Chapter Ten Misplaced Affections
COLONEL RICHARD FITZWILLIAM was not a man who accepted defeat. He had survived the Peninsular War, outrun French cavalry, and once successfully convinced his commanding officer that a missing crate of regimental brandy had been carried off by an organised flock of badgers.
But as he stood on the picturesque stone bridge over the Rosings ornamental stream the next day, holding a yellow bouquet of daffodils, he felt the icy grip of impending doom.
He had planned the ambush. He knew Elizabeth Bennet walked this path every other day at eleven o'clock.
He had spent forty-five minutes in front of his looking glass perfecting a pose that casually showcased both his broad shoulders and the melancholy, poetic yearning in his left eye.
He had memorised a stanza of Wordsworth.
He was a weapon of mass seduction, primed and ready to fire.
And then she appeared.
Elizabeth walked down the gravel path, but she was unrecognisable.
The sparkling woman who usually had the conversational speed of a cannonball was moving with the shuffling gait of a somnambulist. She was staring blankly at a patch of dirt.
She walked straight past the picturesque bridge, past the daffodil patch, and nearly straight into a decorative marble cherub.
"Miss Elizabeth!" Richard barked, abandoning his poetic pose and jogging after her.
Elizabeth gasped, jumping as if he had fired a musket next to her ear. She spun around, her eyes wide, unfocused, and slightly frenzied. "Three thousand pounds!" she blurted out.
Richard froze, the daffodils hovering awkwardly in mid-air. "I beg your pardon?"
"I mean—Colonel! Good morning." Elizabeth pressed a hand to her forehead, as though she was trying to keep her brain from jumping out of her skull. "Forgive me. I was... doing arithmetic. In my head. I find it builds character."
"Arithmetic," Richard repeated slowly. He looked down at his yellow flowers. They felt very stupid. "Well. I wouldn't know. I brought you these. They reminded me of the... the sun. Which you outshine. Daily."
It was a good line. It was a great line. He had practised it on his batman, who had wept. Mostly with mirth, but still.
Elizabeth took the flowers mechanically. She stared at them as if they were a bundle of turnips. "Thank you, Colonel. Daffodils. Yes. Very yellow. Did you know that Ramsgate is quite lovely in the summer?"
"Ramsgate?" Richard frowned. "I suppose? It is a bit sandy. Miss Elizabeth, are you quite well? You look as though you have been hit over the head with a church pew."
"I am well," Elizabeth said, her voice an octave higher than usual.
"I am contemplating the nature of truth, the disastrous consequences of unchecked pride, and the fact that I am arguably the greatest blockhead in the history of the British Empire.
" She looked at him, her eyes missing their usual flirtatious spark.
"Colonel, if a man—a hypothetical man—were to perform an act of great, secretive nobility, but he was also a spectacular snob...
does the nobility cancel out the snobbery, or do they exist in a state of neutralising friction? "
Richard stared at her and felt as though he had walked into the middle of a play in a foreign language. The romantic tension, which he had been diligently inflating like a hot-air balloon, had not merely deflated; it had caught fire and crashed into the sea.
"I... I do not know, Miss Elizabeth," he said helplessly. He tried one last, desperate flanking manoeuvre. He stepped closer, lowering his voice to its most intimate tone. "But I do know that my heart—"
"Because if he is a snob," Elizabeth interrupted, pacing a tight circle around him, clutching the daffodils by their necks, "he is still intolerable!
But if he... then he is a hero! But he ruined Jane!
But he wrote a letter! Argh!" She let out a frustrated sound that was half groan, half shriek, and entirely unladylike.
She stopped pacing and looked at Richard, her expression morphing into one of sisterly apology. She reached out and patted him firmly on the shoulder, exactly as one might pat a reliable horse.
"I apologise. I do not know what came over me since yesterday. But you are a very good friend, Colonel," she said earnestly. "You have excellent brass buttons. I must go and stare at a wall now. Good day!"
Richard stood on the gravel path alone, watching the woman of his dreams march away while strangling his bouquet.
But he was not heartbroken. This was the most shocking realisation of all. As he watched her go, he did not feel the crushing despair of a rejected lover. He felt the relief of a man who had just realised he did not have to pretend he understood Wordsworth any more.
