Finneas Culpepper, the winner of the infamous fencing match and thus the only one amongst them using his true given name, heartily accepted. William was no less keen to add his agreement to the scheme. He had little experience in ballrooms, but he knew he ought to get his fill of such novelty while he could.
His friends would go on to join London society, but William would only return to the country estate he had seldom visited since Sir Thomas had died and the widow Lady Grey remarried and sent him off to Eton. He would be the master of Sir Thomas’s estate, Wildewood, and he would take on the supervision of a young ward, Catherine Cardew, the daughter of Lady Grey’s lately deceased second husband. She was but ten years old, and had been an orphan for above six months now.
William was of a serious disposition, and he believed he was capable of rising to the challenges he faced, yet he could not help envying his friends just a little. They laughed as they bemoaned what awaited them – dinners and parties and the glittering world of the ton, but they all had living parents andthus few true responsibilities beyond preparing themselves for someday facing the challenge William must take on at the summer’s end.
He did not entirely envy that they must often move amongst a vicious and often disingenuous social circle, but he would have at least liked the liberty to partake in society as often or as little as he chose. His own fate was not his own to control, being already so burdened by responsibility.
A fortnight later, when William and his friends attended the countess’s ball at Pemberley, he again felt this unaccountable desire to move as freely in the world as his friends. At the only ball he had ever attended in London, he had been uncomfortable with the whispers of speculation that spread through the room, mammas pinching their daughters’ cheeks pink as they spoke of Wildewood and four thousand a year. But at the ball at Pemberley, there was no such talk to trouble him.
He was Will Darcy, and Will Darcy was an enigma. His prospects were unknown, and his looks were admired more than he had thought to expect. And under the influence of the lively captain, William even found himself making jests and pleasing all his new acquaintance. It was novel and intoxicating; he rather liked being Will Darcy.
Chapter One
16 April, 1812
Rosings Park, Kent
“Farewell, Oscar! Farewell, Barnaby! Farewell, tedious Olivia! I hope your carriage crashes into Hunsford Creek.” Lady Catherine de Bourgh smiled cheerfully as she joined her daughters in waving to the departing carriage, which was at too great a distance already for the de Bourgh cousins within to hear her speech.
Jane gasped. “Mamma! You rather sound like Lizzy.”
Elizabeth grinned. “No indeed! I cannot join you in wishing them to the very devil, Mamma; they were vastly too amusing!”
“They are notsovery bad,” Jane said with a little wince. “They have some right to be interested in the ladies who are to inherit the de Bourgh ancestral home.”
“They have no right at all to question me,” Lady Catherine harrumphed. “Their father did not have the temerity to be born before my late husband, and therefore it can be nothing to them whom I decide to leave my house, my fortune, and all my worldlygoods, when the time comes. God has taken my Anne, but he has given me the pair of you, and my nephews are neither entitled to my beautiful daughters nor to what I bequeath you. Indeed, I think their showing up here uninvited on the final day of our mourning for my brother was exceedingly ill-judged, and it is not to be borne!”
They had been in near-constant mourning for three years. The Bennet sisters and Lady Catherine had been inconsolable after the loss of Anne de Bourgh; despite her years of failing health, her death was still a terrible blow. Shortly after this, Lady Anne was made a widow once more, when her husband Sir Geoffrey Beaumont was thrown from his horse. A year later, their cousin Robert Fitzwilliam, third son of the Earl of Matlock had been taken by a fever, and his father suffered a sudden apoplexy within a twelvemonth. Elizabeth had been in mourning since she was seventeen.
The de Bourghs had imposed upon Lady Catherine for a week at Rosings, and though Elizabeth had found them to be nothing short of absurd, they were the only suitors she had ever had. Jane had been betrothed to Robert Fitzwilliam before his death; she had liked him well enough, though she had never exhibited any symptoms of being in love with him.
