8. A Matter of a Name
CHAPTER EIGHT
A MATTER OF A NAME
Elizabeth Bennet, Darcy reflected, must surely be the most provoking woman alive.
Yet here he sat on a tattered cane chair in the not-quite-so-leaking steward’s cottage with his great-grandfather, George Darcy’s journal, and discovering, to his astonishment, that a Bennet girl had been vexing Darcys for a full century—this one called Alice.
George, in a hand as broad as his affections, recorded that she walked faster than any woman he had ever known, darting over stiles to elude the mud and skipping from stone to stone across the boundary streams. If he ever found himself in a puddle, he had the good sense—or pride—not to confess it.
She is the most extraordinary creature. Not beautiful by conventional standards, but wild and natural, as if she had sprouted from the very earth of Longbourn.
She speaks fast and walks even faster, and though she has a pleasing and slight figure, she can travel long distances by using the stiles to elevate herself above the muck and mire that seems to cover the fields and meadows of Longbourn.
I have a mind to address the drainage, but she speaks of the ponds and the ducks and geese as her friends, and she splashes across the streams, heedless of the water soaking her boots.
Darcy turned the well-worn page of the journal, its leather gone dark with age, while the visual of Elizabeth Bennet pulling him from a mud puddle, her dark curls in wild disarray and an impish smile she had failed to hide, offered some respite from the tedious surveying of the northern fields and their bogs of standing, now frozen water.
Mother sent me to Longbourn every summer since I left the schoolroom behind.
She wanted me out of the way because I distract William from his duties at Pemberley.
He is to be the master of our Darcy legacy, but he cannot concentrate when I tell him stories about dragons and knights and monsters lurking in the bogs.
So I go to Longbourn, where Aunt and Uncle Bennet treat me like their own son.
Their heir, Thomas, is sickly and spends his days in bed reading, and their daughters are too young to care about ledgers, tenants, or any of the details of estate management.
This ancestor of his, George, was a man Darcy would have loved to meet, and now, he could only meet him through his words and his descriptions of Longbourn, with its mill prone to flooding, its smokehouse that often burned down, and the icehouse that had long since gone back to the ground.
The ponds and their attendant creatures lent the place a certain fairy-tale charm, but even fairy tales must conclude.
I did not particularly notice Alice until the year I turned seventeen.
She was fifteen and teased me mercilessly.
How big-boned I am—an oaf—she said as she picked daisies from the meadow.
I looked down at my hands and saw how large and clumsy they were and how small and dainty she was, and I…
well, I spare you the details. She walks faster than any creature I have ever known.
Always walking away from me, and she says it is because she has longer legs, which is a falsehood, as she is smaller than her sisters, although second oldest, and she simply refuses to be overtaken, especially by me.
Darcy turned the page. Cleo was curled on the desk beside the memoir, her tail draped across the inkwell, licking her paws.
Beyond the window, the December morning lay grey and still, the frost silvering the cottage garden and the bare branches of the oak that marked the boundary between the cottage grounds and the path to Longbourn.
He had stumbled upon great-grandfather George’s journal some weeks past, just as his solicitor delivered the astonishing news: Mr. Collins was dead, and Darcy—through this man who was both a Darcy and a Bennet—was now heir to Longbourn.
The inheritance, as it happened, included one Elizabeth Bennet, whom he had not managed to forget, nor, if he were honest, had he ever truly wished to, despite the hostilities that had flourished between them while he was a guest at Netherfield.
The boy’s round handwriting grew more angular as the next words were scratched onto the page, blotted in places, as if the words were hard and regretful.
I am to leave Longbourn. William is dead of a sudden fever. Quick, furious, and merciless, writes Mother. He was twenty and was to be married in the spring. His betrothed, Miss Catherine Astley, is prostrate with grief. I am to return to Pemberley immediately and assume the duties of the heir.
Alice cried when I told her, although she would never admit to it later.
Aunt Bennet gave me a funny look, telling me I must do my duty and marry William’s bride.
Uncle Bennet only shook his head and blessed me.
And they sent me away as if I carried a curse.
