“Darcy!” Brougham’s agitated whisper pierced through Darcy’s senses like the crack of a rifle as they struggled to navigate the front steps of Erewile House. He winced at the pain that reverberated through his head and tried again to put one foot in front of the other and still stay upright. To be perfectly honest, Dy was in charge of navigation and had been since they had departed the Fox and Drake a half hour before. The cool night air outside the public house had done nothing to revive Darcy’s brandy-disordered faculties, so it had become Dy’s unwelcome task to see him home and into Fletcher’s capable hands. If Darcy were not already flushed from drink, he would have been from the supreme embarrassment he ought to have been feeling. He had no doubt that, come morning, he would feel every drop of mortification that he ought.
Gaining the top step, Brougham steadied his friend against the door with his shoulder and tried the knob. “It’s locked!” he hissed to him, “which is as it should be, but it is a cursed inconvenience for us! Do you have a key?” Darcy fumbled beneath his coat in his waistcoat pocket and, after several tense seconds, produced his key to the obvious relief of his navigator. “Thank the Lord! Now, if we can manage not to raise a hue and cry once we are inside…” He bent to the keyhole and swiftly released the lock, but the door was still against them. “Another lock?” Dy looked up at him.
Darcy groaned. “Yes…forgot. Ordered before I left…for Kent.”
“And have you also forgotten to acquire the key?” Brougham asked in exasperation. Sighing at Darcy’s grunt of admission, he straightened and began a search of his own coat pockets. A soft “aha!” told Darcy that he had found what he searched for, and Dy once more bent to the lock plate of the front door. In a breath, the second lock was released, and the door of Erewile House swung back a few inches.
Darcy stared down in befuddled astonishment. “How did you manage that?”
“Practice,” Dy answered. Dawn was only beginning to invade London’s streets, but there was enough light for Darcy to make out his friend’s bitter smile. “I shall tell you about it later,” he whispered, “when you are sober and your head is not splitting. But now we must get you inside and, Lord help us, upstairs to your bedchamber without bringing your entire household down upon us.”
“Georgiana,” Darcy muttered, nodding his head in agreement and then wishing he had not. The movement started the pain inside his skull careening from one side to the other.
“Yes, Miss Darcy.” Brougham reiterated the identity of the person they both most wished to avoid in Darcy’s present state and offered him his shoulder. “Now, in you go!” Gratefully leaning on the proffered support, Darcy lifted one foot and hesitantly set it down upon the threshold as Dy pushed wide the door. With another push and a grunt, they were both inside and stood for a moment like errant schoolboys surveying the silent, empty hall. “All clear! There’s a mercy!” Brougham looked about them and then steered Darcy toward the stairs. “Come on, then, old man,” he encouraged, but Darcy could only grimace as each step’s change in altitude caused another painful explosion in his brain.
When they had finally reached the top, he was soaked with perspiration from the effort and was forced to lean heavily upon his friend’s shoulder merely to stay vertical. Fortunately, Dy knew his way quite well around Erewile House, and Darcy was spared the necessity of directing him to his chamber. Still, he barely restrained himself from groaning out a desperate thanksgiving when they finally stood before his door. “Almost there, my friend!” His Lordship gripped the knob and slowly twisted it, the click of the latch barely audible. “There’s a candle, Fitz!” he warned, but Darcy had already jerked back and shut his eyes against the flame.
“Fletcher,” he whispered, not yet daring to open his eyes beyond the merest slits. “He will likely be asleep in the dressing room. Get me to a chair. I must sit down!” He groaned, but Brougham made no further move into the room. “Dy?”
“That may present some difficulty,” His Lordship returned drily. “Good morning, Miss Darcy.”
“Georgiana!” Darcy’s eyes flew open as he lifted his head in surprise. “Ahhh,” he groaned as the light from the branch of candles in his sister’s hand invaded his sight.
“Fitzwilliam!” He sensed the fear in her voice and not only heard but felt the thump of the silver candleholder as it hit the table next to the chair. “My Lord,” she addressed Brougham, “is he hurt? Oh, Fitzwilliam!” She returned to him, her hands reaching for him and coming to rest lightly on his arms. “Set him down here, in the chair!” she instructed Brougham. “Or should he lie down? My Lord?”
“Yes, please.” Darcy could only sigh, closing his eyes once more. That Georgiana should see him like this!
“The chair, I think, Miss Darcy,” His Lordship decided. “His man can handle getting him to bed.” Dy stiff-marched him over to the chair where his sister had awaited his homecoming. He helped Darcy into the chair, sparing him the indignity of falling down into it as he probably deserved. Immediately, Georgiana was on her knees before him, her hands seeking his.
“But is he hurt, My Lord? Shall I call for a surgeon?” She looked over him anxiously. Darcy chanced opening his eyes just at the moment that her anxiety was replaced with a questioning frown, which in turn gave way to shocked surprise. The mortification that swept him was worse than he possibly could have imagined. “But he is —! Fitzwilliam cannot be —!” She looked up at Brougham with a face that begged him to deny it as Darcy flushed in guilt. Fumbling in his pocket for something to wipe the sweat from his brow, his hand closed on a handkerchief; but his efforts to bring himself to a semblance of order were met with a sharp, shocked “Oh!” from his sister and a rueful snort of laughter from Dy.
“What is it?” he asked, looking from one face to the other, baffled at their reactions. Dy motioned to his hand, from which drooped a very lacy bit of holland cloth. Darcy’s countenance went crimson as he hurriedly stuffed it back into his pocket.
“I fear you are correct, although in only your first surmise, Miss Darcy,” His Lordship returned gently, “but I beg you will take it in stride as I know you are able. Your brother has been through deep waters of late, and tonight was, I believe, an aberration, the nature of which he will be very loath to repeat.”
Georgiana gripped her brother’s hands tightly and, with more compassion than he had any right to, smiled encouragingly at him through misted eyes. “Yes, I understand, My Lord, better than you know.”
“Well, then.” Brougham sighed as he stepped away. “I shall rouse Fletcher, who will know exactly what to do, I have no doubt, and leave you both to your ministrations. May I call on you and Miss Darcy this evening?” he addressed a much subdued Darcy.
“Yes,” Darcy answered with gratitude, “whenever you wish. Dy —”
“I know, my friend,” His Lordship assured him. “And there is also the confidence that I owe to you for which we never found the time or the right circumstances. Tonight then.” He bowed low. “Miss Darcy, Fitz.” He let himself out through the dressing room door.
“A true friend,” Darcy murmured as the door clicked shut. Hesitantly, he looked to his sister.
“Yes, he is,” she agreed and turned a soft, wistful countenance upon him. “And he desires only your good. That I know.” Her softness assumed an air of puzzled dismay. “But I would never have dreamed that he — that you —! Oh, what has happened to you, Fitzwilliam? Can you not tell me?”
“Ahem!” From the dressing room door came the extraordinarily loud sound of a throat being cleared, and precisely ten seconds later Fletcher’s head cautiously appeared at its border. Darcy almost sighed with relief.
“Later,” he promised his sister, his head pounding, “I will recount what is fitting; but at this moment and, I fear, for some hours to come, I will be suffering the consequences of every man fool enough to look for solace in a bottle. Please.” He winced at the pain his efforts to rise from the chair were inflicting. “Go to bed, dearest, and let Fletcher assist me to mine.”
“As you wish,” Georgiana responded, her brave smile not quite erasing the concern that shaded her tired face, “but you will remain in my thoughts and prayers, Brother, until then.” Reaching up, she quickly kissed his cheek and, with a look to him that spoke all her love, left him to his valet’s care.
