Chapter Two

Fitzwilliam Darcy toweringly walked in a rage through the field and glen, and beck and wildernesses, and shrubbery and coppiced wood, and through a pomaced wood too. He leapt over fences and streams, and drainage ditches. He muddied his boots in lately manured fields, and he waded through the early growth of the meadows, trampling a path behind him that would leave several farmers quite annoyed with him.

He was better than her.

He. Fitzwilliam Darcy. Better. Elizabeth Bennet, not better!

He had every right to think himself better.

Self-hatred? Ha! If only she knew. If only she knew how much he clearly had hated his name, his honor, his duties, and his own good self. He had nearly asked her to marry him. Only serious hatred for himself could have led him to seriously consider doing such. Of course good sense would have reestablished itself in the end, and prevented any such foolishness.

The day was cold, but Darcy wore a heavy enough coat that he began to perspire heavily in the clear sun, making him additionally miserable.

He might have married her — any girl would have agreed to marry him, even Elizabeth Bennet, if he condescended so, so low as to ask.

And she despised him. She despised him! She thought he hated himself. She thought…

Rude, arrogant, believing himself above others, and calling her merely tolerable.

Well, she wasn't even tolerable. She was a horrible woman.

Darcy stomped through more manured fields. He found floating meadow, and slipped as he crossed it, scraping the bottom of his hand, and then climbed out, his coat and his mood muddy. He alighted on the far side like a raging tower in a towering rage.

Fitzwilliam Darcy was not happy.

Eventually he tired out his muscles, though not his resentment, and returned to his aunt's house.

He saw Elizabeth that night when she arrived with a dinner invitation to Rosings along with the Collinses. And when he saw her, he raised his nose to her and sneered. He would not speak to her at all. Not ever again. He also determined to not look at her once, the whole night. They had noticed how often he looked at her, well now he would not torture himself with further glances.

Alas, this was a resolution by far the easier to make than to keep.

Colonel Fitzwilliam, as though driven by some particular perversity and the intention of tormenting Darcy, found the place by Elizabeth's side that Darcy had in the norm forcefully pushed himself into. That gentleman sat near her, and he had Elizabeth laughing the entire evening, and each time he heard Elizabeth's musical, mystical, tinkling laugh, he wanted to look at her.

And sometimes he did. But it was painful to see her, and to know that she despised him.

Thus Darcy brooded the entire night. He could concentrate on nothing else, and at cards he lost three pounds simple to Anne, who could not keep the count in whist if her fortune depended upon it.

Elizabeth, Elizabeth, Elizabeth.

And then, to Darcy's yet further torment, when he fell into bed, unhappy, that image his mind had constructed of Elizabeth as a naked nymph returned to torment him. But it was not his lust that the image aroused in him — rather a different base emotion.

She laughed at him, giggling with her pretty, but vague in his imagination nymph friends. "So awkward. He cuts such a ridiculous figure. Even his money is not enough a reason to like him. Nobody ever likes him for anything but his money. Ho, ho, ho."

And when, in his dreams, Darcy tried to speak to this naked nymph Elizabeth, she giggled and looked at her friend with an such expressive gesture that showed how much she despised him, and then Darcy felt a rush of self-hatred, and he saw how despite every pretension to the contrary, he was on the bottom naught but a worthless wriggling worm, and that like Elizabeth, Papa had loved Wickham more than he.

And Darcy woke.

Covered in sweat. Breathing hard. The scent of the pine fire light on the air. The smooth feel of the silken sheets on his naked body.

Darcy rose from his bed, a pain in his chest. He pulled a dressing gown over his shoulders, to guard against the early April cold, and he walked to the window to stare out at the view provided by the thin moonlight.

In the distance he could see the dark outline of the parsonage house.

During nights previous he had stared across the park betwixt them, and thought how Elizabeth lie in peaceful repose in her bed, likely thinking thoughts of hope, thoughts she dare not confess to herself, towards him. He would think of her soft hair floating around her head, and her modest flannel night clothes, and of that hint of leg made visible as she twisted and turned in bed at night.

Sometimes as Darcy stared towards the house where she slept, his loins would grow engorged.

Not tonight. Not ever again.

Worthless wriggling worm.

