Mr. Darcy’s Fortunate Neighbor (Darcy and Elizabeth Forever: Pride and Prejudice Variations 22

1. The Fortunate Elizabeth

CHAPTER ONE

THE FORTUNATE ELIZABETH

Elizabeth Bennet wished she had never returned to Longbourn—or, better, had never been born.

“Ten thousand pounds, Mr. Bennet! Ten thousand!” Mrs. Bennet’s shriek pierced the oaken library doors. “And she sits there—that girl—as if she has not plucked the very bread from her sisters’ mouths.”

Elizabeth plugged her ears while her father pushed a heavy chair against the door, but the tumult on the other side did not relent.

“Lizzy, I will never forgive you. Never!” The walking stick thudded against the wood. “Refusing to marry Mr. Collins was foolish. But to refuse Mr. Darcy is the unpardonable sin.”

Papa hunched his shoulders against the onslaught, but neither father nor daughter expected the siege to end—not until Elizabeth promised to stop refusing proposals.

“I don’t suppose you can hide here forever.” Her embattled father wiped his spectacles.

“When will she tire? She promised never to speak to me after I turned Mr. Collins away.”

“I’m afraid her nerves won’t allow her to stay silent,” her father sighed. “We will need to eat and drink eventually.”

Mrs. Bennet’s daily assault on the library doors had been going on for the better part of six weeks, ever since Elizabeth returned from visiting her friend, Charlotte, who had married her rejected suitor, Mr. Collins.

What made matters worse, she had incurred yet another unwanted proposal in the form of a scathing insult—from Mr. Darcy, no less.

The door shook as Mrs. Bennet pounded it with renewed vigor.

“Mr. Bennet, you must do something! Write to Mr. Darcy this instant! Tell him the girl was in a fit of vapors. Tell him she is a simpleton who knew no better—that she has repented in sackcloth and ashes! He is a man of pride; he will want the satisfaction of an apology before he deigns to stoop to us again!”

“Your mother’s logic is impressive,” Papa murmured, “in its complete disregard for logic.”

“She isn’t wrong about his pride.”

Her father looked at her over his spectacles. “No. But pride cuts both ways, doesn’t it? And yours cuts deeper. He will not forgive that quickly, if at all.”

“Neither will I.” Elizabeth threw her hands up in exasperation. “Refusing a flawed proposal is not a sin that begs forgiveness. If anyone needs to repent, it is Mr. Darcy, who has thoroughly insulted our entire family.”

“Aye, but perhaps you could have used a gentler touch?”

Elizabeth didn’t even dignify that with a glare. Her father should know better. Arrogant, boorish, and pompous men deserved no such consideration.

“Mr. Bennet! We must invite Mr. Darcy to dine with us. Perhaps we could offer him another Bennet bride now that Jane is idle. She has the looks, if not the sense!”

“Dear,” Papa called back, “perhaps we could offer you, Mrs. Bennet. You still cut a fine figure, and your nerves might be soothed by ten thousand a year. That would solve our difficulties beautifully.”

“And then Lizzy and I can break this siege,” he added under his breath.

Elizabeth could not suppress a smile at her father’s jest, but she recognized it for what it was—a gentle nudge to face her mother’s wrath. With a sigh, she rose and moved the heavy chair aside, reaching for the door handle.

As the door swung open, Mrs. Bennet’s walking stick came dangerously close to Elizabeth’s cheek, stopping just short as it grazed the doorframe.

“You impudent girl!” she exclaimed, lowering her weapon. “You have not the intelligence of a gnat. If you wanted to vex him, you could very well have vexed him—at length and with great satisfaction—after you were settled as mistress of Pemberley.”

“Mamma, I believe you called him the most disagreeable, horrid man, not at all worth pleasing. I was merely following your opinion.”

“That was before he offered you marriage. Marriage! To ten thousand a year.”

“He insulted me. There is a distinction.”

“A distinction! She speaks of distinctions!” Mrs. Bennet appealed to the room at large, which contained, beyond Jane and Mary, only Kitty, who was curled upon the window seat, making desultory alterations to a bonnet ribbon, and Nettle, Elizabeth’s small, wire-haired terrier she’d found in the hedgerow.

Her puppy pressed her tiny body against Elizabeth’s ankles with the unerring instinct of a dog who always knew which human in the room was in the most distress. Not that Elizabeth was as distressed as her mother.

“What I cannot comprehend,” Mrs. Bennet huffed a fortifying breath, “is how any girl with sense could refuse ten thousand pounds when her family is in such desperate circumstances. Jane sits there with her heart in pieces over Mr. Bingley—oh, do not shake your head at me, Jane, a mother knows—and Mary has no prospects at all.”