“Fletcher, your shoulder, man!” Darcy gasped as soon as the door behind his sister had clicked shut.
“Sir!” His valet set something down and was at his side in a moment.
“I believe I am about to be sick.”
“Stand firm, sir!” Fletcher maneuvered him to the bed, where Darcy gratefully sank down, only to have a glass of some vile concoction thrust into his hands. “Drink this, Mr. Darcy! It will settle your stomach and go far toward clearing your head, sir.”
“Or put me out of my misery entirely.” Darcy looked into the glass with dubious distaste. “Where did you get it?”
“It is a recipe that even His Majesty the Prince has found effective.” Fletcher looked suddenly abashed. “Although, I hasten to add, there is no comparison implied, sir.”
Darcy managed to raise a brow. “I should hope not!” Sniffing it tentatively, he drew back with a grimace.
“It will help you sleep,” his valet added and then stifled a yawn.
Stop acting like a child and take your medicine, Darcy reproved himself. You deserve no such sympathy or relief as you have met with tonight! He gulped down the liquid, which was every bit as vile as he had suspected.
“There, sir.” Fletcher took the glass. Setting it down, he began peeling away Darcy’s coat and waistcoat, then unbuttoned his shirt. “Lie down, then.” Darcy let himself sink back onto the pillows and slowly brought his legs up onto the bed. Deftly removing his shoes, Fletcher set them with the rest of his clothing and returned to throw a blanket over his supine form.
“Thank you, Fletcher,” Darcy breathed out, his eyes closed. “I’ll ring for you when I am able.”
“Very good, sir.” His valet gathered up the discarded clothing and made for the door.
“Fletcher!”
“Yes, sir?”
“In my coat pocket.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Did you find something?”
“Yes, sir.” Fletcher’s even-voiced professionalism betrayed nothing concerning the nature of his discovery.
“When it is laundered, please have it sent to the Fox and Drake along with half a crown.”
“Very good, sir. Good night, sir.”
Darcy heard the door shut but little more as a blessedly deep, dreamless sleep claimed him for the first time in weeks.
The magnitude of the headache that greeted Darcy the next day was less than he had feared it would be, and even that would soon be soothed by the powders that Fletcher had carefully left beside his water glass sometime during the morning. Leaning on his elbow, he reached over from the bed, poured the medicine into the water, and watched as the early afternoon sun caught and reflected the particles as they drifted and dissolved on their way down the column of liquid. Drifting and dissolving…not unlike himself, he reflected. He drank it in one swallow and then sank back against the pillows, closing his eyes again. He had done all that his society and breeding expected and more. He had, after his sire’s death, set himself to be like him — the best man he could be in all his dealings, whether as landlord, master, brother, or friend. He held himself to scrupulous honesty in his business concerns and exercised unfailing caution in his social affairs. Yet in all the upright principles he imbibed and all their attendant expectations in whose precise fulfillment he took pride, he saw now that he was a mere observer of life, a creature of convention and propriety. Never had he allowed the world beyond his immediate family any claim upon him. In point of fact, he was bred and nurtured to that view. Like a chess master, he had ordered his life according to his own unbridled prejudices and the conceits of his class, congratulating himself on his adherence to them and dismissing all that did not conform to them as unworthy of his consideration…until Elizabeth.
Darcy’s heart turned over in his chest as her name brought home to him every knot of frustration and ache of longing he had ever had of her. Elizabeth, the contradiction of all his expectations. How could he ever have anticipated that on that one fateful night in a hedgerow village in Hertfordshire, amid the most undistinguished company he had ever been called upon to suffer, he would meet both his Nemesis and his Eve, that the dissolution of his carefully contrived existence was begun? Ending, he reminded himself with a groan, in a nest of political and social intrigue and the bottom of a brandy bottle in a strange public house. He flushed with embarrassment and disgust as he remembered his behavior of the evening before. Thank God, Dy had been there! Because of his friend’s peculiar eccentricities, he had succeeded only in making an ass of himself. It could have been very much worse, but that did not dilute the hot shame and repugnance he felt at his weaknesses displayed them.
He opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling. He must rise and face the day and reflect carefully upon what all that had happened revealed about his character. It was not a pleasant prospect. Already he knew himself to be much diminished in his own estimation. How, then, must he appear in the eyes of his beloved sister? Had his drunken display lost him her respect? Would his confessions of weakness today sink him even further in her regard? The possibility sent a stab of fear through his body. How was he to exert his care and guidance of his sister if he no longer commanded her respect, if every decision he issued was received not with confidence but with dubious hesitancy? For that matter, how confident did he remain in himself? Putting away that fearful thought, Darcy slowly pulled himself upright, pausing to test his equilibrium before swinging his legs over the edge of his bed. The resulting pain in his head was a dull one thanks to Fletcher’s powders and, possibly, that witch’s brew he’d downed. At least he had slept.
The clock on his mantel struck three, announcing the fact that the day was fast waning and his interview with Dy would soon be upon him. Darcy was more than curious about what Brougham would confide concerning his strange behavior and turn of personality over the years since university, but he also entertained a maddening uncertainty about what Dy had made of his drink induced confession of the previous evening; and, worse, what he might do with it. He drew up short at the thought. Exactly what had he confessed? Darcy strained to remember how the evening had played out after he and Dy had resumed their seats at the Fox and Drake.
“You had better tell me.” Dy had pinned him with a compassionate air containing not a trace of pity but rather the heartfelt regard of an old friend. Slowly, finally, Darcy opened his mouth, and what had been his most private concern seemed to rush out of him: his initial interest, his resistance and caution, and then his eventual fascination, desire, and love.
“ ‘Thy likeness, thy fit help, thy other self, Thy wish exactly to thy heart’s desire,’ ” Dy quoted absently to himself after Darcy had finished, then whistled under his breath. “Good heavens, Fitz, I know you well, my friend; and having said that, I must say that your Elizabeth must be an extraordinary young woman to have tied you into such excruciating knots!”
“She is not my Elizabeth, but you are correct” — he sighed — “she is an extraordinary young woman.”
“So you have said. Pardon me, but I take it from your opening salvo that, despite your manifold reservations and doubts, you did offer marriage.”
“Yes,” he stated. “After I had committed myself to forgetting her, we were thrown together in Kent. Her closest friend had wed my aunt’s parson several months before, and Elizabeth had come for a visit not knowing that I would be attending Lady Catherine during that same time. You can imagine my shock to find her there, neatly lodged on the edge of my aunt’s park and already quite Her Ladyship’s favorite.”
“Shock! I would say panic as well! You were in a hopeless position! In love against your better judgment, only recently committed to putting her out of your mind, and there she is!” Brougham shook his head. “And so easily to hand!”
There was a long silence then, but not an awkward one. Dy merely nodded his head in commiseration and then looked away, the tired lines of his face growing deeper as he seemed to withdraw into private contemplations. In time he rose and called to the serving girl for a pot of strong coffee and cups, then taking his seat, he turned again to his friend with a single word. “Then?”
Darcy took a deep breath. “Then, after nights of wrestling with what I owe to my name and station, the prospect of the justifiable disapprobation of my family and Society, and the consequences of allying myself and Georgiana with a family of questionable propriety, I succumbed. Life, a future without her seemed an impossibility. ‘Part of my soul’ since we are quoting Milton.” Dy nodded. “I began to court her, or at least I thought that was what I was doing. At the time, I thought her subdued responses were due to modesty and her consciousness of the disparity in our stations; but in that, as in so much else, I was completely mistaken.” He laughed grimly. “I had made up my mind to ask for her hand, you understand, but found it difficult to finally come to the point. Eventually, an opportunity presented itself, and I leapt upon it. She was alone at the parsonage; I went to her.”
