34. Two Gentlemen
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
TWO GENTLEMEN
Caroline Bingley arrived at Netherfield on the twenty-first of January with three trunks, a lady’s maid, and the settled conviction that Pemberley was finally within her reach—and this time, not through marriage to Darcy, which had been her previous aim.
“You cannot be serious, Charles.” Her voice carried through the breakfast room with the crack of a well-aimed shot.
“You cannot possibly intend to let this opportunity slip through your fingers. Pemberley! One of the greatest estates in England! And you sit there eating your eggs as though nothing has changed.”
Darcy set down his fork, resigned to the inevitable.
He had dreaded this conversation the instant Bingley’s express rider returned from London with news of Miss Bingley’s impending arrival.
For a brief, perhaps foolish moment, he had harbored the hope that she might exercise restraint—either out of friendship or, failing that, a prudent regard for her own comfort.
But Caroline’s ambitions, like her trunks, always arrived in excess.
“Mr. Darcy, or whatever should I call you now?” Caroline looked down her sharp, long nose at him. “I hope you are well.”
“Well indeed, Miss Bingley. Your arrival from London to this backwater wilderness is unexpected.”
“Is it? I should have thought, given the extraordinary intelligence I received from my sister here, that my arrival was entirely predictable. When one is apprised that the true Darcy line runs through my great-grandmother, Mathilda.” She paused, savoring the shape of the words.
“One becomes quite interested in what one’s brother is still doing here in this backwater instead of claiming our rightful place at Pemberley. ”
“Caroline.” Bingley’s voice was mild, but Darcy recognized the set of his jaw—the same stubborn angle he had displayed in the London coffee house. “We have discussed this repeatedly. My position has not changed.”
“Which is preposterous.” Caroline set down her coffee cup. “The entail is clear. We inherit through the female line. We have a legitimate claim, supported by documented evidence. You would be a fool not to pursue it.”
“The evidence is insufficient to bring before any court,” Darcy said. “Mr. Blythewood was most explicit on that point.”
“Courts.” Caroline dismissed the word with a flick of her wrist. “This is not a matter for courts, Mr. Darcy. It is a matter for family. Charles has a moral obligation—a duty—to assume the position stolen from our ancestors. And you, I should think, have a corresponding duty to vacate. Gracefully, one would hope, with appropriate reparations. Georgiana, too, naturally.”
Stolen.
The word struck a nerve that had throbbed without ceasing since Elizabeth laid the oilskin packet in his hands by the boundary stream. Four generations had lived upon the consequence of a choice made in 1695, and now Caroline Bingley sat in a morning room in Hertfordshire and called it theft.
“Nobody stole anything,” Bingley said, with an edge Darcy had heard from him only twice in six years. “The documents cannot be corroborated as everyone directly involved is dead.”
“The estate is not dead,” Louisa observed from her corner.
She had the faintly apologetic air of a woman who knew her contribution was unwelcome but could not resist making it.
“Pemberley is very much alive, and very much in the wrong hands. A hundred years of income was misallocated, and I suggest it be restored to the true Darcys.”
“What about the work of the Darcys in managing, investing, and improving on the estate they held in good faith?” Bingley asked. “Does that count for nothing?”
“Then they were merely stewards for the rightful owners, Charles; you know that.” Caroline rose and glided to the window, offering the room her most distinguished profile—a posture Darcy recognized, having adopted it himself whenever judgment required a scenic backdrop.
She turned, her features arranged into what she likely imagined was compassion, though it bore as much resemblance as a wax fruit to the real article.
“Mr. Darcy. I do not wish to be unkind. You have been a generous friend to my brother, and we are all sensible of it. But you must see that the situation is untenable. A gentleman cannot occupy an estate to which he has no legitimate claim.” She paused, as though weighing her next words with care.
“Perhaps the Navy. I understand there are always commissions available for men of… uncertain lineage. Or the Americas. I am told there are opportunities in the new world for those who wish to begin afresh, unburdened by a name that does not belong to them.”
Louisa’s teacup halted midway to her lips. Bingley’s face drained of color and flooded with an ire Darcy had never seen from him.
“Get out.”
Caroline blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“Get out of this room, Caroline. Take Louisa. Go upstairs, or go back to London, or go to the devil for all I care, but you will not sit in my house and tell the best man I have ever known to exile himself because you fancy the drawing rooms at Pemberley.”
