Chapter 40
I could rightly claim that for the first time in my life, I shocked my friends, my family, and in all probability, an entire neighbourhood.
If I were privy to what was said of me below stairs in my house in town, I suspected even my servants would soon be stunned to be told they were to receive a houseful of country ladies as our guests.
“What?” cried Miss Bingley. “All of them? With the mother?”
“Certainly all of them who wish to come,” I replied with such ease that I struggled not to chuckle at her outrage. But noting the look of shock on my sister’s face, I turned to her and said, “Forgive me for launching such a surprise over dinner, Georgie. I hope you do not mind?”
Her expression, ever facile, had already shifted to joy. “Mind? Of course I do not mind! But what a brilliant idea. When did you think of it?”
“Yes, Darcy. When did you think of it?” Fitzwilliam drawled. Clearly, he was not as pleased by this announcement as was my sister.
“I have taken a page from Bingley’s book, and on a whim, extended the invitation not an hour ago,” I replied.
This effectively silenced my cousin, for Bingley laughingly congratulated me for having come around to his philosophy.
Life, he said, waving comprehensively at the scene around him, was best lived upon the dictates of caprice, for look what it had got him?
Even when the conversation surrounding my announcement moved on, my cousin’s preoccupation with it had not.
He grew increasingly silent and filled his glass again and again.
It was then I knew for certain what I had already suspected.
He did not wish to avoid Jane Bennet because her feelings were at risk but because his own had been engaged.
My impulse threatened his strategic retreat.
After dinner over our port, when Bingley and Hurst began to speak of Sussex, I felt sufficiently emboldened to poke Fitzwilliam out of his brooding silence.
“You are annoyed with me.”
“Annoyed is a mild word, is it not? You know my purpose in leaving, and now she will be in London,” he hissed.
“Yes, she will,” I said pleasantly. “Oh, pardon me, of which she are we speaking? If you mean Miss Bennet, then I am not insensitive to your dilemma. You need not fall into anxious concern on my account. I assure you I shall understand if you do not visit us to avoid seeing her.” And after refilling my glass, I looked at him appraisingly, and said, “Unless—perhaps I should beg your pardon, Cousin? I did not stop to question whether you have the requisite discipline to stay away.”
“You are uncommonly provoking tonight,” he said in a bitter under-voice. “I ought to call for our foils, for I have an overwhelming urge to stab you just now.”
“By all means we should fight. You will have to use your left hand, and I shall be winded in under ten minutes. I shall be lucky if I can keep you from tearing a hole in my shirt.”
This led to yet another late-night meeting under torchlight, this time behind Bingley’s house on a bare patch in front of the kitchen garden.
Fitzwilliam swung at me with vicious intent, for he was truly angry for reasons that were all too clear.
The fact that I knew why he was so frustrated, and worse, that he had little control of his left arm, only exacerbated his fury.
He did not want to be in love, and oh, how well I knew the taste of that peculiar rage.
I was forced to defend myself as best I could, a task made harder by how little anger I could summon to propel my blade.
More than once, I was forced to suppress the laughter that threatened to burst through, for the scene we made—both lovesick fools in various stages of our affliction—was perfectly ridiculous.
At the very height of our contest, his swipes were so ferocious, he dislodged the button on his foil, and though Donaldson called to us, he was too far into his advance, and I only managed to hold off my cousin’s last thrust before he had successfully ripped my shirt—and my arm.
“Are you satisfied?” I gasped, heaving and bent double for lack of air and dizziness.
“It is only a scratch,” he panted as Carsten rushed forward, tore my shirt sleeve into a strip, and tied up my wound.
In fairness, it was just a scratch, but some streak of mischief caused me to allow Carsten to fuss over me as if I had been cut to the bone.
It was then that without warning, the laugh I had been holding back broke through.
“Are you drunk? You are out of your head!” Fitzwilliam roared. When I could not answer, for I truly could not stop laughing, he also began to chuckle, albeit begrudgingly.
What more was said between us as we mounted the stairs that night was brief. “You had better come to your senses,” he muttered while striving, not altogether successfully, to revive his irritation with me.
“Oh, but I have. I have had the sense to ‘advance my cause’ as you once put it. But for the love of God, do not say another word, or I shall start laughing again. My ribs are aching.”
“I should have Donaldson throw a pitcher of water on your face.”
Just as I had predicted, this threat—or rather the prim disgust with which it had been issued—was too absurd to ignore, and as a fresh gale of hilarity overtook me, he clamped his hand over my mouth and shoved me ungently into my room before I could wake my sister.
In the morning, I could only marvel at how one group of persons could face a singular event—in our case, the simple breakup of Bingley’s house party—with such wildly divergent feelings.
Fitzwilliam looked a touch defeated, Bingley was anxious to be away, his sisters were snappish, Carsten was visibly relieved, and Sergeant Donaldson was a touch wry in his enquiry as to my wound .
Even Mrs Annesley, who was always agreeable, seemed lightly impatient with Georgiana, who was fairly bursting with restless enthusiasm.
Whatever would she do to entertain Mrs Bennet, she fussed as they took the stairs, and after barely a breath, she fell into raptures at how many things she would show her friends!
How many amusements! And then, sudden uncertainty overtook her.
Should she have a party, she wondered. She did not know, and upon asking her companion, she then immediately answered herself.
“We should certainly have a dinner party with the Gardiners, should we not?”
As to my own feelings, after the storm of last night in which great stores of pent-up constrictions and restraints had been released, I had landed back on earth and in a state of preternatural calm.
The resulting peace was profound. My tea tasted like nectar, the light from the weak sun outside was exquisite, and even the mild aching of my body from fencing for the first time in months was strangely satisfying to me.
Gone were any hidden doubts, judgments, and even a sense that I had to either control life or be savaged by it.
Love had rendered me so perfectly secure that I no longer had the slightest urge to resist anything.
The world could condemn me, Mrs Bennet could be as shrill and silly as she liked, and if I felt inclined to do so at any time, I could sit down to dinner at the kitchen table with my servants, or sail to the Outer Hebrides, or any other impulse of the liberty I suddenly felt—including marrying for the simple sake of passion.