That was what Darcy felt. By declaring him to be filled with self-loathing, Elizabeth had somehow given that to him, as though her low opinion of him mattered more, had more truth, than his high opinion of himself. As though he suddenly needed, though he dared not admit it, as though he needed her to think well of himself, for him to be able to think well himself of himself.

Ridiculous. Absurd.

And true.

She lie in bed, no doubt awake. Maybe she stared from her window across to the great house, and she thought rude thoughts of him. She thought about how disagreeable he was, about how rude, about how he had spurned her, about every awkwardness he had ever shown.

Elizabeth disliked him.

And Darcy could not abide this.

It did not matter that they could not marry — even if Elizabeth liked him as much as he had believed she did, they would not have married, for he did owe too much to himself and to his family name and connections. But he hated that a woman who he… liked.

He still liked her.

Damn.

Shouldn't he hate her as much as she hated him?

But he did like her. He had shown himself very poorly to her. And he had never flattered her vanity, and he had acted as though she were beneath him… which she was…

There was a hint in Darcy's mind.

The beginning of that vital change already: No woman worth pleasing would be pleased by a man who refused to see her as anything but far below him, and who saw her family as contemptible, and that if he wanted Elizabeth, he must strive to think better of those she loved.

But what came to Darcy consciously above that slow moving shift was that he must find some way to make her come to think well of him.

He slammed his fist into his palm.

Elizabeth Bennet would come to like him, he would charm her into being friendly towards him, though not into wishing that he would make her an offer, and then, and only then, would he depart from Rosings, leaving her in the full knowledge of the worth of the man who she had once spurned.

It so followed that Fitzwilliam Darcy's first attempt to charm Elizabeth did not turn a resounding success. It failed. Badly.

The next morning, bleary eyed from a lack of sleep due to his hurt heart, and wild plannings for how to achieve his aim of reversing Elizabeth's feelings with regards to him, Mr. Darcy walked out towards that grove which she had told him that she preferred to take her daily walk.

At the time he believed that her specification had been a gesture forward and flirtatious, but now better information showed that Elizabeth had thought it would convince him to avoid that grove, since he would obviously not want to find her.

Aha!

She was there. Now for the first step.

Darcy quickly came up to her, and Elizabeth watched hm with a curious look in her eye.

However Darcy found it entirely impossible to speak to her anything charming. When the choice was entirely his, when she was the one longing for him, and he the one contemplating whether to offer to a woman so far beneath him… it had been easy to speak to Elizabeth at such a time.

Now though, Darcy found he could not speak a word.

Elizabeth looked at him with her dancing eyes, and a growing smirking smile, just like the one she wore in his dream, when she wore nothing else.

He could not say a word, though he opened his mouth twice, but no sound from his throat.

At last, mercifully taking mercy on Mr. Darcy, Elizabeth said, "Good day, Mr. Darcy. I had not expected to find you walking about here."

"Good day, Miss Bennet," he croaked out through a rough throat as she looked at him, her eyes smiling. "I had hoped…"

His voice cracked, and he found himself looking into her dazzling eyes, and anything else he might say fled.

She smiled and looked away at last. "What had you hoped, Mr. Darcy?"

That question. It lit a pain in his stomach again. And another sense of the foolishness of his pretensions, of his belief in himself as the master of the universe, when he had never been.

"I had hoped I might find you… you look very well today. In that summer dress. And you have a fine… fine…" Darcy shook his head in confusion. What had he meant to compliment. Her bosom?

She had a fine bosom.

Entirely inappropriate to think about that, or to mention it to her. A woman should always know her breasts were beautiful, but never be informed direct by a gentleman's word, except for maybe her husband's.

And she looked at him, with that mocking smirk, disliking him.

"I do have many fine things," Elizabeth said agreeably. "It is kind of you to say so. But I wonder why I find you here — I did tell you that I preferentially prefer this grove."

"You had."

Elizabeth opened her mouth. She closed it. "I had rather thought you preferred to—" She shook her head frowning.

"Yes?"

"Let us walk. How… how is your day. Have you… uh… what do you do on mornings here?"

"Go about riding. Dreadful dull in the house. Go out, think… what does anyone do?"

"A useless class."

"What?"

"The gentry, we do not do a great deal, but we gain a great deal."

"No! We are the backbone of the country, the rulers, the ones who ensure the stability that is craved by the lower orders, and prevent them from hacking each other to death as they did in France."