The coffee arrived, delivered by the pub’s owner himself, who cast a questioning glance at Dy as he laid out the cups. Brougham responded with a weary smile. “I will close up for you.” Waving the publican away, he then poured them both deep cups. By this time, they were almost alone, closing time having past. “You went to her,” Dy prodded.
“And she refused me,” Darcy responded grimly.
“There is more to the story than that!” Dy returned.
Darcy closed his eyes, his jaw working as the scene, so oft remembered, sprang easily into even his inebriated consciousness. “More? Oh, yes, there is more,” he answered bitterly. “I professed my love in the strongest terms and, with even more vigor, gave her to know all the struggles I had overcome before appearing at her door to tell her so.”
“Your struggles,” Dy repeated slowly. “Pardon me, but did I hear you aright? You gave her to know all the reasons you should not be making her an offer of marriage?” Setting down his coffee, Brougham regarded his old friend in fascination. But after a moment’s reflection, the corners of his mouth hinted at an upward turn and he began to nod his head in agreement. “Yes, yes, that would be the Darcy approach, wouldn’t it? No need to pander to the lady’s sensibilities now, is there?” he offered in tart sarcasm. “Her attractions had prevailed over the inflexible Darcy canon, and what was more natural than that she be made to know her extreme good fortune and how little she deserved it!” Laughing humorlessly into the dangerously narrowed eyes Darcy set upon him, he smacked the table, setting the coffee to dancing. “Yes, only you, my friend, would make the lady’s general unfitness the leading topic in a proposal of marriage. Pray, enlighten me! Which of your scruples led you into such a confession?”
“Honesty…honor…pride — call it what you will!” he bit back angrily.
“To be sure, it was one of them, but it is for you to call, not I!” Dy retrieved his cup and settled back. “Please, continue. How did the lady respond?”
Darcy hesitated, fallen as he was under Brougham’s satirical eye, but the conviction that relating the painful events would release him from the tangled confusion that gripped him body and soul propelled him on. “She sat in utter silence.” He closed his eyes as he spoke, the scene vividly alive in his mind. “Her color high, neither looking at me nor replying to my suit. I was stunned at such a response,” he continued, looking up at the smoky beams of the pub’s ceiling. “It was hardly what I expected. Perhaps she did not believe me, I thought, or perhaps the prospect was too much for her.” His gaze returned to meet his friend’s. “I pressed my suit, desiring her to know that I had considered our proposed union from every conceivable angle for months, that my offer of marriage was not the result of a schoolboy’s infatuation but a well-considered proposal that took into account our relative situations in life.”
Whistling low, Brougham shook his head. “Why, I would venture there is scarcely a woman in all England who would refuse you an offer to become mistress of Pemberley no matter how pompously you came or how insensitively the offer was made! With all that before her, within her very grasp, yet she was silent! Extraordinary!” He paused, allowing them both time to ponder it before concluding, “And then, despite the immeasurable advantages she and her family would gain, she refused you! She had taken a very great offense, I imagine?”
Darcy laughed grimly. “She took not only offense but the offensive as well! My character was called into blackest question due to Wickham’s lies to her months before and then —”
“Wickham! The son of your father’s steward Wickham?” Dy asked in surprise. “Odd that he should turn up after all this time and in Hertfordshire! Is he the red coat — but of course, he is. In the military now, is he?” Darcy nodded and drank a bit of the coffee. “Go on,” Dy encouraged.
“Then she laid into me about her sister and Bingley.”
“Ah, so this is where Bingley comes in! The Unsuitable Hertfordshire Miss about whom you enlisted my help at Lady Melbourne’s is your Elizabeth’s sister?” Darcy had nodded again and then waited for Brougham’s laugh. It did not come.
“She blames you for her sister’s disappointed hopes,” he stated flatly.
“And she is right to do so, although I had considerable help from Bingley’s own sisters. They did not want any Hertfordshire relations of that sort, and I could not but agree…at the time.”
“I remember,” Brougham replied, then sitting up straighter, he continued. “It is most unfortunate that she discovered your hand in the matter. The death knell of your hopes, I suppose?”
“Death of them? Hardly!” Darcy cried. “She gave me to know in what light she had held me from our very first encounter, which had convinced her that, of all men, I exhibited the epitome of arrogance and conceit. This charming sketch of my character furnished her primary objection to me and laid the ground for her later summation: I am an unfeeling monster who ruins men at whim and dashes the hopes of virtuous maidens.”
“Such animosity! And you never suspected?” Dy’s brows furrowed deeply.
“No, fool that I am!” Darcy slumped back into the chair. “As I was saying when you came in, ‘the World’s Greatest Fool.’ ”
“Well…well,” Brougham repeated with a sigh. “I believe that is enough for tonight. You need to go home. I need to go home! It has been a very long day and night, my friend, and ranks among the most interesting in my experience. But you need to go home,” he emphasized again. Darcy could not but agree. Struggling up out of the chair, he swayed and blinked until Brougham reached out and steadied him. He managed to walk to the door, but while he waited for his friend to close up the pub for its owner, the night air hit him like a blow to the head, and his stomach heaved.
“Now, this does recall university days,” Dy remarked wryly before stepping out from the shadows to hail a passing cab.
“Where to, gov’nah?” the cabbie called down, then added, “Is yer friend there all right? It’ll be extra if’n I got ta clean up after you!”
“He’ll do,” Dy called back as he piloted Darcy toward the step up into the cab. “Grosvenor Square. Take the turns with care, though, and I will double your fee!”
Slowly and with deliberation, Darcy tucked his pocket watch into his waistcoat pocket and adjusted the fob as Fletcher took a whisk across the shoulders of his frock coat. They, both of them, stood silently before the mirror in his dressing room as they had countless times in the past, about the daily business of preparing him to meet the world as a gentleman. Everything was in place: his pocket watch, his seal, a handkerchief — his own, this time — sequestered neatly in his coat. His clothing fitted perfectly to his frame, a modest but artistic knot lay about his neck, his shoes shone, his chin was smooth. He appeared every inch as he should have until he dared look at the face in the dressing mirror, which with its drawn lineaments and bloodshot eyes, declared his pose a fraud. Quickly, he looked away, but not before glimpsing Fletcher’s carefully bland countenance reflected at his shoulder. There had been no impertinences this day, no quotations from the Bard concerning his state of the previous night, just quiet service performed with a minimum of display and an almost complete absence of noise. Although Darcy found himself grateful for the consideration, it also represented to him the cautious uncertainty into which he had cast his household with his unprecedented departure from his usual habits.
It was now half past four, or so had said his pocket watch. He could hardly believe it; he had never before arisen so late in the day. It was an altogether disorienting experience to go about the movements of early morning in the late afternoon. That, along with the queer sensations in his stomach and the slow ordering of his mind, gave the present moment a strange, fantastical air. He did not like it at all.
“Mr. Darcy?” Darcy looked over to his valet, his expression inviting him to continue. “Is there aught else you desire, sir?”
“Oh, a multitude of things!” A smile pulled briefly at his lips at the return of humor to Fletcher’s eyes his wry tone had evoked, but he continued somberly, “But most of all the recovery of the last twenty-four hours so that I could spend them more profitably. I should have heeded your advice.”
Coloring at the praise, his valet looked away. Darcy pulled at his cuffs and then at his waistcoat. “Am I ready for Miss Darcy?”
“Assuredly, sir.” Fletcher bowed and left at his master’s nod.
