Chapter 5
“Miss Smith!”
“Mr Jones!”
That was how our eleventh encounter began.
I completed the new ritual by chastely kissing both of her hands, and she introduced a new one by grabbing my head and kissing me within an inch of my life.
Good Lord, I thought I would burst into flames!
I was absolutely certain our nuptials should be much sooner than later—presuming I survived the courtship.
“I cannot believe how much I love you,” I said when we finally paused for breath and she was clasped to my breast.
“I never could have imagined the pleasure of being allowed to love you,” she returned enigmatically.
I thought about that a minute. “That is why I need you in my life. You always give new and interesting perspectives. Most people think about the pleasure of receiving love, yet you focus on the pleasure of giving. You have the essence of love in one sentence.”
She smiled a bit, or at least I think she did because her ear was against my chest and I could not see her face, though she nodded in acknowledgement.
She thought about it a few minutes, and finally added, “I think the contrasting perspectives are due to the differences between the sexes in our society.”
“How so?”
“I think that, in general, the pleasure of giving love is as great as receiving, as you agreed. It is more obvious to me due to the limitations society places on women. You are free to fall in love and declare yourself or not as you choose. I never had that luxury—that freedom of choice. Had I tried to even hint at an attachment before you declared yourself, I would be considered fast… even desperate… and that is even beside the fact I was meeting you in such an unorthodox manner, and our conditions in life are so vastly different.”
“Yes, that is tremendously unfair, and it means you had to suffer in silence until I got my thinking straight. I regret the lost time.”
“I do not,” she said thoughtfully. “We did what was required to arrive here. Who knows if we would have been able to rescue your sister had we been distracted by our feelings or already attached. Who knows if our love would have had the strength to endure all of life’s trials if we had not had the time to allow it to grow naturally.
For most of our acquaintance, I was far too young for you anyway.
I was little more than a child when we met.
Things worked out well enough, but I still find the imbalance unjust.”
I thought a bit more. “While it does not excuse your mother’s failings, it certainly paints your father in a very poor light.”
“That it does.”
“Enough! There is time to be maudlin later.”
She jumped back, grabbed my hands, and forced me to spin around a few turns laughing like children on a maypole.
We ended up with another toe-curling kiss, and it was something I looked forward to very much, though we both realised we would have to put some effort into not anticipating our vows.
We would have enough suspicion as it was without feeding the beast with an early arrival.
We sat down on a bench placed at the best viewing spot.
“Fitzwilliam, I dislike lying on principle, but the last five years have forced me to become accustomed to it—or at least—if not lying, then not telling the complete and unvarnished truth either.”
“Disguise is my abhorrence as well, but I had no qualms about meeting with you all these years, so I hardly have room to criticise your propriety.”
“Whilst we need to establish an honest footing going forward, we still need a good, shared history. We obviously cannot tell anybody the real story with four unwed sisters.”
“Agreed,” I said, having given it some thought.
“I think it would be best if we met when you were eighteen, and thus old enough to be out in London and worthy of notice, yet not old enough to be in a hurry for an attachment. Did you ever attend anything with some remote possibility of us meeting back then?”
“My thinking exactly,” she said, and pulled out a piece of paper.
“I listed all the events I can remember starting from when I came out at seventeen in Meryton. We could embellish a few meetings. Balls and assemblies might be far-fetched because you would never attend the same ones, and meeting at the theatre or opera also fails because I was always with my relatives. The museum, park, amphitheatre, and bookshop are our best bets.”
I looked over the list. “Some of these dinner parties or Vauxhall Gardens are not as far-fetched as you might think. Will your uncle contradict the story, or at least look on it suspiciously since he never heard of me?”
“Not really. I love them dearly, but I only mentioned some of the men I met, and it was common for other friends to chaperone us. If I tell them I met you and spoke with you extensively, but you were obviously far above my touch so I would be embarrassed to even presume any future possibilities, they will go along. That is not as far from the truth as it sounds. In the worst case, I suppose I could own up to it. They are not like my parents. You will like them tremendously, but I would prefer they not be aware of the risks I exposed their family to over the last five years.”
“They have children, I presume.”
“Yes. They are much younger, but still—”
“Say no more,” I said gently.
I once might have objected to her blanket assumption that I would like a tradesman from Cheapside, but such scruples had disappeared years earlier.
It was not as if my conduct was beyond reproach, or my wealth and station prevented my own sister from abject stupidity.
I wondered if I would have still been the overly proud man I had been when I first met her if we had not continued meeting.
I shuddered to think how I might have reacted to Bingley scolding me to dance with her. It would not have been pretty.
She would be the making of me.
We spent the next hour discussing our story, including some contradictory events we might argue over good-naturedly.
Nothing says attachment like a couple bickering over irrelevant details.
I gave her a few names of other people she may have met who were so absentminded they would have no idea if it had happened or not, and she did similar for a few of her London friends.
She had pencil and paper, so we jotted down notes and made a second copy so we could memorise our shared story.
We spent the next hour or two discussing the things a courting couple really should have discussed before the proposal.
I described her new home in some detail, then spent considerable time smoothing her worries that she was not up to the job.
I spent some time describing my connections in town.
They were obviously more extensive than hers, but she told me all about her aunt and uncle, and a few of their friends she particularly liked.
I was anxious to meet them. She even suggested the best cure for Georgiana might be to throw her in with her younger cousins, since nothing beat having a three-year-old demand the twentieth reading of a story to chase away the doldrums and give one perspective.
If that were not extreme enough, we could always toss them in with her sisters.
We talked a bit about how we saw our family life, how many children we would like, how we expected to raise them, how much we wanted to be in the city versus the country, and the like. It was enlightening, and we found our goals to be remarkably similar.
Far too soon, it came time to return for breakfast. Elizabeth had to endure her family, and I had my own trials to deal with.
~~~
“Mr Darcy, where have you been keeping yourself,” Miss Bingley asked stridently the minute I stepped into the breakfast parlour. “We have been absolutely desolate without your good company.”
I had been avoiding the woman for years and even asked Bingley on several occasions to tell her explicitly that I had no interest—but she was not one to be deterred by such minor obstacles.
She somehow thought that a month of doing the same thing she had been doing for the last few seasons would succeed where they previously failed.
The whole idea seemed ludicrous, unless of course you knew that it took me several years to fall in love with Elizabeth, at which point being slow-witted had something to recommend it.
“I had business to attend to, Miss Bingley,” I replied as I moved to the sideboard to load my plate. She had been encouraging me to use her Christian name for some time, but I wanted no part of it—then or ever.
She always ordered far too much food for the number of residents, even after accounting for the fact that Hurst ate enough for three men.
I suspect she thought I would find it appealing that she took the trouble to have anything I might desire, but all I saw was waste and mismanagement.
The servants would get the extras, but you could much more efficiently just feed the servants better in the first place; not that such an idea would ever occur to her.
Bingley followed a minute later and started filling his plate, while his sister seemed torn over which target to choose. She finally tackled what she presumed was the weakest flank.
“Charles, where were you all day yesterday. I hope you were not visiting those dreadful Bennets.”
I watched Bingley curiously to see what he might say.
I had been mentoring him ever since I helped with some bullies at Cambridge, but the man was five and twenty, and it was long past time for me to stop.
He was a grown man with a worthy woman to woo and an ongoing problem in his home to fix.
I resolved that if he could not get the nastiness of his sisters under control, or better yet get them out of his house, I would gently suggest that Jane find a better suitor.
Bingley drank a sip of coffee, then replied nonchalantly, “No, I did not.”
“Thank Heavens!”