The Man I Chose to Despise (Pride, Passion & Promises #5)

CHAPTER ONE

The letter arrived on a Tuesday, which Elizabeth would later think was exactly the sort of detail life enjoyed inflicting upon a person: not a dramatic Sunday, not even an ominous Monday, but an ordinary Tuesday, with the bread already rising in the kitchen and Kitty complaining about a ribbon, when everything in her father's library quietly rearranged itself.

She knew something was wrong before she knew what.

Mr. Bennet did not summon his second daughter to the library in the middle of the afternoon for pleasant reasons.

He summoned her when he wanted a witness to his own composure, someone who would not weep or exclaim, someone who could be trusted to sit very still while he worked out, in real time, how frightened he ought to allow himself to be.

"Shut the door, Lizzy."

She shut it. The library smelled the way it always did, of leather and dust and the particular staleness of books that were read more often than aired.

Her father sat behind his desk with a letter open before him, and he did not look up at her immediately, which told her more than anything he might have said.

"Papa."

"Sit down."

She sat. He passed her the letter without preamble, and she read it twice before the words arranged themselves into something coherent, because the first time through she had simply been looking at the seal, the unfamiliar hand, the cold formality of the estate of the late Mr. George Darcy and outstanding obligation and the sum, with accrued interest, now standing at, and a figure that made her stomach drop in a manner entirely separate from her understanding of what any of it meant.

"I do not understand," she said, which was not strictly true. She understood the words. She did not yet understand how they applied to her family, to Longbourn, to the careful fiction in which the Bennets were merely unlucky rather than precarious.

"Nine years ago," her father said, in the flat, unhurried voice he used when he had decided that calm was the only dignity left available to him, "I borrowed two thousand pounds from George Darcy.

Your mother does not know. I would prefer she continue not to know, for as long as that remains possible. "

"Two thousand pounds." She had read it correctly, then. "Papa, why would Mr. Darcy, the elder Mr. Darcy, lend you such a sum?"

"Because the harvest that year was a disaster, and your dowries were going to be a disaster along with it, and George Darcy was, whatever his son may have inherited or failed to inherit from him, a generous and discreet man.

" He removed his spectacles and rubbed at the bridge of his nose, a gesture she recognized as the precursor to an admission he did not wish to make.

"We were neighbors once, in a manner of speaking.

Derbyshire and Hertfordshire are not so far apart when one is young and foolish enough to go to school with a man's father.

He extended the loan privately. No solicitors, no notes beyond a private letter between gentlemen.

I intended to repay it within three years. I did not."

"And now his son is calling it in."

"His son's trustees are calling it in, as part of settling the elder Mr. Darcy's estate, which is apparently only now being fully closed out, some years after his death, for reasons that are none of our concern.

They have written to inform me that the debt, as recorded, must either be repaid in full, or" and here her father's mouth did something that was not quite a smile, "or some other arrangement made, at the discretion of the current Mr. Darcy. "

Elizabeth set the letter down very carefully on the desk, as though it might detonate if handled roughly.

"At his discretion," she repeated.

"Yes."

"Mr. Darcy of Pemberley. The one who stood up at the Meryton assembly and pronounced the entire room not handsome enough to tempt him.

" She heard the bitterness in her own voice and did not particularly try to soften it; bitterness toward Mr. Darcy was a well-worn groove in her, comfortable as an old shoe, and she reached for it now the way she always did when the ground beneath her felt unsteady.

"That man holds the discretion over whether we keep Longbourn's good name, or whether the whole county learns we have been living on borrowed money for nine years. "

"That is approximately the situation, yes."

"Then we shall simply repay it. Surely there is some arrangement, some economy."

"Two thousand pounds, Lizzy, with nine years of interest. I do not have it.

You know I do not have it. Every spare shilling has gone toward keeping this house running and your sisters in muslin, and I have managed that imperfectly enough as it is.

" He said this without self-pity, which was somehow worse than if he had said it with some.

"I am sixty years old and I have made a great many comfortable jokes at my family's expense instead of attending to its actual welfare, and I find that the jokes do not, in the end, repay debts. "

Elizabeth had rarely heard her father speak so plainly about his own failures, and it frightened her more than the figure on the letter had.

She had built her understanding of him on a kind of fond exasperation, the assumption that his negligence was a character flaw she could roll her eyes at rather than a genuine threat to the family's survival.

To hear him name it himself, without irony, was to feel the floor of her childhood tilt slightly.

"What does the letter propose, then," she said, "if not repayment in full."

Her father slid a second sheet across the desk, one she had not yet seen, written in a different hand, more controlled, less the language of solicitors and more the language of a man choosing his words with some care.

She read it. She read it again.