Strolling back into his bedchamber, Darcy was greeted by a bored and yawning Trafalgar. Although the dressing room door was no obstacle to him, the hound had acquired a healthy respect for his master’s valet and that man’s active opinion of the presence of animals within his artistic realm. Therefore, as fascinating as all his master’s activities in that most sacrosanct of rooms were, Trafalgar exercised a rare discretion where it was concerned and waited without the door for Darcy to emerge. Seeing him come at last, he scrambled to his feet, his eyes fixed in hope upon his master’s face.
“No, not today, Monster!” Darcy was forced to dash Trafalgar’s simple canine hopes. “I must see Miss Darcy…” The hound’s ears wilted even as Darcy reached down to scratch them, and with a sharp snort, he stalked over to the door, nosed it open, and left Darcy staring after him in dismay. Even to his hound, it appeared, he was a sad disappointment!
Following in Trafalgar’s offended wake, Darcy strode down the hall and then the steps of an Erewile House frozen in silence. The clatter of his shoes upon the stairs so sullied the unnatural quiet that the sound brought Witcher out into the hall with a harsh reprimand upon his lips before he realized who it was that had transgressed his orders.
“Oh! It is you, sir! I beg your pardon, sir.” The elderly butler’s eyes widened in embarrassment at nearly ringing a peal over his master. In both their younger days, such peals had occasionally been rung, but that had been many a year ago. Witcher’s stolid demeanor reasserted itself as he bowed and held himself in readiness for his master’s orders for what remained of this very strange day.
Darcy gestured in dismissal of the offense. “You would do me a courtesy by lifting the ban, Witcher, and relieve the staff as well, I imagine.” He cast about then for something, anything, that smacked of his normal course. The more quickly his household fell back into its accustomed patterns, the sooner this aberration would be forgotten. “And send coffee to the Small Parlor, please,” he ordered.
“Yes, sir. At once,” his butler answered, but then continued. “Mr. Darcy, sir, Lord Brougham called earlier and left his card for you with instructions that you read his note. I placed it on your desk, sir.”
“When did he call?” Darcy asked in surprise. Come and gone already, had he?
“Two o’clock, sir. Miss Darcy passed by the hall and spoke to him briefly, but he stayed no more than ten minutes, sir, as was proper.”
“Thank you, Witcher.” Darcy turned in the direction of his study, his curiosity awakened. “And send round that coffee, if you will.”
“Very good, sir.”
Free to satisfy the mystery of Dy’s early visit, Darcy entered his study, and striding past Georgiana’s portrait, which sat there on an easel until Unveiling Day, he went directly to his desk, where an elegant, gilt-edged calling card rested in a silver tray. Snatching it up, he sank into his chair and flicked it over.
Fitz,
Will call again later and for dinner as Miss Darcy has invited me to dine tonight! I strongly advise you to stay home today. Trust your sister to receive the truth aright. She, also, is an exceptional young woman!
Dy
Darcy grimaced at the message, a hot flush creeping up the back of his neck. “An exceptional young woman!” Yes, he had bled quite freely in the pub last night, there was no question. By turns, Dy’s wit and sympathy had teased everything of consequence out of him save the dangerous knowledge of Elizabeth’s identity. Sighing, he tossed the card onto the desk and then sat back, his fingers working at his temples. He had felt such a relief at the time finally to tell aloud the entire chronicle of the wretched affair, but the discordance of his own perception of the tale as he told it and the memories of his friend’s responses to it preyed on his mind.
Yes, yes, that would be the Darcy approach, wouldn’t it? Dy had skewered him with sarcasm. Only you, my friend, would make the lady’s general unfitness the leading topic in a proposal of marriage! Darcy winced. Was that what he had done? His memory ranged over the first minutes of that awful interview once more. What had he said in that ill-fated suit so undesired by its object? Good Lord! He remembered it so plainly now! He had plunged straightway into an examination of the injurious deficiencies of station and consequence her family represented. He had spoken of degradation and social censure, following it with a warm description of the certain wounds to his family that would be incurred as a result of his surrender to inclination. In short, he had talked only of himself, his family, his consequence, and her “unfitness,” then claimed a fastidious abhorrence of disguise as his justification! Darcy sucked in his breath. He had insulted her abominably, then excused the recitation of his vaunted scruples on the grounds that they were natural and just! He closed his eyes and saw again how her eyes had flashed as she had rejected his insolent proposal.
Natural and just? Had he ever considered her feelings? No! He raked a hand through his hair and then dropped his head into his hands. Despite all her early signs to the contrary, despite all the wit and vivacious honesty about her that had attracted him, despite even his own deeply held desire for a marriage characterized by love and friendship, he had treated her with a reprehensible condescension and insensitivity. Why? Why had he done so? Pray, enlighten me! Dy had jibbed at him. Which of your scruples led you into such a confession? His disguise was finally rendered transparent. It was family pride — his pride — that all his life had invariably set at naught those outside his circle and tempted him to think meanly of the sense and worth of the rest of the world. Elizabeth had felt it, called it what anyone outside his concern would agree it to be, what even Dy had seen it to be: pride attested by an arrogance of mind, a conceit of class, and a self-absorption that disdained to acknowledge the rightful feelings of others.
Darcy’s chin sank to his chest as the truth fell like hammer blows upon his faltering conscience. Pride, not a refined set of scruples, had been his master in this enterprise from beginning to end! He struck his fist on the desk and, pushing away, threw himself into an agitated pacing of the room. What had he ever said or done that had not been tempered by it or could not be traced back to it? He turned, his eyes coming to rest upon Georgiana’s portrait. Slowly advancing on her beautifully posed image, he halted before it, examining it with new perspective. Yes, his sister had unwittingly given him the key that morning she had questioned him concerning his portrait. She had expressed her discomfort with the untruths she claimed her own presented. I hoped to God that one day I would be the man in the painting, he had answered her while the keen edge of his failure in Elizabeth’s eyes had flayed away at his estimation of progress toward that goal.
That he was not yet the man in the painting he had that day freely admitted to himself with some pain; but now, as he thought again of that portrait, Elizabeth’s charge came against him with new clarity. Had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner…Seething with anger and self-pity since it was delivered, he had retreated into irascibility, yet he had not been able to bring himself to curse her memory for the simple truth that, with those words, she had demanded of him the man depicted in his portrait. His lack in that regard, he now saw with horror, had been not merely in degree, in isolated specifics, or only where Elizabeth was concerned, but in essentials that reached into the core of who he believed himself to be.
An appalling certainty broke upon him that the very path on which he had embarked toward his goal had been, from the beginning, terribly flawed, tainting and distorting everything that had followed. Pride was not a weakness, he had loftily instructed Elizabeth, when under the good regulation of a superior mind. Good God, what arrogance! But it did explain all: his aloofness from others, his reputation in Society, his suffocating hatred of Wickham, his attraction to Sylvanie, his interference in Bingley’s happiness, and most devastatingly, his struggle against his own starkly human need and love for a certain extraordinary gentlewoman of diminished consequence. The pervasiveness of it threatened to overwhelm him. An abhorrence of disguise, had he? Indeed, he was a master of it, having deceived himself utterly!
Ten difficult and humiliating minutes of self-reproof later, Darcy entered the Small Parlor of Erewile House to find his sister curled comfortably on a divan, bent over a book, with the remains of tea lying on the low table in front of her. At the sound of his footstep, she looked up, her face filling with relief that he had at last arrived. “Fitzwilliam!” she exclaimed. Then tempering it with a return of uncertainty, she apologized. “I am sorry; you have missed tea, or rather it has grown cold and stale! Shall I ring for new?”
“No, thank you, Witcher is bringing coffee.” He smiled at her and then, sweeping her feet off the divan, sat down beside her. “But first, I have something I wish to say.”
