Even Daedalus must fall.
I. Beginnings
-~o~-
Until that fateful day in the summer of 1883, Fitzwilliam Darcy had led a charmed life.
He was born to a doting mother and a dutiful, if unaffectionate, father. Their ancestral seat glowed with contentment: his parents had made a love match, and the quiet intensity of the bond they shared only deepened over time. When a second addition came to their small circle, she adored him with the ardent hero worship uniquely possessed by younger sisters.
And, if this rare fortune in family were not enough, Darcy was tall, classically handsome, and, mostly importantly, the heir to a dukedom. Such a lofty personage buffered against any imperfection, for it was inconceivable that a young, dashing marquess could be shy. So even his discomfort with strangers became a boon: the beau monde saw his frequent silence as the reserve befitting his station, his wry, measured manner of speech as a sly and cutting wit.
All this he understood. All this he appreciated. `
But it was nothing, nothing to the fire burning in his blood.
It started with a gift from the Earl of Arden when Darcy was six, a curious assemblage of seven metal spheres dangling from a square iron frame. Quite still, until the earl had lifted the leftmost marble and let it swing.
Darcy had stared, mesmerized, at the smooth arc of its movement, the perfect symmetry of its rightmost counterpart's upward trajectory. Somewhere in that deceptively simple motion roared a fierce, violent struggle. It rang in the clash of steel, in the thudding of one object against the next, screaming, striving for it to move. For the apparatus to descend into a mess of tangled string and jutting metal, a heap of chaos.
The spheres remained immobile.
Only the two ends sailed in graceful hyperbolas, mirror images eternally separated by mere seconds. And, guided by some deep-buried impulse, as a child Darcy instinctively understood something he would not be able to verbalize for years after.
Order had conquered disorder. Some massive, invisible law governed the Newton's cradle the same way it did the crashing of the tides and the orbits of the planets. It was the engine of the world – his world, a tenet unfathomable in scope, beautiful in simplicity –
Anchored in pure, raw logic.
It was magnificent.
From that point on, Darcy would glide through life with the power and inexorability only absolute certainty of one's purpose could bring.
First came the myriad requests for more books, for more tutors. Then appeared the homemade catapults, the nights spent gazing at the stars, the sheaves of paper meticulously cataloguing positions and angles and curves. Astronomy, the Principia, Gibbs' obscure ramblings, the publications of Maxwell: all mere shades of a vibrant fascination with what and why and how that simmered through him, making everything else seem faded and trite in comparison.
He left Eton holding firsts in mathematics and natural philosophy. When Oxford inevitably followed, academic distinctions were no longer enough. He did not want to regurgitate knowledge; he wanted to discover it.
And discover it he did.
Six noted papers in three years, from a university student no less. The last was revolutionary. He was proclaimed to be the new Boltzmann, the second Faraday! Perhaps, whispered the most daring, one day the next Newton.
Such brilliance, of course, was not entirely without cost. In the frenzy of mad ideas and endless experimentation, his sister's letters were misplaced, at first occasionally, then with alarming regularity. The annual Christmas celebration – he could not leave the laboratory, as the generator would be running during just that time. A birthday? No, he had another lecture to give at the lyceum, but he would be sure to send a gift for his mother.
A little distance from his family seemed a small price to pay for blazing bright even in a sea of luminaries, a savant soaring to new heights during a time when invention came fast and quick as the approach of the new steam locomotives. What was a dinner at Pemberley to unraveling the mysteries of the universe?
Which was precisely why Lady Darcy had chaperoned Georgiana to her engagement, rather than himself.
Yes, Darcy had originally agreed. As the duke-to-be, it was his duty to squire his twelve-year-old sister to meet the boy who Father hoped would one day be her husband, provided that Georgiana was still amenable to cementing the longstanding alliance between Arden and Derbyshire when she reached her majority.
But all those concerns were from before the new circuit configuration delivering beyond all expectations. He'd had important results before, but somehow he just knew this was so much more.
So it was with both rising frustration – he had not yet devised a method of measuring the frequency without disrupting the apparatus – and brimming euphoria that he finally slipped into his apartment for a brief respite.
The faint gleam of early morning illuminated his path. A solitary burning candle on the mahogany table outlined a broad, familiar silhouette. He stiffened.
"Father."
Silence.
How curious. Though distant and autocratic the Duke of Derbyshire might be, his heir usually merited a curt utterance in greeting. No matter how disappointed his father was by his son's choice to bury himself in beakers and capacitors instead of his duties at Pemberley.
"It is rather late for a courtesy call," drawled Darcy. "Surely Mother is waiting for you at home."
The duke turned almost imperceptibly. The slight shift was just enough to cast the aquiline nose, dripping with condescension, and the ever-frigid steel gaze into the light. Except this time it was not mere coldness.
"She waits no longer," Derbyshire said, strangely inflectionless.
"Impossible." The duchess always waited until her dear ones came home, no matter how deep into the night.
His father did not move. But somehow he loomed larger, closer. A sharp foreboding prickled at Darcy's skin.
