Just a short story
just my first FF.
Oh and English is not my native language (obviously)
Warning this is a "Caroline friendly" fanfic
The Most Impractical of Reasons
After a year and a half of one of the most painful events of my life, I was finally coming out the little church at the arm of my husband. Neither of us was a child anymore; I was six and twenty years old and he was four and thirty.
The day we met, I had just lost all hope of marrying. That day, during the wedding breakfast of my brother and Jane, I had already decided that I was going to ask Charles the twenty thousand pounds of my dowry. I wanted to buy a little house in Scotland; I wanted to be some place's Mistress and be able to avoid the mocking gazes of my 'friends' in London. My pride had received a mortal blow. Darcy's marriage with Eliza had made me feel that the doors were closed to me, and that to be alone somewhere far away was the best I could hope.
The breakfast was crowded and noisy, and I just had to go outside to Netherfield's gardens to cry. I had been sitting by a great tree some fifteen minutes when I heard a male voice behind me, and when I turned I saw him. I knew he was one of Darcy's cousins, but, my attention being elsewhere those last few days, I had not remarked on him. He was not exactly handsome, but in his blue eyes I saw reflected something that I had not often felt directed at me. Compassion, and sympathy, as if he really understood Caroline Bingley, the silly Woman that had struggled four years to win the favour of a man, and then lost him to someone who had not been anything but impertinent and mocking.
He sat beside me, and instead of badgering me with questions he waited patiently for me to talk. I eventually told him everything, surprising even myself, but the most startling thing of all was his reaction to it. He did not judge me, as the rest of the world did. He simply took my hand, as if giving me strength to continue, offered his handkerchief to dry my tears, and after I finished my story he told me about himself. About the marriage mart and his years long search for a rich heiress. He told me how his lack of funds and his love for his career on the army lead to several ladies rejecting him. He told me how he had abandoned the idea of marriage, how he had resigned himself to solitude as I had.
Hearing that I was not the only person disenchanted with the world eased some of my pain, and almost without noticing it, I squeezed his hand. From that day on, and going against propriety, we wrote each other. For more than a year his letters made me laugh, and sometimes, cry, but they always filled my empty days with emotion. When I wrote to him, all my problems seemed somehow lighter.
Finally, one day, he came to my little house in Edimburgh. It was then that our relationship changed, in those very seconds that it took the servant to announce him and we were left alone. My heart was beating so loud that I could hear it. We still debate who was the first one to act then, because the truth is that we kissed almost without noticing what we were doing, there in the drawing room, where any servant could see us. Nothing mattered to us then. I felt so many things while we kissed, but above all I felt a freedom the likes of which I had not dared dream before. It was then that I accomplished something that so many times I had felt silly and useless. I finally understood why I had lost against Eliza, why I had felt so alone for so long.
Today we married, Caroline Bingley and Richard Fitzwilliam, for the most impractical and wonderful of reasons, for love.