“Yes, Brother?” Georgiana sat very straight, her countenance solemn.
“My girl…” He reached for her hands and, holding them to his chest with one hand, nudged up her chin with the other. “I have not behaved toward you as an elder brother should and, in so doing, have caused you pain and denied you what is your due.” He breathed in shakily. “I cannot reveal everything that has occasioned my ill behavior, for it involves others; but what is due you, I will.” Bowing his head, he grasped her hands tightly. “I have come to beg your forgiveness, Georgiana, and beg I must; for I have done nothing that would recommend myself to your mercy.”
A tear slipped quickly from his sister’s lashes and traced a path down her cheek to fall upon his hand at her chin. “Dearest Brother.” She gave a small gasp. “Freely and with all my heart!”
“As quickly as that!” He bit his lip, looking down upon her glossy tresses. “Do you ask no penance?”
“No deeds, no penance,” she answered, shaking her head. “Mercy requires neither.” Georgiana’s smile was pure joy. “I would rather tell you a story. Will you hear it?”
“I will listen, dearest, and carefully.” A knock at the door signaled the arrival of his coffee. After Georgiana had poured and he had supplied himself with the first solid food in almost an entire day, he settled back as comfortably as was possible on the divan. “Now, your story,” he prompted, “after which, I beg you will permit me to explain a little concerning my behavior of late and what you saw last night. Is that agreeable?”
“Yes, above all things.” Georgiana nodded, tucking her hand intimately against his arm. She allowed him to pull her head comfortably against his shoulder before drawing a deep, tremulous breath. “There once was a foolish young girl who, save for the mercy of God, nearly ruined her family and her beloved elder brother by putting herself into the power of a wicked man…”
It would have been impossible to keep an account of how many times during her narrative Darcy went hot, then deadly cold. Wickham’s treachery, his smooth and unscrupulous seduction of his generous benefactor’s daughter, Darcy’s own innocent sister, stirred into flames the fury that had lain smoldering in his breast for almost a year. As Georgiana spoke of their meetings under the complacent eye of her companion, Mrs. Younge, anger and guilt very nearly choked him. What he said, what he did when she had finished, he knew to be of the utmost importance. If he had learned anything in the last weeks, it was that he might no longer entertain a careless confidence in his ability to deal rightly with his fellow man. But when his sister related how she had succumbed to the blackguard’s urgent plea that they elope, her words of self-recrimination forced them from him.
“No, Georgiana! Dearest girl!” he remonstrated, holding her close. “What chance did you have against him?” He stroked the curls that tumbled against his shoulder. “You have been too generous with me, for the world can see that it is I who am to blame! You had no defenses against him, for neither was I with you to shield you nor have I any credible reason for my absence. I should have taken you to Ramsgate or wherever you desired to go!” Releasing her, he rose and walked blindly to the hearth. Leaning his head against the cool marble, he took a deep, shuddering breath. “I neglected you. And for what? Nothing! Nothing half as important as your well-being. God and you forgive me!”
“No, Fitzwilliam.” Georgiana’s negation vibrated delicately in the air between them. “I lacked nothing in the way of true defenses against his blandishments. Credit me at least with knowing what was right and what was due my family!” She rose and came to him, laying a hand upon his back. “What I lacked was the character to reject his appeals. He played to my sympathy and romantic dreams, yes, but he also encouraged my vanity and fed my discontent with countless pointed insinuations.”
Darcy shook his head and turned away.
“Brother, I have always been encouraged to think so well of myself. Insulated by wealth and rank from any serious demand upon my character, I had little experience of its worth. I have since learned that in those more important things I am poor, helpless, and needy. It was the most important lesson I have in this life to learn.
“So, you see, Fitzwilliam.” She laid earnest hold of his arms. “You may not take upon yourself the entire blame. But for what blame you do hold in it, dear Brother, I forgive you with all my heart.”
Darcy looked down at the young woman, anxiety for his receipt of her absolution troubling her features. He had gotten what he had hoped for in this part of his confession, but it seemed altogether too easy.
“I was unforgivably selfish, Georgiana!”
“Brother.” Georgiana tried to stem his confessional flow.
“I should have done —”
“Fitzwilliam! I know you are selfish!” she exclaimed and then laughed at his affronted expression. “You are usually the most kind and generous of brothers, but with others, and also at times with me, you do look to your own concerns first. Oh!” she cried, “please, do not frown so when I merely agree with what you have confessed! Did I not forgive you already? More and I will suspect you of taking pride in your confession!”
The blush that colored his face he would have wished due more to contrition than to the embarrassment and chagrin he truly felt. It seemed he could not even confess his faults without a display of pride. “Well, ahem, I thank you, then.” He cast about, unable to look his sister in the eye. “You are very kind.”
“No, not ‘very’ kind, for now” — she turned and, resuming her seat on the divan, indicated the place next to her — “it is your turn, and I hold you to your promise.”
His turn! How was he to begin? Ignoring her invitation, he circled behind her and across the room. The rustle of her gown informed him that his progress was being followed. His bid for time to collect himself denied, he turned back and, with a sigh, sat down beside her.
He closed his eyes and leaned back. “You will remember my letter from Hertfordshire about a certain young woman. We spoke of her at Christmas, I believe.”
“Yes, Miss Elizabeth Bennet.”
Darcy opened one eye to peer down at her. “You remember her name?”
“Oh, yes.” Georgiana’s gaze was wide with expectancy. “I could not easily forget the name of a woman who had caught your interest and approval so well as she had.”
“Yes, well.” Darcy sighed. Then he began, in a fashion, to acquaint his sister with all that had occurred, the memories crowding upon him too swiftly, too poignantly to offer a precise chronology.
“At Rosings, I found my attraction to her growing stronger each day. I came to the point that, despite the manifold obstacles, I decided I could not live without her. I began to court her, at once eager to conclude the matter and ashamed of what I regarded as the sure consequences of my choice. My ambivalence was so complete that my object had not the slightest suspicion she was being so singled out. When finally I could deny my desire no longer and went to her, she greeted the offer of my hand with cool dismissal, professing herself surprised that I had held her in such regard.”
“She refused you!” Georgiana looked up at him, incredulous. “No, it cannot be! There was a mistake, some misunderstanding —”
Darcy took her hand between his, quieting her. “Yes, there was a mistake and a misunderstanding.” He shook his head at the hope that began to light her eyes. “It was my mistaken conceit that intervened between Elizabeth’s sister and Charles. Elizabeth had only that morning discovered my hand in her sister’s unhappiness and justly tasked me with it. The misunderstanding…” He paused. Must he reveal to her Wickham’s reappearance? “The misunderstanding concerned a malicious rumor about me that Elizabeth had no reason not to believe given my ill behavior toward her earlier. Of course, once she knew of my interference in the former, she was disposed to believe me perfectly capable of the meanest injustice.”
“But you explained this, surely!” Georgiana protested. “I know you must have been sorry for what you had done!”
He gripped her hand more tightly. “I am sorry to say, I was not. Her rejection so pained and humiliated me that I justified myself to her at every turn.” He sighed. “We exchanged words that I will regret to the end of my life. Later, I wrote her a letter explaining my actions in regard to her sister, for which she will never, I believe, forgive me. As for the misunderstanding, I have hopes of being acquitted in that quarter, but none so strong as to support a rapprochement. Her opinion of me and my faults, she made quite clear. No, she does not, nor can she ever, love me, my dear.” His voice dropped.
“Dear Brother!” Georgiana’s pity was sweeter than he had ever suspected pity could be.