"A carriage accident. Instant." Each dispassionate word was a bullet to the heart. "Your sister is confined to her bed indefinitely. Your mother – she will never wait at Pemberley again."
Darcy fought for speech. For breath.
Neither came.
In the glass of the display cabinet, a stark reflection flashed: a portrait of a young man stricken into stone. Across from him, an older gentleman rising slowly to his feet, stern and unbending even after the only person he had ever loved vanished into the mist.
The duke's icy visage was wrought with terrible, terrible accusation.
"It should have been you."
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Across the tumultuous waters of the Atlantic, it was an entirely nondescript June evening.
Nondescript, that was, for the enraptured Elizabeth Bennet. To her mother, it might as well have been the second coming of Christ.
"Careful!"
The frenetic din of Mrs. Bennet's voice penetrated even the five-inch oak panels of the library. But a screech, no matter how imperious, was incomparable to the majesty of the Clifton Bridge – insuppressible majesty, in Elizabeth's admiring eyes.
Not that the artist had not tried. The brazenly modern structure appeared almost rustic in the broad, light-dappled strokes of what Papa dubbed "that newfangled French fad." Almost, because transforming a hundred tons of steel into an idyllic pastoral landscape was beyond even Pissarro. But expressional failings aside, his rifts and valleys – uneven layers of papyrus-like paint – formed perfect guides for Elizabeth's slim fingers.
Reverently holding her breath, she traced the dramatic curves of the main cable, then skimmed over the towers – bearing a weight, she imagined, not unlike that of Atlas himself – and the elegantly dipping deck. Below, invisible, the anchorage locked the entire structure in place, stubbornly defying the edicts of gravity with one of its own.
Aesthetically, the airy style showed the waltz between mirage and reality, emotive rather than precise. There was beauty there, certainly. But Lizzy ached to see the sharp lines, the scaled distances, the careful blend of the push and pull of nature –
One day, she wanted to ensure that balance.
"Balance it, Albert! It's meant to be aligned with the ceiling! Priscilla, be gentle with that carpet – it's worth twice your annual salary. Kitty, out of the way, this instant!"
On the other silk-covered seat, her sister Jane winced.
"Mama is on a warpath."
"Quite," agreed Lizzy, squinting harder at the painting on her lap. That sloping suspension cable: iron cording or steel?
Jane sighed prettily. Unsurprising, as the oldest Bennet daughter did everything prettily. And daintily. And charitably.
"At least planning this ball induced Mama to buy some lovely art. That one you are holding is stunning, Lizzy; Mama has very good taste in oils."
Perhaps too charitably.
"Good taste? Jane, Mama cannot tell a Renoir from a Botticelli. She only ordered this Impressionist batch because she heard Parisian trends impressed Mrs. Astor – and even so, it was Papa who chose them."
"But surely Mama had some say. Papa is far too busy to handpick paintings. Look at tonight: it is Mama's grand debut, and he is still not home."
Elizabeth bit her lip. Her father was out precisely to avoid Mama's preparations for her magnum opus, a gala for the illustrious Knickerbocker set. It would be Mama's first opportunity to enter the glittering world of New York's high society: despite moving into an enormous mansion on Madison Avenue, the Bennets had not garnered the invitations that Mama coveted.
Or, for that matter, any invitations at all.
Disinterested in dances and fripperies as she was, Elizabeth still heard traces of the servants' gossip, the loaded insinuations of her governess, the silence of the foremost ladies when greeted by her mother on the city streets.
It was no great secret that even the Bennets' vast wealth could not wash them of the uncouth stench of the nouveau riche. Not when that fortune was minced and churned out by the bloody grinders of the meat industry; not when Mr. Bennet still loomed over the helm of the butchering conglomerate he had stacked from the ground up, sausage by putrid sausage.
But this time, against all expectations, the vaunted Mrs. Vanderbilt had deigned to respond to Mama's thirteenth delivered invitation. Soon followed the acceptances of the Astors, the Morgans, the Archers and the Wellands, and where the foremost five went, the rest followed. A positive coupe! beamed Mrs. Bennet, beside herself with excitement.
No expense was spared. For weeks on end, brocaded carriages and shining automobiles alike rolled up to the towering gates of the Bennet brownstone. Boxes of Austrian crystals, stacks of leopard furs imported from the East, assemblages of Monets and Sisleys and Pissarros that would make the managers of the Louvre drool with envy. All for one lavish night.
The guests were due in thirty minutes.
"Are you nervous?" inquired Jane abruptly.
"No, dearest, I'll leave that to Mama. Why should I be? We're exiled to the library until the guests leave. Children in this progressive age of ours shall be neither seen nor heard."
"Don't be so flippant," Jane chided. "I just have a strange feeling. That's all."
"Jane! It is your job to be the eternal optimist."
"Lizzy."
"Yes, governess, I will try to behave myself," said Elizabeth, lowering her head in mock contrition.
When the furrow between Jane's winged brows knitted further, Elizabeth's lips straightened from their mischievous quirk, her pixie-like features for once almost serious.
