apron, Miss Bingley came up to see her draw and exclaimed, “Emily will draw better, I am sure, than a thousand adults might! It is so delightful that you let her run about here in the drawing room. Ordinary men, with less parental care than you, would put their children in the perfectly suitable nursery.”
Darcy looked at her with some suspicion.
Miss Bingley flushed. “I only mean to praise you—and your daughter.”
“Then do not pretend that you like the child running about your drawing room, if, in fact, you would prefer me to send her up.”
“I did not mean—”
“No? You did not?”
Darcy’s temper was always short these days. He often had disturbing dreams. Though Mary had cuckolded him, the whole of it was Darcy’s fault. At one time his dead wife had possessed a good enough heart.
She had even loved him, sincerely, for a time.
Miss Bingley reminded him of Mary: finely schooled, sparkling, always trying to find a clever turn of phrase, and fundamentally dishonest. Except Miss Bingley was poorer, less fashionable, and not half as beautiful as his wife had been.
Jove, why could the woman not see that he would make her miserable, like he had Mary, if she succeeded in catching him, and thus leave him alone?
“Darcy,” Bingley said in a half-warning tone. “I believe we were all gathered to watch Emily draw. Do draw something, my dear little bun.”
“I am not food!” Emily retorted as she sat down and scraped the pen eagerly over the page where Darcy had written nonsensical notes. A great deal of ink spattered onto her apron. “There! A fish!”
The scrawled lines failed to depict a fish.
However, if Darcy were in a charitable mood, he might admit they possessed a slight similarity to a fish, if one had never actually seen one, which was an enormous improvement over her art of only three months ago.
Bingley and his sister praised the image as being remarkably lifelike.
“I shall put it in my portfolio!” Emily exclaimed. At that declaration, the nursemaid, Rose, smilingly offered her charge the old leather document case that the little girl had stolen from her father some months before to keep her ‘business’ in.
Shortly afterwards, the child was sent up to the nursery for dinner, and Darcy and Georgiana retired to dress for the evening.
Since Bingley had told them that there would be an assembly so soon after their arrival—an excellent opportunity to meet the rustic horde of neighbours—Darcy had given serious consideration to whether he should allow Georgiana to attend.
His sister had only turned sixteen the previous month; she was still full young for society.
But a small assembly in an insignificant market town was only half out.
Or at least by the standards of the ton.
Not Almack’s. Not a presentation to the queen.
Not five hundred persons of great wealth stuffed into a room made for a hundred and fifty.
No dukes, nor earls, nor even, according to Bingley, impecunious baronets.
A perfect opportunity to permit his little sister to experience the questionable and oft (by Darcy) questioned delight of a room crowded with dancers, freely flowing wine, inferior music, excessively sweet sherbets, and giddy maidens without proper supervision too deep into their cups.
Darcy would find no more pleasure in a ball attended chiefly by persons of a lesser station than he would in one filled with those of the highest fashion; however Georgiana might find greater comfort in a room without people whom she would be forced to converse with frequently, and where the damage of giving a poor impression must be mitigated by the poorness of the unimpressed.
Darcy at least did not think that he would need to attend so closely to matters of reputation in a room filled with persons he would not see every time his concern with the business of the nation dragged him to that awful, stinking, crowded, muddy, sinful place, gilded with manure and the love of money, that cesspit known to all the world as ‘London’.
Even at the best of times, Darcy preferred country to town, but of late he had an additional cause for antipathy towards London: Mary had almost certainly begun her intrigue with Wickham while he stayed in their town-house as the particular guest of Darcy’s ailing mother.
At the time, Darcy had already given up hope of marital harmony and finding true similarity of mind or soul in the woman he had foolishly tied himself to. Instead, he had busied himself with being useful to Wilberforce’s circle of abolitionists.
As a father, Darcy had decided that he ought to involve himself more deeply in the great affairs of the nation and the arrangement of a future which was a little kinder than the one he had inherited from his own father.
And he had wanted to avoid his wife.
Mary had complained and complained about his neglect of her and demanded that he perform for her friends and play attendance on her.
Yet, when he had generally done so during the first years of their marriage, she had always been dissatisfied with how he spoke to Lady such-and-such or how he was rude to Lord so-and-so.
He had not even known himself to be rude.
She also wanted him to make, on occasion, a show of gambling when the stakes were high enough to be interesting, and he never did that.
He never drove a fast gig, he never nearly ran over six ladies and three children in Bond Street, and he talked too long and with too much dullness.
She expected him to be easy in conversation, to fill her ears with sweet gallantries, as regular as a metronome. Yet when he did so, using his watch to remind himself to say something affectionate, she was dissatisfied with the mechanical nature of how he praised her.
None of it was how he had foreseen marriage to be.
Mary had expected him to be…a different sort of man from what he in fact was.
His mother and Mary had died within six months of each other, and at least his mother never knew that the woman she had encouraged Darcy to marry had cuckolded him with dear little Wicky.
Darcy could not guess which betrayal—that by his wife, or that committed by his childhood friend—would have made his lady mother more miserable.
For Darcy’s own part, this behaviour was exactly what he had expected from Wickham, and by the date of his discovery of her unfaithfulness, nothing that Mary did much surprised him.
Entering the Meryton assembly, Darcy studied the crush with a critical eye.
A grummy place—the music was sawn out by the violins, the vinegary stench of spilt wine assaulted his nose, the chattering of a hundred people whom he neither knew nor wished to know besieged his ears.
His coat and shirt seemed uncomfortably tight.
The cramped room was cheaply decorated, lit with few candles, and had a low ceiling.
Thank the Almighty that at least he was not in London.
That thought made him smile, or at least not frown deeply, at the clamour.
Georgiana looked small and terrified by the crowd.
Rather than beginning his quest to find an ugly, sensible, affectionate, and penniless woman to be the mother of Emily and his yet-to-be-conceived son, Darcy led his sister to the line and partnered her for the first set.
Alas, that pleasant dance ended too soon.
Bingley had kindly agreed before they arrived that he would step out with Georgiana for the second set, and Darcy was left to arrange for himself an introduction to a suitable woman to judge as his first candidate for the high and exalted post of Mrs. Darcy.
Unfortunately, this presented no difficulties.
Within a minute he was introduced to the children of a Sir William Lucas.
From her appearance, his eldest daughter was exactly the sort of woman whom Darcy insisted to himself he would marry: sensible, not pretty but not so unpleasant to look at that he would be unable to father an heir with her, and even two months his superior in age.
She had only the smallest dowry, and her family had been in trade before her father was made a knight. Darcy was conscious of his great fortune in finding such imperfection so quickly.
His conversation with Miss Lucas proved of little interest, but that did not bother him.
His conversation with Mary had once been of great interest to him, and that had brought him no happiness in marriage.
To embark upon an opposite course was wisest. Darcy decided he would ask Miss Lucas for a second dance later.
He then stood up with a Miss King, who was an attractive enough girl, he supposed.