The reply from Darcy was a glare.
Georgiana glanced between the two of them.
She pressed her hand to her face and said, “Ah…” She flushed and asked, “You two are not really angry at each other are you?”
Darcy turned to her, and he shook his head. “No, I do not think so.”
“You’ve seemed angry to me ever since I refused to follow you,” Colonel Fitzwilliam replied. But then he flushed, looked at Georgiana, and said, “This isnotan argument to have in front of you.”
“It was not the matter ofBingleyat all,” Darcy replied. He saw it again like a flash of lightning, like a nightmare: Elizabeth’s face in the strong moonlight.The feelings of another make it impossible for me to accept you.
“Oh,” Georgiana exclaimed. “There was a message for you, or about you in my most recent letter from Anne.”
Georgiana and her cousin Anne de Bourgh had maintained a steady correspondence since Georgiana’s near elopement with Wickham, as she’d been encouraged to write more to her relations by Lady Matlock.
Darcy had always kept a careful distance from Anne, since the suspicion that Lady Catherine would do anything to make him marry her daughter — though of course not quite as much as Miss Bingley had, since Lady Catherine was in fact well bred — had never quite left Darcy.
He became still at being told that Anne had said something about him. “And what is this message?” Anne had no basis from his behavior to harbor any hopes towards him. She shouldn’t have any reason to say anything to him.
“Oh, merely that an acquaintance of yours, Miss Elizabeth Bennet, is visiting — sheactuallyvisits her cousin Mr. Collins. The parsonage is ten minutes away across the park, so it sums up to the same.”
“Miss Elizabeth!” Darcy said in astonishment.
There was a softening on Colonel Fitzwilliam’s expression as well. He smiled and said. “I’d dearly like to see how Miss Elizabeth manages Lady Catherine’s tirades.”
“Anne writes,” Georgiana said, “that her mother likes Miss Bennet, but that she finds her rather impertinent, and wishes that her fortune had come from a more respectable source than trade, even if her father does possess a hereditary estate.”
Both Darcy and Colonel Fitzwilliam laughed. Colonel Fitzwilliam said, “That sounds quite like them both.”
“How long is she to stay?” Darcy asked.
Georgiana picked up the letter again. “Oh, the dates seem to be not firmly set, but certainly until a week after Easter.”
Half a day’s carriage ride away.
Of course she had been half a day’s carriage ride awaybefore. In fact she was now much further from London than she had been at Longbourn, but then it had seemed impossible to go to her, or to make an excuse to himself that would let him go.
But now!
There would be nothing simplernowthan to simply announce a visit to his aunt, and go.
When Georgiana left the breakfast table to go to the drawing room piano for her morning session of practice upon the piano — she habitually spent at least three hours a day at the instrument — Darcy and Colonel Fitzwilliam remained sitting in the breakfast room over their coffee.
After a while, Colonel Fitzwilliam said, “Eh, Coz. Not just Bingley, I suspect you judge his sister more harshly than her desserts as well.”
“I shallnot,” Darcy replied sharply, “hear any word spoken in her favor.”
“Zeus.” Colonel Fitzwilliam laughed. “You are a man who’ll not change his mind readily.” Then he added, with a sudden gloom as he sipped his cooling coffee, “Not that it matters. Not that it matters. She earned harsh judgement.”
“She showed herself to be the worst sort of woman imaginable.”
“You have a very particular notion of the possible range of female deficiencies — what about that woman who promised for a fee to take care of the offspring of unfortunate women who could not raise them on their own, and then murdered them.”
Darcy grimaced. “You hardly will put Miss Bingley in my good graces by convincing me that at least she does not murder babies.”
“Youare the one who reached for the heights of foolishness by naming her the worst sortimaginable. I merely point out to you that it was a fool thing to say.”
“I know,” Darcy replied sharply, “that that is not the real point towards this conversation tends.”
