“I accept your terms, Mr Statue, with one modification. Should we happen to meet each other any time after say, midsummer, we may be friends again and talk of anything we wish.”
Mr Darcy sealed the bargain with a kiss on Elizabeth’s knuckles, and she wondered just what she had got herself into.
On impulse, she rose on tiptoe and boldly kissed him on the cheek. “I will see you in 6 months, my friend.”
She blushed furiously, but unrepentantly, and skipped down the path to rejoin her sister at the parsonage.
Phaeton
“Miss Bennet, may I ask you an awfully impertinent question?” Anne de Bourgh asked, insouciantly.
“Of course!”
“What in the worldhave you done to my cousins?”
Elizabeth turned to the lady beside her on the phaeton’s seat. “I presume you mean Mr Darcy and Colonel Fitzwilliam?”
Anne de Bourgh wondered if her friend was having it on with her or simply clarifying. It was often difficult to tell if she was teasing, explaining, or qualifying—one could so rarely tell.
Elizabeth wondered how much the lady intended to pry, and how much she herself meant to divulge. Anne de Bourgh fascinated her; she was more than willing to indulge her where she could.
It was mid-afternoon, three days after Jane’s engagement announcement, Elizabeth’s second failed proposal, and the subsequent long, healing conversation with that vexing-vexing cousin. As planned, Mr Darcy and Colonel Fitzwilliam called at the parsonage the day after she arranged a rendezvous 6 months hence, and Elizabeth found the experiencefantastical.
The colonel looked and acted much as he usually did, though perhaps the ease was a façade; some tension clung to him which had not been there before. She might offer him an apology, but she had no idea how to begin the discussion, or what good she could hope to achieve. He was a full-grown man and could fend for himself. He should at least be cured of the worst of his gossipy tendencies.
On the other hand, Mr Darcy wassubstantiallymore open and amiable than previously, with her, with Mary, and even with William. Elizabeth was still trying to sketch his character,and could not decide how to interpret him. Was he being more amiable because he was trying to improve her opinion of him—courting behaviour, perhaps? Or because, no longer so worried, he was reverting to his normal demeanour? Or because he no longer fought his attraction to her? The colonel had opined earlier that he was lively enough in other situations. Was the more amiable Mr Darcy real, or was it the more taciturn one—or was it something else entirely? Perhaps he was like a chameleon, and changed his colour according to his circumstances. Whatever the explanation, thenewMr Darcy was much more palatable than the disagreeable old one, but she still did not want to marry him.
Elizabeth shook her head, recognising the telltale sign of what Charlotte called athought storm—that endless loop of thoughts cascading into a waterfall of thinking. Learning to control the storms had been one of the hardest lessons learned during Charlotte’s self-imposed training regimen—though, in the end, it was not Charlotte who produced a tolerable solution, but Jennifer Long.
One day, Elizabeth described the problem, and Jennifer suggested, “It sounds like you need to trim your sails[xx].”
She meant that Elizabeth’s thoughts circled like a ship in a storm, sails fully open, riding the storm to destruction like a poorly managed vessel.
Jennifer asserted that she must learn to trim her sails enough to quiet herself in the frightening seas before she could open them again and return to riding her thoughts as was proper. That meant disregarding conflicting voices until they faded, disregarding her mounting panic, or calming her nerves (hopefully without salts). Just reimagining the voices as wind helped somewhat. The technique worked… eventually.
Jennifer professed no particular cleverness. The wisdom came from an uncle, a sea-captain, who used the same technique to quiet his thoughts before a battle.
Elizabeth applied the technique and dragged her attention back to her companion before she became even ruder. A quick daydream of a ship in a violent storm, with sailors swarming up the ropes to trim the sails while the captain stood calmly on deck calculating the area of the furled sails aloud did the trick.
She smiled at her companion. “I apologise for the delay. My mind sometimes wanders, through no fault of my companions. I would be pleased if you called me Elizabeth.”
Anne sat up straighter and gave the biggest smile Elizabeth had ever seen on her. Miss de Bourgh was quite pretty when she quit slouching, frowning, letting her companion coddle her, and tolerating her mother’s browbeating.
“And I would be pleased if you called me Anne… or at least I would be if you were not avoiding my question.”
The last came with a shy,timid smile, as if teasing itself frightened the young lady—not an unlikely surmise.
Elizabeth returned the smile. “I would be happy to call you by your given name; or at least to do so when I am not around your mother. As to the latter, I fear I must answer your question with another.”
“Very well,” Anne said with a chuckle, “though I will not absolutely promise not to reply to your question with yet another.”
“As long as we answer more than we ask, we should eventually run out. On what basis do you claim Idid somethingto your cousins.”
“Fitzwilliam Darcy was kind to me, and Richard Fitzwilliam followed suit.”
Elizabeth raised an eyebrow and waited.
“Darcy and I wereclose as children. Around the time he went to Eton, I becameextremelyill and never quite recovered. In the process, we lost our childhood connection. As soon as he came of age, my mother started telling this ridiculous story of planning our marriage in our cradles and has hounded him ever since.”
