Chapter 20 Breakfast
“Mrs Longman, if I eat one more biscuit, your husband will have to make two trips to the stables. One for a wheelbarrow, and the other to haul me to my horse.”
Both Longmans laughed at the admittedly weak jest, and Longman added, “Do not pick on the young master just because he is skinny as a beanpole.”
“I do appreciate the meal,” Darcy agreed laughingly.
Both Longmans had known Darcy since he was in swaddling clothes.
The young Fitzwilliam Darcy had been a bit of a gangly, awkward boy, especially when compared, as he inevitably was, with his much bolder and more outgoing cousin, Richard Fitzwilliam; or worse yet, with the steward’s boy, George Wickham.
When the boys were young, they were rascally and mischievous as most boys were, but the heir to the estate was always just a step behind the others, always just a bit more cautious, a bit more reticent, as if he were born with the knowledge of his duty and responsibility.
Mrs Longman had chased all three out of her kitchen with a large wooden spoon more than once, though she never quite arrived in time to prevent the pilferage of whatever pie or biscuits were cooling on the table at the time.
On the day that Mrs Darcy was birthing her last child, when the young Fitzwilliam Darcy was but twelve years old, the process was not going well at all.
The men in the house could not be much bothered with the young heir to the estate; but whether that was because they thought it was women’s business, they did not think it important, or because they did not know how, was anybody’s guess.
It was the Longmans who had taken him aside, and Mrs Longman who had the painful conversation about what was happening upstairs and what the likely outcomes were, thinking forewarned was forearmed.
The latest conversation was happening as Darcy was having breakfast at the stablemaster’s cottage, two days after getting the news from Bartlet that his wife was not only gone, but flush with enough money to do just about anything she wanted.
He had spent the days sorting the enormous number of things awaiting his action into things that he had to do immediately or face material consequences, things that he could decide later, and the much larger pile of things he simply did not want to bother with.
He also had to urgently write to his poor neglected sister with some belated apologies, and his uncle Matlock with some sharp words.
Lady Catherine would get her own sharp words in person, and sooner than she might like.
In between bouts of working until his eyes crossed and fingers cramped, Darcy spent two melancholy days wandering around Pemberley between tasks, because in some ways, it felt like a tomb.
Everywhere he went, he saw things that made him envision a ghost of Elizabeth, even though she had left so little behind it felt more like a dream than anything else.
His memories of her were fragmented, so he could not picture her in the room exactly, but he could picture an idea of her.
He found a lost handkerchief in the hidden stairs that connected the master and mistress’ suites to the library and wondered if that would be the only keepsake he had of her time at Pemberley until he found her—if he ever did.
There was a chair in the library closer to the fire than where it formerly sat for so long a depression was worn in the floor from the legs.
There were a dozen books that had been moved, but he found that she put them where they belonged, instead of where she found them.
He found the seventeen law books and looked through all of them, thinking she might have left a note of some kind, probably around the marriage law or contracts sections.
He spent an hour or two in the room that Georgiana had decorated, wondering if Elizabeth found it comfortable, or if she only disliked the décor instead of hating it.
He rode Omega to the field where she made her first jump and found the log was all of half a foot high—hardly more than a broom handle.
He wondered how good a rider she was when she arrived, and after Longman finished her training.
She was gently born, on an estate with plenty of horseflesh, and a woman was expected to have the skill.
The eldest Miss Bennet—and he struggled a moment to come up with Jane—obviously knew how to ride, but her knowledge of when to ride seemed suspect.
However, if you looked at riding to Netherfield in the rain as a marital stratagem, he could easily see one or both Bennet parents forcing the issue.
Whether the eldest Miss Bennet was willing accomplice or reluctant victim was a question best put aside.
He finished his ride by going to the wide spot in the drive between Pemberley and Lambton, then urging Omega into a full-out run, while trying to imagine how she felt leaving the Matlocks in her dust. He had to admit that just the idea of doing that gave him a thrill, so it seemed likely it would have done the same for his wife, but who could know?
