24. Names Inherited #2
“So,” Bingley said after they were out of earshot. “Who is responsible for a tree that crosses the boundary stream? The roots are on Netherfield land, I should say—but the damage is to the Longbourn field.”
“The roots determine responsibility. If you purchase Netherfield, the clearing falls to you.”
“And if I marry Miss Bennet and she inherits Longbourn?” Bingley tilted his head. “Then I should be paying myself to clear my tree to save my field. The boundary rather loses its meaning.”
“The estates would remain separate. Jane would hold Longbourn; you would hold Netherfield. Two properties, two incomes, two sets of tenants.”
“Two names,” Bingley said it lightly, but his voice caught—a small hesitation, barely perceptible, like a horse checking its stride before a jump. “The entail requires the husband to take the Bennet name. Your Mr. Philips drafted the provision himself.”
“It was a pre-existing provision of the entail,” Darcy noted. “Even Mr. Collins would have had to change his name. His grandfather had a dispute with the family and took the Collins surname.”
Bingley fell silent—a rarity sufficient to draw Darcy’s notice. He gazed at the fallen tree, his expression hovering between contemplation and unease, as if he were weighing a matter he had not anticipated would prove burdensome.
“Charles Bennet,” he said, testing the sound of it.
“Charles Bennet of Longbourn. My grandfather hauled wool in a cart and gave his sons a gentleman’s education so they might live as gentlemen.
He built the name Bingley from nothing. Two generations—that is all it is.
But it is ours.” He paused. “My father would not have liked to hear his name traded away, even for an heiress. Though I suppose he would have liked the heiress well enough.”
“You would not be compelled to change your name unless Jane inherits while you are married to her. Mr. Bennet is in good health.”
“He is. He may well outlast us all; he possesses the constitution of a man who preserves his health by never troubling it.” Bingley managed a half-smile. “And yet the question remains, does it not? Like the tree in the stream—one cannot simply hope it will remove itself.”
He turned to Darcy with the frank, unguarded curiosity that was his most disarming quality.
“Although, I have been thinking. If Jane were to bar the entail herself, as you did, and let the line pass to daughters without requiring the husband to change his name—the question would dissolve entirely for us.” He paused, and a slow, mischievous light entered his eyes.
“Mr. Bennet would have to agree. Barring an entail requires the current holder and the heir.” For once Bingley was put in a hard place, and Darcy could not fail to relish it.
“Buck up, my man. If you love Jane Bennet and wish to take on Longbourn, you shall become Charles Bennet, perhaps Charles Bingley-Bennet at the very least.”
“Unless, of course, being mistress of Netherfield Park is enough for Jane and she then passes the estate to the second daughter.” Bingley grinned as if he had won a hard-fought battledore match. “And the next man to face the Bennet name question would be whoever married Miss Elizabeth.”
The blood rose in Darcy’s face before he could prevent it—a hot, sudden flush that had nothing to do with the January cold and everything to do with the image Bingley had just conjured: Fitzwilliam Bennet.
The moniker sat in his mind like a foreign object, angular and impossible, and his father’s voice surfaced from the deep place where all his father’s certainties still resided.
The Darcys have held Pemberley since the Norman Conquest, his father’s voice reminded. You are the steward of that name, Fitzwilliam. Guard your heritage.
“The question does not arise,” Darcy said, and heard how stiff the words sounded. “Jane is the heir, and the provision applies to her husband, not to Elizabeth’s.”
“I notice you did not say you would refuse.” Bingley was watching him with that open, guileless expression that made his observations land with twice the force of a cleverer man’s. “Only that it does not arise.”
“Because it does not.”
“Very well.” Bingley accepted the deflection with his customary grace.
“I suppose I have less to hold onto than you with your traditions dating back to the Norman Conquest. However, there is something I ought to have told you, and perhaps now is as well as any other.” He did not look at Darcy as he spoke, which was unlike him.
Bingley faced everything head-on—bad weather, awkward silences, his sisters’ disapproval.
That he was studying the frozen stream rather than meeting Darcy’s eyes told Darcy this was no small thing.
“You know my family came from trade. What you may not know—what I have never told you, because my father counseled keeping it in reserve—is where the Bingleys came from before that.” He drew a breath.