“I raged against the crushing of my heart and the advent of a joyless future. I blamed her for deceiving me, fate for toying with me, everyone and everything save myself. As you said, we have been brought up to think well of ourselves, perhaps too well. Since my return from Kent, I have meanly thrashed about in my pain without a thought for those who care for my well-being. Last night, despite good counsel, I plunged into dangerous company for no better reasons than an appeal to my pride and the flattery of my person. It took Lord Brougham’s intervention to bring me to my senses, yet I rewarded his trouble with drunkenness. In my pride and conceit I have behaved abominably, foolishly. I stand shamed.” He swallowed hard. “I am not the man I had thought to become, before the memory of our father. Further, I have given you pain, Georgiana, most selfishly,” he concluded, “and I am heartily sorry for it.” He released her hand and waited, steeling himself for whatever should come.
“Brother,” she gasped, putting fingers to her lips to force back the sob in her voice. “Such pain, Fitzwilliam! I knew your anger, your isolation came from hurt of something, but this! To love so and receive…” Emotion caught her up again, preventing her from continuing.
“My pain…” He reached into his coat pocket and brought out his handkerchief to daub at her cheeks. “My pain is not sufficient excuse for my actions even if I had not brought its cause upon myself.”
“What a sorry pair we make.” She looked up at him as he did her his gentle service. “We have, both of us, been given to see ourselves and have responded like children, unwilling to be taught and resentful of our discipline.”
“But you are reconciled, I think.” He looked at her closely. “Whereas I am only resigned.”
Gently, her head came to rest upon his shoulder, and her hand was shyly laid over his heart. “I know,” she whispered. “But it is a step away from the angry pain you have been suffering so cruelly and alone. Pray, do not continue so, Fitzwilliam!”
Slipping his arms around her, Darcy held her close and placed a kiss upon her curls. “Shall you be my Portia, pleading my case before the bar?” He laid his cheek upon the place he had kissed.
Georgiana sighed as she burrowed deeper into his shoulder. “Not I alone, dear Brother; but yes, ever your Portia.”
What remained of the day, Darcy spent in his study working at his neglected affairs under the benevolent observation of his hound. Trafalgar had forgiven him also, it seemed, appearing unexpectedly at his usual place by the desk when once Darcy had turned his back to the door. Erewile House still lay hushed, but it was no longer silent as the servants brought it to order for that evening’s dinner and guest. From the other side of his door, footsteps softly clicked down the hall, doors opened and closed on the clink of china and silver, and murmured orders were passed along to underlings, all creating an undertone reminiscent of normalcy.
More than once during the early evening, Darcy’s gaze strayed from his papers to his sister’s portrait, and he wondered again at their extraordinary interview. She knew now all that was needful. His character had been laid quite bare, his devastating misadventure into love revealed, and the result had been not an estrangement but rather a new closeness built upon who rather than what they were to each other. Rising from his desk, he looked more carefully at her image and, after his study, determined that she had seen better than he. Lawrence had gotten her entirely wrong. It was a fine painting, no mistaking that, but Georgiana was correct. Although she had put it in quite different terms, he now saw that it had not captured the essential humanity of the remarkable young woman who was his sister. No, he would not insist on a public unveiling, he decided. Let the family come to view it if they wished and the thing be sent on to Pemberley.
A knock at the door brought his head around, and Trafalgar’s came up as the door opened to reveal Witcher’s smiling mien. “Excuse me, Mr. Darcy; Lord Brougham is here to see you, sir.”
Darcy looked past his butler but saw no sign of his supposed visitor. “Lord Brougham, Witcher? And where might he be?” A sound of footsteps signaled the approach of his erstwhile dinner guest, who appeared a trifle breathless at his study door. “Ah, yes. You are correct; it is Brougham. A bit early for dinner, are you not? Or is it late for tea?”
“You were to give me a few moments, Witcher!” Brougham cast the servant a look of exasperation. “It was meant figuratively, man! Never expected you would be precise to a pin!” He turned back to Darcy as the unrepentant butler bowed and closed the door. “The man is inestimable, Fitz, but remarkably obtuse at the most significant moments.”
“Meaning that you have yet to discover a way around him.” Darcy’s laugh was tempered by an acute unease at the arrival of his friend. After a day’s reflection on his foolish actions and sodden confessions, how might Dy regard him now? “Inestimable, indeed! But you are rather early. We did not expect you for another hour.”
“I could wait no longer to satisfy myself as to the condition of your head, old man! Or the rest of you, for that matter. I have no doubt that it has been quite some time since last you had that much to drink.”
Declining to answer, Darcy instead offered him a tight smile and sketched a bow. “Here you see me! Judge for yourself.”
Taking his invitation with irksome literalness, Brougham circled him round in precise imitation of the examination Brummell had given him the night of Lady Melbourne’s soiree. “Rather the worse for wear, my friend,” he concluded, shaking his head. “Dare I ask how you feel?”
“Not as bad as I might thanks to Fletcher’s vile potion, but bad enough to entertain the thought of going Methodist.”
Brougham looked at him sharply. “What do you mean?”
“Only that I believe I shall abstain from drink for a time.” He returned his friend’s regard cautiously. “What should you think I meant by it?”
In his typical fashion, Brougham ignored the question in favor of another of his own. “You have explained last night to Miss Darcy?” he asked, strolling over to the bookshelf.
“Yes, yes, I did.” Darcy watched as Dy’s fingers lazily caressed the ranked, leather-clad volumes.
“In detail?” Brougham asked as he perused the titles.
“No, of course not!” he replied. “Georgiana knows only that I fell in with some questionable company and you helped me to see how impolitic it was to remain.” He paused before adding, “I told her about Hertfordshire and then…and then about Kent.”
“Ah.” Brougham pulled out one of the company upon the shelf and gingerly opened it. “She knows about the lady, then, and the rest.” His gaze traveled steadily to and fro across the pages, nor did he lift it to ask, “How did she respond?”
“She forgave me,” Darcy replied simply.
“Well, she would have to now, would she not?” Dy looked up at him briefly and then fell to a study of the book once more. “Religious as she is.”
Darcy stiffened at his tone. What did he mean to imply? “I believe she truly forgave me,” he replied in hauteur, “and from her heart.”
“I see.” Dy looked over at him, his eyebrow crooked in that infuriating way Darcy had known since university, indicating that he saw no such thing, or that the speaker’s words were a pile of rubbish. “Very comforting, that — choosing your truth. Makes life quite tolerable when lived on such terms, does it not? Well, at least for a bit.” He shrugged. “Until one brushes up against another’s truth whose fur does not lie in the same direction.”
“A fine one you are to be lecturing on the nature of truth,” Darcy retorted, stung by his friend’s carelessly leveled skepticism.
“I did read philosophy, old man!” Brougham protested mildly as he turned another page.
“As did I.” Frustration gave way to anger. “But that is not my meaning, and well you know it! This charade of yours, this concealing of a first-rate mind behind the mask of a cork-brained rattle with more hair than wit, has grown exceedingly tiresome! What is the truth there, my fine friend?” Dy looked up from the page at his sharp tone, but his appreciative grin for his friend’s verbal thrust only angered Darcy further. “And last night at Monmouth’s! Posing as a servant, for God’s sake! Closing for innkeepers! And my door.” He suddenly remembered. “The lock! I may have been drunk, but I remember the lock!”
“I had hoped you would have forgotten that.” Brougham shook his head. “Pity you did not!” He set the book aside and regarded him meditatively. “But I did promise you an explanation, and an explanation, of sorts, you shall have.” He held up a hand to forestall the expression of dissatisfaction that sprang to Darcy’s lips. “I owe it to you for more reasons than one, and for the sake of our friendship and future relations, I will tell you all that I am able.” He sighed, his face creasing in rueful lines. “It is a rather complicated affair, though, I warn you.”
