“Whatever do you mean?”Lachglass replied haughtily.
The angry white-haired man stomped back and forth, not caring about the value of Lachglass’s carpets.“You are finished.Nothing in our government for you anymore.Your position is to be given to Windham.I will see your resignation tomorrow.Tomorrow.In the hands of Liverpool.We can’t have you anymore, not with these stories.And I dare say, for my own part, I don’t want you.”
“I have provided my support to the government consistently.There is no stauncher defender of our British institutions than I, and—”
“Codswallop.Think I give a damn?Think I give adamn!”
The piercing shout cut through Lachglass’s headache, and somehow, against his desire to be angry and defend his own rights, it cowed him into a silence, and he despised himself for that.He despised himself for it even more than he already despised himself.
“Bother themaidsif you must.”The politician’s voice fell quiet and conversational.“A gentlewoman in reduced circumstances?An actual lady of breeding — someone a man likeDarcywould marry?You disgust me.I’d not let my daughter attend a ball you were present at.And then to bring the matter to the courts when you were just a damned fool.”
“She robbed me and beat me, and—”
“I don’t believe that.You don’t believe that.Nobody believes that.It makes you even less of a man if it is true.No jury will believe that — Jove, pathetic.You are pathetic.We have the Hampden clubs organizing against us.The lack of work drives vagabonds to the streets.Secret groups whisper revolution andyoumust prove every false claim about the excesses and wrongs of our aristocracy true?You are the sort of man who led to our French friends meeting Monsieur le Guillotine.Youare one of the chiefest problems with the state of Britain at this time.”
“I will not listen to such insults.I will not listen to such lies about—”
“You were beaten by a woman.And you planned to force her, which you could not even manage.You are done.Done!”The old politician’s voice snapped again loudly enough that Lachglass vibrated.
The minister added in a disgusted tone, “If you must bother anyone, let me say it again:bother the damned maids.They can’t write to the papers.They don’t have rich friends who are politically useful.Have you any idea how much trouble a man like Darcy could cause for us if he threw his lot in with the Whigs?He has two boroughs in his own pocket and he is exceedingly well respected.Exceedingly.Ifhetalks about a need for reforms to curb the excesses of the peers, others amongst the commons will listen, and then where will we be?”
“I don’t give a damn.You show yourselves to be low dogs deserving of being shot like low worm infested whores deserve to be shot.You show no loyalty to a man disdained and despised, viciously and violently, by the low seditious scribblers of the press, who deserve to be shot.”Lord Lachglass sneered at the powerful government man before him.
The politician sneered back.“For once the scribblers speak sense.I don’t want a man who’ll let a woman knock him on his ass in my government.”
The minister was such a short man.With an ugly folded and wrinkled face, he’d never been handsome.Never been much of a man either.
And now that was how everyone saw Lachglass.Ugly, with his bent nose, and the scar whose fringe was visible on the top of his forehead.No longer handsome.
SHEhad thrown him from the position of power and influence he’d cultivated for himself.
They’d tossed him aside.Without so much as a “by your leave”.With a simple, “You can take yourself and the votes you provide, and we’ll manage nicely without them, because we want tocourtDarcy more.Darcyis respected, unlike you.”
Darcy, who married agovernesswhore.
Shouldn’tthatmake him a laughing stock?Wasn’tDarcythe one who was less of a man, who would ask the same woman twice to marry him?
Darcy was seen as a romantic hero by the newspaper eating crowds of cits.Darcywas seen as a man worth cultivating.Lachglass knew how pathetic Darcy was.He couldn’t do a damned thing with a woman without someone literally holding his baby hands to propel him into the room with her.And he’d probably still not manage to stick himself in her.
And nowDarcyhad the upper on him.
Lachglass wanted to murder the politician in front of him.He rather wanted to murder everyone in London.
But instead he did the only thing he could, he sneered.“You have earned my permanent hatred, and one day you’ll rue this.”
The man laughed.“Going to hurt me like you hurt Mrs.Darcy, eh?Just make sure your resignation letter is handed in by tomorrow midday or we’ll have a cabinet vote to throw you out of office.”
He left out, chuckling, his grotesquely oversized stomach wiggling side to side with each wormlike laugh.“Scared of your revenge?A man who lets a woman beat him up?What a molly.”
Lachglass clenched and unclenched his fists as the sound of the minister’s laughing departure faded.And then, without thought, he picked up a vase, almost as expensive as the one Miss Bennet bashed over his head, and he threw it through his gilt mirror.He picked up the fire poker and he bashed out each of his windows, the shards of glass falling onto the scurrying pedestrians on the road below his townhouse.
He kicked five holes in each wall of the drawing room.
A giant globe with a map of the earth painted on it that had cost more than ten pounds was beaten until its remains looked like a giant wooden cracked egg that had been painted blue and brown for Easter.
If one of his servants had entered the room at this moment, Lachglass would have tried to kick them to death.
And then, the cold wind blowing through his ruined windows, Lachglass curled up in a corner of the drawing room and cried.