“I have a bit of Darcy in me—from a disinherited line, and I suppose if I had been a legitimate Darcy, I would have also felt the pride of possession of the name.”
“You what?” Darcy froze, aware only of the shock traveling from his heart to his fingertips. “My family tree is well-kept without any wild offshoots.”
“Like the perfectly manicured grounds at Pemberley.” Bingley plucked an intruding branch that crossed their path. “Yes, it has been quite pruned of malcontents and those deemed inconvenient.”
“I urge you to speak plainly.” Darcy’s jaw tightened, because affront to his family name was not a thing he tolerated, even from his oldest and dearest friend. “I did not take you for a climber.”
“I assure you I am not,” Bingley said. “My family’s fortune is extensive, as you know: the wool trade, mills, and factories up north. However, there was a lass who grew up in Pemberley. Her name was Mathilda. Mathilda Darcy.”
“I have never heard of that name. Georgiana is the only female for generations.”
“She would have been from your great-grandfather’s time—his sister.
” Bingley’s voice carried a trace of bitterness inherited from people who had felt it keenly.
“She eloped with a tradesman after her eldest brother died. The younger brother became the heir, and the family struck her from the records. They kept her dowry and barred her from Pemberley. They also removed her name and told her she could never use it.”
Darcy was not sure he could believe this fanciful story. Bingley would not lie to him, but had someone lied to Bingley?
“I will, of course, require independent corroboration of this,” he said, before he could think better of it.
“You may corroborate it however you wish,” Bingley said with a tightening at the corners of his mouth.
“I told you because you are my friend, and not a card to be played if the Bingleys needed a Darcy favor. Both of us are courting Bennet daughters, and I thought to say that it would be just as hard for me to give up the Bingley name as you value your Darcy name.”
“I did not mean it quite that way,” Darcy said. “I just had never heard of a daughter. But if, as you say, my family erased her, then I am truly sorry for what she suffered.”
“It was well before your time, Darcy.” Bingley, always easy to forgive, clapped his shoulder.
“I tell you this because I am rather partial to my great-grandmother who married a hardworking tradesman who cherished her. I believe they were happy together despite the loss of her dowry and her family name.”
Darcy did not know what to say. It mattered to Bingley that he believed the story, but if true, it meant his family erased inconvenient daughters, which rather put a new light on the tradition that they only birthed sons.
It being late, Darcy and Bingley mounted their horses to return to Longbourn. The ride was quiet now, companionable in the way of two men who had said what needed saying and could leave the rest unspoken. As they crested the gentle rise above the Longbourn lane, Darcy saw them.
Two graceful female figures crossed the frozen field from the direction of the tenant cottages. They walked arm in arm, swinging an empty basket. Elizabeth’s head was tilted toward Georgiana’s, either listening to a story or sharing a confidence.
Georgiana’s laughter floated through the air, and a sharp pang turned in Darcy’s chest. The two women he loved most in the world were walking together like old friends, and yet, here he was reproaching himself for his guardedness even from Bingley, his closest friend.
He could not tell if they saw him, perched atop the ridge in the uncertain winter light. The field stretched wide between them. He raised his hand in a small, private salute, but they continued on, absorbed in their own easy companionship.
Bingley wasn’t watching Elizabeth and Georgiana. His gaze turned to Jane’s distant figure at the Longbourn gate, where she had come out to meet them.
“Come on, then.” Bingley gathered his reins, his voice carrying no residue of injury. “Let us go and face Mr. Bennet. Shall we race?”
Grinning like a schoolboy, he flicked his wrists and his grey lunged forward into a gallop over the open field. Darcy, not wishing to make a spectacle of himself, yet unwilling to concede, gave the bay a sharp, firm nudge and urged his mount into a thundering, full-stretch gallop.
The wind bit his face, cold and sharp, but Darcy didn’t blink.
Ahead, Elizabeth and Georgiana had stopped at the sound of rushed hoofbeats.
Elizabeth’s hand rose to shade her eyes against the glare of the setting sun.
Darcy saw the moment she recognized him—a sudden, sharp stillness.
He did not slow. Propriety and the dignity of his name could wait; all that mattered was reaching her first.