“I would not expect otherwise!” Darcy folded his arms and leaned against the edge of his desk. “You have been seven years at this game, man!” The thin line that was Brougham’s mouth plainly spoke his discomfort, causing Darcy to prompt, “By all means, proceed!”
“It began in the middle of our last term at university.” Brougham turned away and strolled to the window to peer down into the street below. “We were competing for the Mathematics Prize; do you remember?”
“Yes,” Darcy recalled. “I did not see you for days at a time during the preparation of our papers for the committee.”
“Yes, well…I was not at work on my paper; not the entire time. I was not even in Cambridge but here in London.”
“In London!”
His friend nodded but continued to stare out the window. “One evening while I was at work on my thesis, some men appeared in my rooms and whisked me off to a very private meeting, one which I was not permitted to refuse. My work in the relation of mathematics to linguistics had gained the notice, it seemed, of certain officials in the government who wished me to apply it to ciphers being passed here in England. Being young and impressionable, I agreed at once!” He stopped and looked back at Darcy. “No, that is not the absolute truth. I agreed because it was, at last, an opportunity to exorcise a personal demon. I have never told you of my father, Darcy. Have you never been curious as to why?”
“Naturally, I was.” Darcy straightened, surprised at the turn of Dy’s explanation but intrigued with its direction. “That you do not go by your title, Westmarch, but prefer Brougham was always curious. But early on you had made it clear that anything to do with your family was a private matter.”
“My family!” Brougham snorted. “Yes, I suppose you could call it that! My father, the Earl of Westmarch, was said to be a brilliant man; and perhaps at one time, he was. I have no notion of his intellect save in the inventive ways he studied to persecute my mother and humiliate me. He also had the Devil’s own temper, was a quick hand with his riding crop, and had a passion for gaming. The fortune my mother brought to the marriage was quickly dissipated, and after my birth, he had no more use for her, preferring, as he did, to graze in fields elsewhere.”
“Good God, Dy!”
Brougham shrugged his shoulders. “It is a common enough tale among our class, Fitz. You understand why I practically begged to spend that summer after our first year with your family at Pemberley? Even though the earl was dead and I had nothing to fear going home, I hungered to experience what a real family was. Your father was such a revelation! I am honored to have known him and confess that he has always been my ideal of what a husband and father should be.”
Darcy nodded, acknowledging the tribute. Both of them swallowed hard and looked away.
“Pardon my digression.” Brougham broke their silence. “My own father’s need for money became desperate after my mother’s death, for her income from her family’s holdings now devolved upon me, and my uncles had made certain that he could not lay his hands upon it. It was then that he turned to intrigue.”
“Intrigue?” Darcy frowned. “With whom?”
“Anyone!” Brougham threw up his hands. “Anyone with coin: French, Irish, Prussian, the Barbary pirates for all I know! Westmarch Castle became a tollhouse for anything or anyone that wished to elude the notice of the government.”
“A traitor!” The condemnation burst from him.
“Yes, a traitor.” Dy’s face hardened. “And not even for a cause, a belief, but merely for money. When he was finally caught by the authorities, he put a bullet through his brain before they could take him. Since his suicide had saved the Home Office the cost of a scandal, it was all hushed up. An accident while cleaning his pistol, or some such tale. But I knew, Fitz, I knew!” He turned away, his head and shoulders stiff. “So, you can see that I viewed this offer as a means of redeeming my name. Translating ciphers was also a fascinating challenge. The pitting of one’s mind and imagination against that of an unknown enemy was exhilarating. I finished out our last year at University dividing my time between my thesis and my work for the Home Office.”
“And still managed to win several prizes!” Darcy shook his head in chagrin.
Smirking, Brougham faced him. “You have not quite forgiven me that, I believe!”
“No!” Darcy answered. “But I can hardly begrudge you them after this. Go on.” He brought his old friend back to his subject. “For I do not see how this explains these last seven years or these mysterious pranks of yours.”
“Ah, but I have set the stage, as it were.” The steady, concentrated gaze reappeared. “It became obvious from their content and complexity that the ciphers were originating in the upper classes of British society, circulating within them before finally being sent to France. With Napoleon’s forces gathered at Boulogne in ’04 for a proposed invasion, the Home and Foreign Offices went into a panic. The plans for Pitt’s coastal fortifications in Sussex and Kent were discovered in a packet bound for Holland. I saw them myself and deciphered the note that accompanied it; a very elegant, inventive one I might add.” He smiled wryly at the memory.
“Well done, Dy, but the problem remained!” Darcy was caught in his friend’s narrative. “It was the men themselves who needed to be apprehended!”
“Precisely!” Brougham replied. “But how to discover them? They moved in the first circles of Society. They were highly intelligent and possibly powerful men. They might even have been part of the government itself ! The introduction of an agent would prove useless, for he would never be accepted, let alone trusted. It remained, therefore —”
“It had to be one of their own!” Darcy looked at his friend in wonder and some apprehension. “Someone they would accept without question but who was their equal in cunning and resourcefulness. Good Lord, Dy! You turned spy?” Brougham offered him a confirming bow. “All this time! Your pose as a rattle and nod cock?”
“Unfortunately, yes.” He sighed. “It was rather depressing how quickly I was accepted as such, but there it is! For King and Country, you know!”
“But did you catch them?” Darcy persisted. This was too incredible! His best friend a spy!
“Oh, yes, I caught him.” A strained look appeared upon Brougham’s face. He veiled his eyes. “But I cannot reveal his name or those of others I have exposed. They are dealt with by others and quietly while the Rattle continues on his rounds of dancing and hunting, gaming and playing Society’s fool. I swear, Fitz, you do not want to know what is revealed to a fool about those of our set.”
“Or to a servant?” he asked quietly. It may have begun as a noble quest to redeem his family’s name and an exciting challenge to his active intellect, but now the chase was taking its toll upon his friend. Darcy could see it in every line.
“Yes, when I do not have the right connections, such as those that would gain me entrée to the fanatics who surround Lady Monmouth. She has no use for the likes of me, much too devoted a lady to want my sort of fool. Would you offer me something to drink, old man?” he asked abruptly. “Dry work, this confessing! Almost envy you your way!”
“Getting drunk, do you mean?” Darcy groaned. “I do not recommend it. Besides, you may say something you ought not.” He strode over to a cabinet and opened it upon an assortment of spirits. “Wine or brandy?”
“Wine! We dine with your sister in a few moments, and I do not wish to have anything stronger lingering about my person.”
Darcy poured him a glass and then put the bottle away. No wine until supper for him! “And your familiarity with innkeepers and wonderful ability with locks?”
“Tools of the trade, Fitz.” He almost drained the glass in the first swallow. “In this business it is not enough to know the powerful. One must follow treason behind locked doors, through the streets, and into the gutter as well. There are parts of our fair city you would not believe existed even were I to swear on my honor to it. But gutter or town house, the stench is the same, and few are what they seem. I was even beginning to worry about you, old man!”
“Me?” Darcy stared at him, surprised and affronted.
“Oh, not that you were disloyal! Heavens, man, do not poker up so!” Brougham chided. “But I was worried about the company you were keeping. Sayre and Trenholme were always dubious pieces of work, not your sort at all! Then, it seemed that you were taken with Lady Sylvanie, now Monmouth, who has become a rather dangerous woman with whom to be connected. Recently, your behavior had become so unusual, especially in regard to Miss Darcy and since your return from Kent, that I did not know what to think. When you insisted on accepting Monmouth’s invitation, I feared for your reputation and tried to discourage you.” Dy skewered the area over his heart with a finger. “But you ignored even my ‘pointed’ advice.”