“Charles, you are being—”
“I am being clear.” Bingley stood at the breakfast table, leaning over it at Caroline.
“You will not press a claim. You will not write to solicitors. You will not conspire with anyone who believes lineage entitles them to another man’s home.
If you do, I will cut you off. Not from Pemberley, Caroline—from me. ”
“You cannot mean—”
“I have never meant anything more.”
Caroline’s composure held—it was, Darcy conceded with reluctant fairness, one of her genuine accomplishments. She looked at Louisa, who had the sense to look away.
“This is injustice, and you know it.” She glared at Darcy with an expression containing the turmoil she always left in her wake: resentment, wounded pride, and deep disappointment. “Dishonorable, despicable, not the act of a gentleman.”
Bingley walked her to the doorway, ensuring her retreat, and then he stood for a long moment, his shoulders rising and falling with breaths he was working to steady. Then he returned to Darcy. “I believe,” he said, “that I need to shoot something.”
“I agree.” Darcy finished his coffee and rose from his seat.
The two friends collected their fowling pieces from the gun room and two liver-and-white spaniels from the kennel, and strolled out to the stark wintry landscape.
The spaniels ranged ahead, noses to the ground, tails waving. Darcy carried his fowling piece broken over his arm, watching his breath curl against the pewter sky. He tried to focus on the birds or the landscape, but it was futile.
“Caroline is not entirely wrong,” Darcy finally said, unable to hold back.
“Pemberley is still yours.” Bingley’s voice was firm. “The solicitors said so, and the law protects you. Caroline can rail all she likes, but no one is taking Pemberley from you or Georgiana.”
“The law protects a lie.” Darcy’s voice was rough. “I cannot live that way, Bingley. I cannot build a marriage on a foundation I know to be false.”
“It might be false, or it might not be,” Bingley said, cocking his gun as a woodcock burst from the bracken. “The point is it cannot be either proven nor disproven.”
Bingley did not shoot, and Darcy did not even raise his gun. The spaniels looked back with expressions of frank disappointment and returned to their sniffing around.
“Then we must find a way to satisfy both families,” Darcy said. “As long as the doubt remains.”
“I am happy that Mathilda is recognized as a Darcy.”
“Her dowry was taken, and she was driven from her home,” Darcy said. “By parents who would buy an heir and throw out a daughter for her choices. I could make a restoration of the amount to your sisters.”
“If you wish, however, you are not responsible.” Bingley adjusted his grip on his fowling piece and began walking along the stream bank, toward the northern coverts. “Come. The pheasants will not wait forever.”
They approached the fallen elm, where the large pieces had already been removed.
The scar where the root ball had been torn remained, as well as the scattering of smaller branches and twigs on the Longbourn side.
A brace of pheasants flushed from along the frozen streambank.
Darcy’s shot went wide, and Bingley raised his gun too late to take one.
“We are,” Bingley observed, reloading, “remarkably terrible at this today.”
“Our minds are elsewhere,” Darcy acknowledged.
“Speak for yourself. I am merely incompetent.” Bingley grinned, and despite everything—despite Caroline’s machinations and the weight of the Darcy name and the impossible questions that had no answers—Darcy felt his mouth twitch.
“You are never incompetent, Bingley. You aim too optimistically.”
“A family trait, I’m told.” Bingley whistled for the dogs, who had disappeared into a thicket in pursuit of an interesting scent.
“Caroline wants me to be more ambitious. Louisa believes I should be more practical. And I am happy the way I am, which is apparently a source of great frustration to everyone.”
“Not those who value you for yourself,” Darcy countered. “You do not exasperate me, nor, I suspect, Jane.”
“Jane accepts readily. Her sister, less so,” Bingley chuckled.
“You may find yourself surprised,” Darcy remarked as they paused near the stream.
Bingley settled himself comfortably on a sizable log, laid his fowling piece casually across his knees, and gazed out over the frost-frosted fields.
Beyond it lay Longbourn’s north meadow, and beyond that the roofline of the house, where Elizabeth was awake, likely busy with either estate business or teasing Jane about her reading a book upside down or dropping a stitch in her embroidery.
“I have been thinking,” Bingley said, and Darcy allowed him the space, settling beside him. “About how the law does not know who should have Pemberley, because the witnesses are dead, and the law does not deal with doubt—only facts.”