Mary struck a chord. It was emphatic and dissonant.

“And Kitty is pale and coughing and will need a warmer climate before the year is out. Lydia is upstairs feigning a headache because she cannot bear another day without something to amuse her. All of this, every bit of our misfortune might have been prevented if Elizabeth had only said yes to Mr. Darcy and his ten thousand a year!”

“And what of Mr. Darcy’s manner of proposing, Mamma?” Elizabeth’s voice held a bite. “Shall we discuss that?”

Her sisters shrank further, having heard this argument before, but Nettle growled in sympathy, her stubby tail wagging.

Elizabeth took a breath as fortifying as her mother’s.

“Shall we discuss the way the proudest, most arrogant, most thoroughly insufferable man in all of England stood before me and declared that he loved me against his will, against his reason, against his character—as though loving me were a disease he had contracted through some regrettable lapse in hygiene, and for which he expected me to provide the cure?”

Mamma’s eyes bulged, her hands firmly on her hips.

“Who cares how he proposed? When ten thousand a year is at stake, he could have delivered his offer whilst standing on his head in a pig trough, and any sensible girl would still have accepted! You foolish, headstrong child! Do you not see that with such a fortune, his pride would be but a trifling matter, no more bothersome than a fly at a picnic?”

“He proposed to me,” Elizabeth stated, the words faster, “as though I were a scruffy little stray he had discovered shivering in a rain puddle—a bedraggled, mud-caked mongrel who had gazed up at him with such pathetically adoring eyes that he simply could not resist.”

Nettle’s hackles rose, barking in perfect solidarity.

Elizabeth’s breath came faster. “Though I assure all of you, I have never in my life gazed at Mr. Darcy with anything remotely resembling adoration.”

Jane set down her needlework. Mary’s hands hovered motionless above the keys, and Kitty’s bonnet ribbon dangled forgotten from her fingers.

“And having committed this impulsive act of charity—having installed this soggy, unpedigreed little beast upon the velvet cushions of his magnificent equipage—he discovered, to his evident horror, that she had muddied his upholstery, shed liberally upon his impeccable coat, and infested him with fleas for his trouble. That is how Mr. Darcy proposed.” She stomped her feet for emphasis.

“He did not offer me his heart, Mamma. He apologized for having one. He informed me, at extraordinary length, that my family and connections were so thoroughly degrading that he ought never to have stooped so low as to notice me, and yet here he was, despite every rational objection, condescending to offer me the incomparable honor of his hand.”

She was trembling, which was inconvenient, so she clenched her fist for better emphasis.

“So yes, Mamma. I refused him. I will not be any man’s charity case, and I will not be loved as one loves a flea-ridden puppy one ought to have left in the gutter.

Not for ten thousand a year. Not for a hundred thousand. ”

Her indictment of Darcy silenced even her mother, who prostrated herself on the couch, while Kitty fanned her and Jane offered lemon water. Nettle, however, growled her approval, charging toward the door where Hill stood, her cap askew.

“Pardon me, ma’am,” the servant said. “Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley calling for Miss Elizabeth Bennet.”

The blood drained from Elizabeth’s face so swiftly she gripped the back of a chair to steady herself. Of all the moments for him to call.

Darcy stood on the threshold with a leather portfolio under his arm and a deeply furrowed brow. The door had been ajar. How much had he heard? His expression offered no answer she could safely draw.

“We are saved!” Mamma’s fan fluttered weakly, although she could not rise from her stricken position. “Lizzy, offer him tea. Coffee. Oh, is it truly Mr. Darcy? Hill, the good tea.”

But Nettle didn’t wait for tea. She growled a warning and lunged at Darcy’s trouser leg, her sharp little teeth finding the hem and shaking as if she’d caught a rat.

“Nettle! Release him this instant,” Elizabeth commanded.

The terrier obeyed, but not before leaving a ragged tear in very fine broadcloth. Elizabeth, who could not growl at Mr. Darcy without forfeiting what remained of her dignity, felt an ignoble and unhelpful kinship with the dog.

“Mr. Darcy,” said Mr. Bennet, emerging from his library. “This is an unexpected pleasure. Or an unexpected something, at any rate. You must forgive the dog. She was a hedge rescue herself, and takes the subject rather personally.”

“Mr. Bennet.” Darcy bowed to her father, then to her mother, then to her sisters, and finally, as if wrestling with demons, to Elizabeth herself. Although his gaze was so critical that her cheeks burned as if brushed by hot candle wax.

“I apologize for the intrusion,” Darcy said. “I come on a matter of some urgency, in my capacity as trustee to Lady Sophia Mottistone.”