"If you say so — seems to me they mostly hacked their gentry to death. So that is why I support every effort to suppress the scurrilous press. We can't give the lower classes any chance to tell each other how worthless we are."

Darcy blinked at her. "Does that not sacrifice our liberties as Englishmen? We have rights that those under the tyrannical French rulers do not possess."

"Better to have no rights, than to be torn to pieces, and then guillotined by the mob."

That bit of wisdom reminded Darcy that he was here to charm Elizabeth. So she liked him. "A… delightful… delightful… insight, Miss Bennet. You must present it in London. I shall present it. At parliament."

"Are you mocking me?"

"No! I wish to praise."

"By saying you agree when you do not at all? A strange form of praise, I wish to be treated as a serious fellow human being — though I confess what I said was more in jest than seriousness."

Darcy at this became silent.

He had tried to charm her, and she spurned his attempt. What should he do next?

They walked for several minutes, toing and froing, before Elizabeth at last asked, "I must admit, I have no notion of what your thoughts are — or why you persistently attach yourself to me on this walk, as we have little that either wishes to say to the other."

Darcy flushed.

She was annoyed. Annoyed in real life, at him. And she was dismissing him and rejecting him once more.

"Jove — I cannot do this!" Darcy exclaimed. "I had no notion it would be so difficult."

"Heavens! That sounds most serious. Mr. Darcy, what is it that you wished to do but cannot?"

"Be friendly when I know you dislike me!"

"You know that? Why, Mr. Darcy, I assure you that I do not—"

"Do not lie. I overheard you."

"Oh." Elizabeth blinked, and then she smiled insouciantly. "Maybe I do dislike you — the first words you spoke to me were quite insulting."

Darcy flushed. "Tolerable enough? Had I said that — I had forgotten completely."

"Oh do not worry on that matter — you gave ample other reason to dislike you. 'Tis merely to me a story of great value as entertainment — I see you are hurt by my dislike. I assure you that I do not want you to feel disliked in general. I had no idea my sentiments would throw you into such a dizzy, since you really cannot care more for me than I for you."

Darcy thought it would be neither advantageous nor profitable to admit to her at this moment that he cared greatly indeed for her clever, insightful, and disdainful (towards himself) opinions.

"Have you considered," Elizabeth added, "that it is quite petty, and decidedly unreasoning and foolish to care overmuch what a single, small woman such as myself thinks of you?"

"It is not petty to care what a friend thinks."

"Friend? We have only ever argued — and I am sure a great many of my friends think horrible thoughts about me. I learned my cynicism, you see, upon my father's knees."

"I think ill towards no one who I call a friend. Who I treat kindly."

"But we are not friends — oh you dislike that." Elizabeth laughed. "Never in my deepest imagination would I have though you needed to be loved by all." She patted him on the sleeve. "We all have our flaws."

"I do not need to be loved by all!"

"But you need to be loved by me, now that you know my ill opinion? I assure you, that what you try shall not work."

Darcy threw up his hands in frustration. "I assure you it shall. I am determined that you will come to like me, be it the last thing I do."

"And I am determined not to like you, be it the last thing I do."

"And you accuse me of irrationality — I am very likeable. My friends all say that." Darcy frowned at that. In truth none of them, except for Mr. Bingley, had ever said anything of the sort — and Bingley liked everyone.

"Mr. Darcy, I dare say you have many fine features. But I see none of them. But goodbye, and good bye! We have reached the parsonage once more, and I must scamper away."

And Elizabeth did so, laughing to herself, her hips swinging, and the yellow dress she wore, delightfully light and bright in the spring sun waving about her fine legs. There was just a hint of white silken stocking visible about the ankle.

How now would he be able to charm her?

He had foolishly placed her on her guard since he had unstrategically revealed to Elizabeth that he hoped to charm her into liking him.

Darcy returned to the wooded grove so liked by Elizabeth.

Jove, what the deuce would he do now.

The beautiful verdure of the trees was thickening day by day, and the branches bent further and further down under the heavy weight of the multiplying leaves in their rich green hues. There were thick brown reeds along one section of the path, where a burbling stream flowed past, and elsewhere along the thicket growing about the stream there were rich beds of flowers in purples, reds and yellows. Doves flapped back and forth across the pathway, lovers cooing to each other and chasing after their playing companions.