"Truly, there's no reason to worry so," she murmured more gently. "The event will go off without a hitch, Mother will be free to meander about with the most incorrigible gossips in New York, and in a few years you, a diamond of the first water, will be engaged to the crème of the Upper East Side – perhaps even Marcus Archer."
The fanciful description drew a faint blush; Marcus Archer's cherubic good looks were the subject of many a schoolgirl's romantic fantasies. At least Jane was no longer frowning. Satisfied, Elizabeth returned to her perusal.
"And you, Lizzy? What shall you do once I am married to Prince Charming?"
Lizzy grinned. Her eyes never left the turrets. "Be an old maid, of course. An architecturally-inclined one. I want to design buildings – and if Hertha Marks can take a first in maths at Cambridge, I can do the equivalent at Radcliffe."
"You mean to say – employment?"
The lattice network should be triangular, not gridded. The only flaw in a masterpiece – unless there was a reason of which she remained unaware. If only she could ask, could consult a master –
"Why ever not?" Lizzy's voice rang tighter than she intended.
A halo of golden curls trembled in shaking negation. The tenderness in Jane's rebuke only amplified the sting. "It's simply not done. Mama would never allow you to attend university. Perhaps finishing school –"
"Papa will. He has already convinced Mama to enroll me at the Seminary for preliminary schooling next year, real schooling." Geometry and Homer, not flower arrangements and etiquette. Elizabeth could hardly imagine it; she burned to absorb it.
"We are ladies, Lizzy."
"So? I want – I want more from life than this, Jane. More than endless social rituals and a comfortable marriage."
I want to create.
"I want choice," she declared instead.
A flash of puzzlement, before conviction shone bright from those cornflower-blue eyes, clear as the summer sky. "But we have choice. We will be mothers. We shall run our own households. Papa will even allow us to choose our own husbands, within reason."
Choose our own husbands, within reason, even.
The knowledge hit hard and sudden and with the force of a battering ram. It was undeniable: her sister, the closest to her heart, would never truly understand her. Jane had been born without that visceral yearning seeping through her veins, the restlessness that no lesson in deportment could ever quell.
In that, Elizabeth was quite alone.
"Your stitches," she murmured as she gazed at the pink dotted roses on Jane's doily. "They're so straight."
Jane started at the non-sequitur. "Pardon?"
"Mine won't ever be so straight. Not even if Mother makes me embroider for the next ten years without stopping."
"Unlikely. You could embroider beautifully with far fewer than ten years of practice, if only you applied yourself. Those stitches would be even straighter than mine."
Lizzy felt her lips twist into a crooked smile. It was not happy, but it was not unhappy, either; rising out of something deeper than joy or sadness. One day she would design dams, not doilies. But that could wait. This was Mama's night, and for Mama's sake she would embroider prettily until her fingers bled. Tonight, Mama would prove that the Bennets were good society, not butchers. Tonight would secure her sisters' futures.
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Nine, ten, eleven, twelve. The bells tolled midnight. A last, ringing note lingered, vibrations ricocheting through the cavernous mansion, until it at last dissipated. The remaining silence was taut.
Jane was asleep on the parlor seat, having long abandoned her needlework. A single candle burned beside her, throwing her red-rimmed eyes into sharp relief. No servant had come to put them to bed. Mrs. Bennet had dismissed them all an hour past.
No guests had arrived this evening. Not a single one.
Elizabeth's fingers tore through her embroidery as her fists clenched. She had never seen her mother so pale, nor her sisters' eyes so empty, as when they realized no one was coming.
Manners. Breeding. Comportment. Society. They could all be damned.
She would make her own way.
A/N: This has been on my laptop for almost four years now, around when I started having writers' block for Tempest.
What frustrated me about Tempest at the time that I started this, and with Regency-era pieces in general, is how different the worldview is, and how difficult it is to layer characters with more than their various human relationships. On my understanding, the original Darcy is a man of duty; he clearly wants to be a good landlord, a good husband, and a good friend. Elizabeth wants to live by her principles, to laugh at life, and to love well. These are all wonderful goals.
But I wanted to write someone a little different while staying within the historical genre. This is especially hard to do for Elizabeth in a Regency fic, since - and not to diminish the brilliant women who lived during and prior to those times, such as Mary Astor, the Marquise du Chatelet, Mary Wollstonecraft, and many others - it was very, very uncommon. This character study pushes the timeline to more than a half-century later, when it was not quite soahistorical for a woman to be openly intellectually ambitious (Hertha Marks is real! And Philippa Fawcett took (above) First Wrangler in Maths at Cambridge only seven years after this study is set). Moreover, as much as the values in P&P make sense for its historical setting, it's a little disquieting to write villagers and landlords as separated by something more than pure luck. I think the intellectual world of the late-19th century provides material for a very different sort of piece.
...Basically, this was so much fun to write! And I hope you enjoyed reading it. I'm not sure I'll add another chapter. Tempest is definitely a priority, being both truer to the original P&P and easier to write. If I do, this will be a series of snippets that detail E&D's lives and relationship rather than a single, continuous work, and might involve some more experimental writing in different styles.
As always, thanks so much for reading!