For all he knew, she was terrified the entire time and did it just to prove she could, and because she was too much of a lady to say what she really thought.
It all hit him the hardest when he was trying to fall asleep at the end of his first days in Pemberley without his wife, and he found himself crying like a baby into his pillow for the first time since his twelfth year, when his mother died.
He would tell nobody about this episode, just as he had told nobody about the previous one.
Oh, how it hurt! Since time immemorial, father had handed down to son the maxim, ‘men do not cry,’ and he had adhered to it until it struck him just how badly he had ruined two people’s lives.
He wondered when it had started. When had he become so arrogant?
When had he decided his worth was better than others?
Had she heard him say she was not handsome enough to dance with at that blasted assembly?
In Meryton, he believed she had not; but in France, with a great deal of time to think, he worked out that she probably had.
He had seen her laughing with Miss Lucas while looking at him, but was that because his arrogance amused her, or because being slighted hurt and that was her only remedy?
Given that others might have overheard him, making him a joke was her best defence among her neighbours.
Had Wickham poisoned her, and if so, did she still believe his lies? What had Darcy done to convince her otherwise?--Not a damned thing, that was what! Not. one. damned. thing!
Morning found him entirely disgusted with the display, and he needed to start doing something, even if it was wrong, so the obvious place to start was the Longman table. If she could not fatten him up, nobody could.
Mrs Longman joined the men, seeing the young master staring at the table in introspection. “I should have helped your wife more.”
Darcy looked at her in consternation, but she continued undaunted.
“Whatever thought just came to your mind, put it aside. I know it was not my place, and I always felt I would do more harm than good,” then she stared a moment, and finally added, “but I did not even try. I had my reasons, and they were good ones, but it might have turned out better if I had intervened.”
Darcy took a deep breath. “Is there any point in trying to talk you out of such feelings?”
“No, it is just one of those things. Sometimes you wish you had acted differently, even though what you did was essentially correct. We will never know. She could just as well have hated the interference as welcomed it. It could just as easily have made her leave sooner than later. My husband knew she was likely to leave, and perhaps we could have intervened, but she is a grown woman, and the mistress of this estate. I know such interference would have likely been unwelcome. I certainly would not have put up with it at her age.”
Both felt there was no need to beat the point to death, and Longman suggested, “With the kind of funds she has, she could be anywhere.”
Darcy sighed. “Yes. She could be staying in a cottage on Pemberley land, or take rooms in Kympton, and we would never know. Not likely of course, as I think her more likely on a ship to Boston or Rome.”
Both Longmans shrugged, aware that there was really no way to know.
Looking slightly uncomfortable but resolute, Mrs Longman asked, “How did you let it get so bad?”
Darcy sighed, coming back to the question he had asked himself over and over hundreds of times since he woke up in France, a victim of his own hubris and short-sighted thinking.
“Do you want the reason or the whiny excuse?” he asked grimly.
“Those two things are rarely as clear-cut as you might think,” Mrs Longman answered cautiously. “Tell me, what led you to treat your wife that way? What led you to believe her guilty?”
“I had no justifiable reason. If I had suspicions, I could well have answered them by talking to her for an hour. As for the excuses—”
He thought for a while and finally sighed in resignation.
“Sometimes, I just get tired. I endured twelve credible compromise attempts in just the last two years, and another ten or so half-hearted attempts. Bates found the middle daughter of the Earl of Somerford in my bed without a stitch of clothing about two months before I went to Hertfordshire. I was so fed up that I put it about that I would not be compromised into marriage, regardless of the supposed provocation, but that sort of thing would not make it to a town like Meryton.”
“Go on,” Mrs Longman said gently.
“It became easy to think of it as a competition, where I had to be on my guard all the time. I was the fox, they were the hounds, and oh, woe is me! I did in fact have to keep on my guard, but I did not have to take it to the level of pig-headed stubbornness that I finally exhibited.”