A/N: Shifting our scene. Things are angsty early on; they'll be less so later. Not to Rosings yet. A short start to a longer Book Two.
The Resurrection at Rosings
Book Two: The Distances of Proximity
Chapter Three: Disillusionment
Darcy
Darcy abandoned Hertfordshire the next day.
Abandoned: that made it sound as if he had managed his leave-taking high-handedly, riding a nonchalant wave of hauteur. No. He skulked away, a kicked, cringing puppy retreating to the kennel, tail tucked.
Him. Fitzwilliam Darcy. Master of Pemberley. He skulked away from Netherfield.
Rendered pathetic by a few moments of Un-edenic eavesdropping.
Disillusioned.
The late November sky was a cold and cloying gray, less a color than a condemnation. Darcy's carriage was too full of the Bingley sisters and their gray travel cloaks, interiorized bits of the sky, importing the cold, rendering the condemnation intimate, close. The women themselves were empty, hearts and minds.
Darcy realized for the first time, ashamed, that he rather hated them both.
Why did I grant them, particularly Miss Bingley, any power over me? What point in their serrated banter but to harm? — Was that true of me too, when I engaged with them?
Engaged. Married. The last man…the very last…
Darcy shook his head
Bingley had returned to London the day before — the day of Darcy's accursed visit to the Longbourn garden. His sisters had decided to follow Bingley a day later, closing and shuttering Netherfield without Bingley's agreement, usurping his life from him while he was absent.
The sisters had decided what was best for their brother, and they would not allow him to make any other choice. Darcy should have resisted them on principle, not allowing his friend to be ill-used. But he had been too demoralized, too shaken by Miss Elizabeth's avowal, to summon any resistance. And although he disagreed with the decision to close Netherfield without Bingley's consent, he was not entirely in disagreement with the sisters' motives.
He was not entirely in agreement with them either.
After all, he had intended to court Miss Elizabeth, the younger sister of Miss Bennet, and few circumstantial objections to Miss Bennet were not also circumstantial objections to Miss Elizabeth. Neither had a dowry; they shared the same connections to trade, the same Cheapside relatives. Darcy could hardly oppose Bingley's choice and make the choice he had intended himself only yesterday to make. And while that choice had been taken from him, he could not pretend that he had not intended to make it.
Can I object to Bingley's intention given what mine has been?
Darcy looked out the carriage window at passing Hertfordshire. Since yesterday, he felt he had been reduced to a spectator in his own life, no longer an actor. Audience, not player. Disrelish and inappetence filled him. He had skipped his breakfast. His life was adrift, out of his control, and all because of a dark-haired slip of a country girl who filled his imagination. The world seemed to be distancing itself from him, depriving him of any prospect of action.
It had all been an illusion. Miss Elizabeth hated him, and rated him the least marriageable man on the planet, at least for herself. The last man. The Master of Pemberley ranked below the Rector of Hunsford, with no one below him.
The bottom rung on a ladder of humiliation. It reminded Darcy of Dante, of Purgatorio, the punishment of the proud: bent double beneath the weight of huge stones, forced to face the dirt, humbled.
Miss Elizabeth reckoned him proud; he knew that. She had unknowingly triumphed over his pride, trampled it. Only the death of his parents had humbled him as much, made him feel as powerless.
Darcy leaned back in the carriage and stared, blinking, unseeing. After a moment, he focused. Miss Bingley's eyes were on him but she said nothing; she only licked her lips.
London, once Darcy arrived, was a circumambient confusion. Nothing looked right; nothing felt right. Darcy House was a mazeway of echoes. He could rest his eyes nowhere without Miss Elizabeth's restless eyes, bright and challenging — and now disdainful — staring back at him. Never having been in love before, he had never been in unrequited love before.
No, worse than unrequited. She requited hatred for love.
Letters of business were stacked in unanswered, messy stacks on his study's desk. Many were unopened, despite being urgent. He had no heart for business.
Georgiana was dumbfounded by him, worried, Darcy knew, that he was again dwelling on Ramsgate and her failures (as she termed them) there. Nothing could be less true but an effective explanation eluded him. Shame glued his lips. All his life, not just his adult life but even long before, he had deplored being made ridiculous. Darcy had to endure it often: it was Wickham's favorite pastime, turning him into a joke. To explain his melancholy to his sister would require making a joke of himself, rendering himself ridiculous: an eavesdropper who had overheard his romantic damnation.
Not the Tree but the Shrubbery of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Ridiculous.
Weeks passed. The festive season, winter. Thaw.
Darcy House was nearly silent those weeks. Business went undone. Darcy hermited himself while Georgiana wandered alone from her bedroom to the dining room to the music room.
A soft knock sounded on the study door. Georgiana. Darcy rose from his desk chair and bid his sister to enter. He straightened his waistcoat and raked a shaky hand through his hair.
Georgiana entered. She looked lovely; her gown was new and becoming. But her eyes were wary, as was her posture.
"Brother, would you like to go to the theater later this week? We've yet to go since you returned, and, though I know it is not your favorite, Romeo and Juliet is to be performed, and it is my favorite." Georgiana's voice and eyes implored him.