Before her death, Anne de Bourgh was destined to be mistress of Pemberley until Georgiana came of age, or so Lady Catherine had hoped. But Richard, second son of the earl and steward of Pemberley, had been resistant to the match. Indeed, he had been quite elusive since the girls had all reached a marriageable age; whenever he was invited to Rosings with the rest of his family, he was always busy attending to matters of business at Pemberley, or visiting the sickbed of his ailing friend Mr. Bunbury.
Elizabeth could not repine her want of such underwhelming beaux as her cousins, either of the Fitzwilliamor de Bourgh variety. There had even been a Bennet cousin, the exceedingly fatuous son of her father’s heir, who had visited and been swiftly ejected from the house by Lady Catherine after diverting them all for half an hour with his dim-witted pomposity and extolling on the glories of Longbourn to Jane in particular.
The romantic history of her aunt, Lady Anne, still enthralled Elizabeth, and she dearly wished for a proper suitor. In private moments, Jane sometimes confessed the same desire. Jane wished to find an amiable and lively husband, but swore that she was in no great rush, that she felt all her good fortune and was perfectly content at Rosings. Elizabeth comprehended these sentiments; their lives at Rosings had been beyond what the daughters of Longbourn might have expected. And yet, the grief of recent years had cast a shadow over her idyllic country home, and she longed for a chance to move more in the world, to find the companion of her future life – a life she wished to fill with adventure and diversion.
Lady Catherine led the girls back into the house, for it was time to dress for dinner. Their relations from Beaumont Hall were expected that evening, and the subject of their recent visitors occupied them for much of the meal. Lady Catherine spoke with contempt of her late husband’s relations, but Elizabeth regaled her aunt and cousin with an abundance of mirth and no little exaggeration.
She had always enjoyed any opportunity to make a study of any new characters she encountered; she was clever enough to swiftly comprehend their follies and flaws, and good-humored enough to turn them into jests without being cruel. She expressed all her delight at discovering Oscar de Bourgh to be an aspiring poet, and Barnaby de Bourgh to be so devoted to his own fine looks that he could never repine the admiration of a lady.
Lady Anne listened to Elizabeth’s banter with the same fond smile she always wore in the company of the ladies of Rosings, and then she waited for Jane to defend the gentlemen, for she always did find the best in everyone. But Jane had little to say in their favor, which Georgiana found riotously amusing. “They must have been ghastly! I am sorry we were away from home, though I enjoyed visiting my younger brother.”
Lady Anne gave an account of her young son Henry Beaumont, who was excelling in his studies and growing more like his late father at every visit. Then she sighed, and gave Lady Catherine an arch look.
“The children are all quite grown up, Cathy. Georgiana is nearly seventeen, and I have agreed that she may have a little season in London this year. Perhaps you will bring the girls; I believe it is time.”
“Aye, so it is,” Lady Catherine admitted, casting a look of assessment over her daughters. “You have every advantage of fortune, beauty, and accomplishment.”
“You are both far too lovely to be still unwed,” Lady Anne agreed. “It is a pity we have not been able to move in society since you both reached an age to be out, though I believe Georgiana will be happy to share her debutante season with you.”
Georgiana’s eyes lit with excitement, and she gave an emphatic nod. “I will not be half so anxious if you are with me,” she agreed.
“I shall write to the dowager countess,” Lady Catherine said. “Unless you wish to open Darcy House, Anne?”
Lady Anne’s countenance shaded, as it always did at any allusion to her tragic first marriage. “No… no. We will stay at Matlock House. We practically grew up there, and I am sure it is large enough to accommodate all of us.” She turned a teasingsmile on Jane and Elizabeth. “We must do a great deal of shopping. Are you prepared for the exertion and the subsequent tribulations of being admired wherever you go?”
“That will indeed be a trial,” Lady Catherine drawled. “Every fortune hunter in London will be sniffing around! You must be on your guard, girls, for penniless rakes who profess their love as they covet your dowries. Three young ladies with thirty thousand pounds apiece! I shall be obliged to stand sentinel at the door with saber drawn ‘round the clock!”