“I thought that display was concerning Georgiana,” Darcy responded, only partially mollified, “which is another subject we must discuss before we join her.”
“Must we?” Brougham’s jaw hardened. “I would rather not.” He downed the last of his wine.
“I believe we must.” Darcy tensed at his friend’s reluctance. “You were quite correct about her, and your reproofs to me were more than warranted. I thank you for both. I see now that I have lately given into your keeping responsibilities that were rightly only my own and that I must ask you to relinquish.” Abruptly, Brougham turned and walked back to the window, leaving Darcy to frown after his frame outlined against the gathering dusk. “Dy?”
“Do you have any idea what an extraordinary and precious young woman you have in your sister, Fitz?” Brougham leaned against the window frame. “I doubt that I have met her like in any female of our class, or at least in any that my public character has been allowed near! Already she is possessed of the graces an intelligent, discerning man appreciates. What she will be when she has reached maturity takes one’s breath away!”
“She is but sixteen, Dy!” Darcy remonstrated, alarmed at the intensity he heard in his friend’s voice, “and I had your hand that you —”
“That I would not be a danger to her!” Brougham turned back to him. “You have my hand still, my friend. I do not and would never play with Miss Darcy’s heart! I have been at some pains to keep my own feelings at bay, hidden beneath layers of mutual interests and friendship. Upon my honor, Fitz,” he protested vigorously in the face of his friend’s silence, “I have taken the greatest care that Miss Darcy know me foremost as friend. I am only too aware of her age; give me some credit for delicacy, I beg you!”
“But it will be some years before I would even consider giving her in marriage.” Darcy put as much disapproval into his tone as possible. “And the disparity in your ages, Dy!”
“Well do I know it.” He laughed grimly. “I would not have believed it myself. The baby sister of my best friend! How absurd! But there is this, Fitz. I’m old enough to know my own mind and know what love is. After this bloody war is over, I know what I shall do with the rest of my life, and it shall not be performing as London’s prize idiot, I assure you! You know me, Fitz, despite these last seven years. You know that I would cherish Miss Darcy above my own life, and if I ever did not to your satisfaction, you have my leave to thrash me within an inch of it!”
Darcy stared at his friend in silence. He could not doubt that every word Dy spoke was true and from the heart, but the idea that he loved Georgiana and wished to make her his wife was more than Darcy had ever expected to entertain today or any other. “Dy —”
“Please, let us not speak of this further for now,” Brougham interrupted. “She is too young, as you say; and I am entangled in this snarl of intrigue that makes my life not worth a tuppence. Nothing may come of this confession, you know! Any day a notice may appear in the papers. Until this war is done, I can say nothing nor ask anything of you or Miss Darcy. Perhaps, by the time Napoleon is finally dispatched, she will be of age to listen to my proposal. I leave it to you, my friend, to decide in the interim whether you will allow me to make it. Now…” He straightened and gestured toward the door. “Shall we go in to supper?”
“Dy, in all honesty, there is something you must know first.” Darcy made one last attempt to deflect his friend from his determination to wait for his sister.
“Yes?” Brougham stopped with a look of amusement. “Is there some dark Darcy secret that will deter me?”
“Dark?” Darcy bit his lip. “No, but you must know that she…” How was he to put this? There was no delicate way —
A knock sounded on the study door, causing the open expression that Dy had worn during his narrative to be replaced by one of wariness. “Enter,” Darcy called and watched with fascination the stages in the transformation of his friend from the sincere lines of the man he had been during their interview to the supercilious ones of his public persona. In the few moments it required for a footman to open the door and Georgiana to enter, the metamorphosis was complete.
“My Lord Brougham!” The pleasure in her eyes was unfeigned. She cast them down only briefly as she did him her curtsy and turned to Darcy. “Have you closeted with His Lordship long enough, Brother, or shall I have supper sent back to the kitchen?”
“Oh, we are quite at an end, Miss Darcy,” His Lordship interposed. “We have exhausted between us every topic of conversation. I fear it will fall upon you to keep us civil to each other through supper.”
Slipping back into his pose with uncanny ease, Dy proved an excellent dinner guest, entertaining them with anecdotes and absurd homilies interspersed with informative bits concerning the great, the famous, and those who aspired to be so. Darcy could almost believe their earlier meeting had been a dream, so little did the man sitting at table resemble what he had confessed. Still, Darcy watched with a heightened awareness for indications of the strands that might one day bind his sister to his friend. Certainly, Georgiana blossomed under his regard, losing her reticence in Brougham’s company even more than when among their relations; but he could detect no feeling for him other than a delighted friendship. On Dy’s part, there were no secret glances or soulful sighs. He continued to play the amusing rattle Society thought him, sometimes ridiculous, often ironic; yet his edges were softened in their company with occasional displays of his true intellect and powers of discernment.
Darcy knew that his friend would keep his promises, but when Dy took his final bow in wishing Georgiana a good night and pulled him into a conspiratorial huddle at the door to inform him that his “duties” would require his absence from Town for an unspecified period of time, Darcy was not sorry. “What I most regret is that I shall not be here for the unveiling of Miss Darcy’s portrait,” Dy said as he shrugged on the coat a footman held for him and reached for his beaver and gloves.
“You shall miss nothing,” Darcy replied, continuing at Brougham’s upraised brow with “I have concluded that Georgiana has the right of it. Family only, then it shall be packed up for Pemberley.”
“Excellent!” Dy beamed at him. “That was well done of you, Fitz! Although I appreciate Miss Darcy’s dissatisfaction with her portrait, I hope that one day I may have the privilege of seeing it displayed in proper state in your gallery.” He extended his hand, which Darcy immediately clasped in a hard grip.
“Have a care, old man.” Darcy choked on the words of farewell, the inestimable value of the man before him filling him with gratitude and fear. “You play a dangerous game, which it is my heartfelt wish you survive and without injury.”
“I shall, Fitz,” he replied with equal emotion. “You cannot imagine what a relief it has been to come honest with you about it…and the other. I shall be Lord knows where during the next several months, but if you should need to contact me, send a note to the sexton at St. Dunstan’s. He will make sure I receive it.”
St. Dunstan’s? Something from the past stirred inside Darcy at the name. Where had he heard of St. Dunstan’s before?
Dy took a deep breath. “Good-bye then, my friend,” he said and clapped his hat upon his well-ordered curls. “Watch over Miss Darcy, and think of me. I will require an accounting when next we meet.” He laughed, then asked, “What is it that you frown so?”
“St. Dunstan’s! Why should I have heard of that parish before? I certainly do not frequent that part of London!”
Brougham grinned provocatively. “Oh, I should be very surprised if you did! Where have you heard of it? I would imagine you ran across it in the references provided you by the excellent Mrs. Annesley.” He nodded to the footman to open the door.
“Mrs. Annesley!” Darcy stood rooted to the floor of his hall, staring stupidly at his friend while he scrambled to recall the contents of the woman’s letters.
“St. Dunstan’s was, before he died, Peter Annesley’s parish. Her late husband,” Dy offered to the blank surprise that continued to render Darcy immobile. “I beg you will not mention to her that I knew Peter, or apprise her of any notes you send there in search of me. She is not aware of our connection or the circles in which Peter was involved, and he wished it to remain so.”
Darcy nodded. “Good Lord, Dy, what next?”
“The end of this damned war in the defeat of Napoleon, I should hope!” he answered grimly. “I must be off!” He sighed, then turned on his friend a smile that spoke warmly of their years of high regard each for the other. “Have a care, Fitz.” He turned and in a breath was swallowed whole by the darkness.