They told me never to use the word Bennet in any conversation or correspondence. And so, I never saw Longbourn again.
Cleo, apparently tired of the desk, or perhaps sensing Darcy needed an anchor, jumped onto his lap, curling her tail over the journal.
Darcy petted her, stroking her fur, which Vernon refused to brush, saying it was not his duty to clean a mangy cat while polishing the candlesticks to an unholy shine.
The next entry was dated three years later.
I have married Catherine Astley.
She is kind, sweet, and gentle—trained from birth to be the mistress of a great house.
She loved my brother, and now she must content herself with me.
I am told this is how great families preserve themselves—through adaptation, through substitution, through the convenient interchangeability of sons.
I think of Alice often, but I do not write to her or any of the Bennets.
Uncle Bennet has died, and his eldest son inherited.
Even from his sickbed, he fathered another son, also named Thomas.
Their line continues, and I am not needed.
I have never called on them or Alice. She is still unmarried, and it would not be proper.
I am a married man now, master of Pemberley, and the boy who ran through the Longbourn orchards with a Bennet girl is someone I must learn to forget.
I shall not return to Hertfordshire.
He went on to record the birth of his son and other details.
No other children or mention of his wife.
But on the final page of the journal, he did something quite unnatural.
Darcy saw the tear marks on the page where the distraught heir had signed his name, George Bennet, then crossed it out and wrote George Darcy.
Darcy snapped the book shut, jaw clenched.
So this was the price of Longbourn: surrender the Darcy name and become a Bennet.
George had been willing, apparently. Darcy, in his eagerness to see Elizabeth again, had not bothered to consider this particular catch.
He had been too busy advising Bingley to avoid entanglements with country girls of no consequence and vituperative families that gossiped with malice—none of which would recommend the Bingleys to London society.
Indeed, Louisa Bingley’s marriage to a Hurst had not elevated them, because the Hursts, while an old family, had not preserved their estate and were now living on income from its sale.
Cleo, clearly bored with his brooding, leaped from his lap and squeezed her way out through the cottage door when Vernon opened it to shake out a rug. Darcy set aside the journal and picked up his walking stick. He needed air.
The December morning bit at his cheeks as Darcy set off through the orchard, his walking stick tapping against the frozen ground.
The cat had disappeared, as cats were wont to do, and Darcy did not mind if she returned with another one of her gifts—a half-eaten bird or a mangled piece of fur that had once been a rabbit or squirrel.
She kept the rodent population at bay, and she did not seem to mind his presence the way a certain Miss Bennet did—going all prickly whenever he opened his mouth.
The path through the orchards curved northward, following the line of a boundary hedge that separated Longbourn’s cultivated grounds from the rougher pasture beyond.
Darcy had walked it before, noting the gaps, the drainage problems Elizabeth’s ledger had documented, and the places where a modest investment could reclaim an acre or two of usable grazing.
He walked it now, seeing where her drawings had shown a sluice gate could be placed, and then he thought of her blank improvement journal.
She had not needed art lessons to sketch flowers or fruit because she had applied her efforts to visualizing a new fence around the paddock, various designs for an improved smokehouse, and clearing a thicket into a garden.
Most provoking of all, she had managed quite well without Fitzwilliam Darcy descending from Derbyshire to instruct her—though, admittedly, she lacked the funds to enact her plans.
Nor did she aspire to marriage the way every other young woman of his acquaintance did when introduced to his ten thousand a year, a heritage from the Norman Conquest, and the splendor of Pemberley. She preferred her inkstained hands, muddy hems, and worn boots to the silks and fashions of London.
And… She walks faster than any creature I have ever known.
A sustained yowl came from above, splitting the morning air.
Darcy’s gaze moved upward and caught in the branches of a large elm tree at the edge of the Longbourn orchard, halfway between the kitchen garden and the steward’s cottage.
Cleo was wedged in a fork some distance above the ground, scrabbling her paws with no purchase.
She yowled again, not a plaintive mew begging for help but an insistent snarl of displeasure at his failure to immediately extract her.