In itself, it was his least favorite Shakespeare play. But now, with his heartache, it would be unbearable, the comparisons and contrasts with his life too much. Miss Elizabeth was everything loveable; the east-risen sun that should have warmed it cold, gray life.
But that was not to be.
He nodded at Georgiana, unable to add to the disappointments he knew he had caused her to feel since he returned from Hertfordshire. "We will go but I must ask that this time, if you must weep at the end, you do not do it on my shoulder. I will be sure to bring a spare handkerchief."
Georgiana smiled and her posture uncoiled. "Do you believe — as you once contended with Richard — that the play is childish? Perhaps Romeo and Juliet are, at least some of the time, but is it sound to attribute a property of the characters to the play itself? Is that not, as you like to say, a fallacy? The play is profound!" Her blond curls bounced in a sisterly challenge.
Darcy started. Georgiana was clever (she was a Darcy, after all) but she tended to avoid the sort of bookish conversations he favored. She was happy enough revisiting moments in a favorite novel, reliving them as it were, a second swoon, but she rarely did anything more, rarely passed judgment. Darcy was all judgment.
"A fallacy? So you have been listening as you roll your eyes when I talk seriously with you about what we read in the evenings?"
"You are altogether too serious, Brother. After a visit from you, one of the teachers at my seminary remarked that you seemed to be in perpetual mourning, with your black clothes and your black scowl." Georgiana giggled but then she stopped and looked at Darcy closely, soberly. "You know, our mourning for Mother and Father ended long ago, Fitzwilliam. They are gone; I hate it but accept it. No refusal of color is going to retrieve them. You used to wear colored waistcoats, dark colors but colors. Now your snowy cravats are the only non-black things you wear."
Darcy glanced down at himself, not aware at that moment of what he was wearing. He trusted his valet, Steele, to see to his clothes. One less thing to think about. His life had become completely non-chromatic. He had hoped Miss Elizabeth would restore it to color but no, that was not going to happen.
His stocktaking revealed he was wearing a white cravat and all black otherwise, including his black boots.
"It's easier this way, Georgie. I have enough to concern me — "
"And even more since you returned from Hertfordshire," she added, cutting him off gently. "Please tell me what happened there. You know only too well what made me unhappy in Ramsgate. May I not know what — who — made you unhappy in Hertfordshire?" Georgiana paused and swallowed. "Was it a woman? This Miss Elizabeth you mentioned in your letters?"
Darcy knew he added a black scowl to the black he was wearing. He felt it claim his countenance, an ebony mask. Georgiana saw it and shrank from him a little. "Brother?"
He closed his eyes and demanded a smile from himself, hoping the smile was warm but fearing it was not. "Sister, Georgie," he opened his eyes, and softened his tone, "you're right. I cannot expect you to share with me while I withhold from you. I wrote about Miss Elizabeth, expressing my admiration for her." A difficult breath. "It grew until I resolved to ask her for a courtship, intending for it to end in marriage. But," he halted, not wanting to describe the specific, ridiculous image of himself on the wrong side of the shrubbery, and so retreated into generality, "I discovered that she would certainly refuse me…"
"Refuse you?" Georgiana asked, her disbelief profound, rounding her eyes. "But you are the Master of Pemberley. You are you. Mr. Darcy. What woman would refuse you?"
"Miss Elizabeth Bennet." Darcy tugged on his tightening cravat but kept his eyes from Georgiana's, not wanting her to register his shame. "She so far transcended mere refusal as to say that I was the last man she would ever marry." Including Collins, Good God!
Georgiana sank into one of the chairs stationed in front of Darcy's desk. "So this explains the last weeks. You've been holding this refusal tight against your heart, like a blade…" Her tone was rounded, soft, and edgeless.
Darcy nodded, recognizing his sister's maturity, accelerated since Ramsgate and Wickham. It was not a change he was happy about. He had hoped to preserve her childhood, her innocence, a little longer. Yet another thing Wickham has stolen from me.
Darcy shook himself but too slightly for Georgiana to notice. "So Romeo and Juliet it is. Two children ensconced in a profound play. And in a few days, we are for Rosings and the Resurrection."
Georgiana smiled at Shakespeare but frowned at Rosings. "Do I have to go? Do I have to face Aunt Catherine?"
"You need to learn how to stand up to her," Darcy said.
"This from the man who has still not convinced Aunt Catherine that he is not marrying Cousin Anne," Georgiana smirked and curtsied at the same time. "Speaking of childish…"
"You have become impertinent."
"And you remain a coward, more bullied by your family than Romeo or Juliet . 'Deny thy aunt and refuse thy name'..."
Darcy shook his head, giving his sister a warm grimace. At least the only challenges he would face at Rosings would be prolonged boredom and constant celebration of an unreal engagement.
But it would be better than dwelling, hopeless and lost, on Miss Elizabeth Bennet.
She belonged to his past, not his future.
The last man…
A/N: My new novel with Meryton Press, Darcy's Struggle, is available on Amazon. More of this story soon.