Given the long-standing relationship between our families, and out of respect for an arrangement entered into in good faith by my late father, I am prepared to consider the debt discharged in full, with no further obligation upon Mr. Bennet or his family, in exchange for the following service: that Miss Elizabeth Bennet, whose competence in matters of household management has been spoken of to me by Mr. Bingley on several occasions, undertake to review and formally close the relevant estate ledgers at Pemberley, where certain accounts from the period in question remain in some disorder following my father's death.

I propose a residence of several months, properly chaperoned, during which time this work might be completed without undue haste.

I make this proposal not as charity, which I understand would be unwelcome, but as a genuine exchange of value, my father's debt for Miss Bennet's labour, and I hope it may be received in that spirit.

It was signed, simply, F. Darcy.

Elizabeth read it a third time, searching for the insult she was certain must be hidden somewhere in it, the condescension, the implication that the Bennets were a charity case to be managed rather than a family to be respected.

She did not find it. The letter was, infuriatingly, rather well written.

It anticipated her objection and answered it before she could raise it.

It offered her labor as currency rather than her gratitude, which was, she had to admit, a more dignified transaction than she would have expected from the man she remembered.

That memory rose up now, unbidden and well rehearsed: the assembly room at Meryton, the candlelight, Mr. Bingley's easy warmth beside his friend's marble stillness, and the words she had overheard, she is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me, delivered in that flat, indifferent voice as though she were a piece of furniture he had glanced at and found wanting.

She had turned the memory over so many times in the intervening months that she could no longer be entirely certain how much of her recollection was fact and how much was the polish of repeated handling, the way a stone in a pocket grows smooth from being worried at.

She knew, somewhere beneath the well worn groove of her contempt, that there had been other moments since, glimpses of something less simply dismissible.

She had simply found it more convenient not to look at them too closely.

"You will not go," her father said, though it was phrased more as a question than a statement, and she understood that he was, in his own oblique way, asking her permission to hope that she would.

"I have very little choice, do I."

"There is always a choice. We could refuse and find some other arrangement."

"What other arrangement, Papa? You have just told me there isn't one.

" She folded the letter along its existing creases, as though precision might restore some order to the chaos unfolding in her chest. "And if we refuse, what becomes of it?

Does it simply sit there, this debt, waiting to be called in some worse way, at some worse moment?

Does Mr. Collins inherit Longbourn one day to find it encumbered by a debt none of us repaid? "

Her father did not answer, which was answer enough.

"I will go," she said, and was surprised by how steady her own voice sounded, given that something in her chest had gone tight and strange at the thought of it.

"I will go to Pemberley, and I will close out his ledgers, and we will owe Mr. Darcy nothing at all by the time I am through, not even gratitude. "

"Lizzy."

"What."

"You dislike him rather a great deal, for a man you have met perhaps four times."

She looked at her father, who was watching her with an expression she could not quite place, something between concern and a kind of weary amusement, as though he suspected there was more to her dislike than she had ever admitted, even to herself.

"I dislike him precisely the correct amount," she said, "for a man who insulted me before he had spoken a single word to me, and who separated Mr. Bingley from Jane out of nothing more than pride and a conviction that we are all beneath his notice.

I do not think four meetings were required to establish that.

I think one was sufficient, and the subsequent three have merely confirmed it. "

It was not, she would reflect later, entirely true. But it was the version of the truth she had decided to keep, polished smooth from long handling, and she was not yet prepared to set it down.

Her mother, when she finally learned of the arrangement (though not, at Mr. Bennet's insistence, the full particulars of the debt itself, which was framed instead as a generous invitation from a wealthy gentleman impressed by reports of Elizabeth's housekeeping abilities), reacted with a transport of joy so immediate and so entirely missing the point that Elizabeth nearly laughed despite the tightness still lodged beneath her ribs.

"Pemberley! Lizzy, do you understand what this means? Ten thousand a year, and that house, and if he has noticed you already, before you have even gone, then surely"

"Mama, I am going to look at his accounting books. That is the entirety of the invitation."

"Men do not invite young ladies to examine their accounting books, Lizzy, not when there are perfectly good clerks for that purpose.

He wishes to look at you a while longer, that is what this is, and I think it very clever of him to have found a reason that does not commit either of you to anything before you have had the chance to"

"Mama."

"I am only saying," her mother said, fanning herself with sudden vigor, "that I have always thought there was something in the way he looked at you, that night at Sir William's, though you would never credit it, you are too proud yourself to see when a man is"

Elizabeth left the room before her mother could complete the thought, because she did not, in fact, wish to hear it finished, and because some small, traitorous part of her had also noticed something at Sir William's that night, a look held a beat too long before Mr. Darcy turned away, and she had spent a great deal of effort since then deciding that it had meant nothing at all.