Ten minutes later, Richard burst through the doors of the Rosings parlour with the dramatic flair of a crier announcing the fall of an empire.
"It is over!" he bellowed, throwing his hat onto a gilded armchair. "The siege is lifted! The troops are retreating! The general is returning to his tent to eat cheese and reconsider his life choices!"
In the corner of the room, seated at her small table, Anne did not flinch. She was wearing an apron over her muslin gown, and her hands were covered in charcoal dust. She was sketching what appeared to be a portrait of Mr Collins.
"Did she reject your flowers?" Anne asked, her voice dry and devoid of pity. "Or did she realise that if she married you, she would have to listen to you shout your private musings for the rest of her natural life?"
Richard collapsed onto Anne's chaise longue—the very chaise his aunt forced Anne to languish upon for three hours a day. He threw one arm over his eyes. "She patted me, Anne. She patted my shoulder. As if I were a good boy dog. The romantic connection is dead. It has expired. It has ceased to be."
Anne blew a puff of charcoal dust from her paper. "I am shocked. Truly. A man and a woman who are identical in volume and theatricality failed to form a lasting romantic bond. It is a tragedy defying the laws of nature."
Richard moved his arm, peering at her with one eye. "You are mocking me. I come to you seeking the soothing balm of cousinly affection, and you mock my pain."
"You are not in pain, Richard. You are embarrassed," Anne corrected, picking up a piece of blending chalk.
"You approached the courtship of Miss Elizabeth as a competitive sport.
You saw Darcy glaring at her, you saw her wit, and you decided you must win the prize. But you do not want to marry her."
"I am devastated," Richard insisted, though he sounded more as though he were ordering a sandwich.
"You are relieved," Anne stated, turning the sketch to assess Mr Collins's chin, which she had drawn with a satisfying overbite.
"You and Miss Elizabeth are the same person, Richard.
You are both performers. You both crave the centre of the room.
If you married, your household would be a perpetual stage play.
You would shout jokes at each other across the breakfast table until one of you suffered an apoplexy. "
Richard sat up, frowning. "I am not a performer. I am a serious military man."
Anne slowly lowered her chalk and looked pointedly at his brass buttons, his artfully ruffled hair, and the chaise longue across which he was draped.
"You literally just announced your entrance by referring to yourself in the third person as a general eating cheese," she said.
Richard opened his mouth to argue, closed it, and sighed. "Fine. Perhaps I am a bit dramatic. But what is the alternative? I must marry someone. I cannot remain a bachelor for ever. Who on earth am I supposed to marry if not a brilliant woman who can tolerate my volume?"
"You do not need a woman who can match your volume, Richard.
You need a woman who has the authority to tell you to shut up," Anne explained with the patience of a saint, then turned back to her sketch.
"You need someone who grounds you. Someone who finds your antics amusing, but who is not swept away by them.
Someone who has a quiet pragmatism to balance your unhinged chaos. "
Richard stared at her back. He watched the confident movements of her hands and thought about the fact that he had spent the last week actively seeking out this exact room, every single day, just to complain to her, to listen to her dry insults, and to watch her paint angry livestock.
"Someone who grounds me," he repeated.
"Exactly," Anne said, oblivious to the earth shifting behind her. "A sensible woman with a strong constitution and an immunity to your charm. Unfortunately, such women usually become nuns, so your prospects are grim."
"I do not think my prospects are grim," Richard whispered.
He stood up from the chaise longue, the theatricality vanished from his frame. He felt as though he were walking underwater.
He crossed the room, stopping just behind Anne's right shoulder.
She was reaching for a small pot of blue watercolour to add a wash to the background of her drawing.
As she dipped her brush, a stray hair fell across her forehead.
Without thinking, she reached up with the back of her wrist to brush it away.
She missed the hair, but she successfully transferred a vibrant smudge of paint onto the tip of her nose.
She blinked, unaware. "I think I have captured Mr Collins's sycophancy in the left eyebrow," she murmured, leaning back to assess her work.
Richard looked at the blue paint on her nose.
The universe, which had previously been spinning at its normal speed, lurched to a halt.
Oh, good God, Richard thought, a wave of clarity washing over him.
It was as if someone had taken a wet rag and wiped a layer of grime from the window of his mind.
He looked at Anne and saw the elegant line of her jaw, the hidden intelligence in her eyes that she concealed from the world because the world was too stupid to appreciate it, and the paint on her nose.
His heart performed an unmistakable backflip inside his ribcage.
He did not love Elizabeth Bennet. He had merely been dazzled by her.
He was in love with Anne de Bourgh.
He was in love with his sickly, cynical, sheep-painting cousin. He was in love with the woman who faked phthisis to avoid playing the pianoforte. He was in love with the woman who had just unravelled the state of his heart while drawing a caricature of a clergyman.
Panic.
If he was in love with Anne, he would have to marry her. If he married her, Lady Catherine de Bourgh would be his mother-in-law. He would have to live at Rosings. He would have to listen to lectures on paving stones and the correct consistency of mashed turnips for the rest of his natural life.
Joy.
The panic was flattened by a wave of euphoric joy.
He could spend the rest of his life sitting in this room.
He could buy her new watercolours and act as her shield against her mother.
He could make her laugh that rusty, beautiful laugh every single day.
She had eighty thousand pounds, yes, but he did not care if she had eighty pence.
She was the most magnificent creature in England, and she was sitting right in front of him with a blue nose.
"Anne," Richard choked out, his voice sounding as though he had just swallowed a pinecone.
Anne turned her head. "Good heavens, Richard, what is wrong with your face? You look as though you have been struck by lightning. Are you having a stroke? Mother's medical encyclopaedia says I must bleed you if you are having a stroke, and I warn you, I do not know where the leeches are kept."
"You have paint," Richard wheezed, pointing a trembling finger at her face. "On your nose. It is blue."
Anne frowned, crossing her eyes slightly to try to see her own nose. She scrubbed at it with her sleeve, succeeding only in smearing it across her cheek like a piece of tribal war paint. "Better?"
"It is..." Richard felt his knees wobble. He had faced down Napoleon's Imperial Guard without flinching, but the sight of Anne de Bourgh at this moment was destroying him. "It is perfect."
Anne paused, her hand dropping. She studied him closely, her eyes narrowing. The amusement faded from her expression, replaced by wariness. She saw the look in his eyes—the naked adoration—and she went still.
"Richard," she asked, her voice dropping to a low, dangerous warning. "What are you doing?"
"I am realising," Richard said, his voice cracking, "that I am a monumental idiot."
"We established that twenty minutes ago," Anne said quickly, her breathing shallow. She turned back to her easel, gripping her paintbrush like a weapon. "Go away, Richard. Go back to the parsonage. Go and find a woman who produces loud noises."
"I do not want loud noises!" he shouted, stepping closer. "I want quiet! I want cynical pragmatism! I want angry sheep!"
"I am sickly!" Anne fired back, slamming her paintbrush down. "I have a weak chest! I require tinctures!"
"You walked a mile through a damp meadow!" Richard countered, throwing his hands into the air. "You are healthier than my horse! You are a fraud, Anne de Bourgh, and you know it!"
"If you tell my mother that, I will poison your port!" she threatened, her face flushing a magnificent red beneath the blue paint.
"I do not care about your mother! I do not care about the port!
" Richard ran his hands through his hair, losing his mind.
He was bouncing in his boots. He needed to run three miles, chop down a tree, or kiss her until they both passed out.
"I have to leave this room! I am a danger to the furniture! "
He spun on his heel and sprinted for the door. He threw it open, nearly taking it off its hinges.
"Richard Fitzwilliam, you come back here!" Anne yelled, her voice echoing from the gilded ceiling.
"I cannot!" Richard shouted from the hallway, his voice echoing back. "I am going to the stables! I need to ride a horse very fast and contemplate the fact that I am going to voluntarily marry into the jurisdiction of Lady Catherine de Bourgh! May God have mercy on my soul!"
He vanished, his boots pounding down the corridor.
Anne sat frozen at her easel. The echo of his boots faded away, leaving the sitting-room in ringing silence.
Slowly, shakily, she reached up and touched the blue paint on her nose. Her heart was beating hard, something she had never experienced before. She glanced at the doorway, and then down at the sketch of Mr Collins.
"Oh, dear God," she whispered to the empty room. "The idiot is in love with me."