Page 4 of The Widower of Pemberley

Carrying Emily, Darcy rang for a servant, who was sent to fetch the nursery maid and the apron that Emily was made to wear when she worked with ink. Then he walked in circles with her. She seemed sleepy, but it was still several hours before she would usually be put to bed by the nurse. Whilst she slept, Darcy would be at the ball, hunting for her new mother.

There was some danger in how he treated the child. She would grow up wealthy and able to demand nearly anything. There were many people whose characters were spoiled by such a situation.

Her mother had been one.

Darcy’s father would have birched her twice during the afternoon that had just passed. Poor motherless little girl. Darcy could not do it, not even if it would have been better for her.

He sincerely hoped that pain was not the only way to instil good virtue. From all that he had seen of the world, with the children of both strict and indulgent parents sometimes turning out well and sometimes abominably, perhaps nothing he did to his daughter, whether beating or bribery, would change her fundamental character or how she would act when independent as an adult.

Emily’s general conduct suggested to Darcy that her essential nature was as good as his or Georgiana’s.

She shared quickly; she was always concerned whenever she saw someone who was hurt; she insisted that they help nurse a baby bird which had fallen out of a tree; she had sobbed for an hour and refused to eat sausage for a week when she learned that a pig she had tried to befriend on the estate farm had been turned into her bacon.

When Rose entered the room holding Emily’s writing apron, Miss Bingley came up to see her draw and exclaimed, “Emily will draw better, I am sure, than a thousand adults might! It is so delightful that you let her run about here in the drawing room. Ordinary men, with less parental care than you, would put their children in the perfectly suitable nursery.”

Darcy looked at her with some suspicion.

Miss Bingley flushed. “I only mean to praise you—and your daughter.”

“Then do not pretend that you like the child running about your drawing room, if, in fact, you would prefer me to send her up.”

“I did not mean—”

“No? You did not?”

Darcy’s temper was always short these days. He often had disturbing dreams. Though Mary had cuckolded him, the wholeof it was Darcy’s fault. At one time his dead wife had possessed a good enough heart.

She had even loved him, sincerely, for a time.

Miss Bingley reminded him of Mary: finely schooled, sparkling, always trying to find a clever turn of phrase, and fundamentally dishonest. Except Miss Bingley was poorer, less fashionable, and not half as beautiful as his wife had been.

Jove, why could the woman not see that he would make her miserable, like he had Mary, if she succeeded in catching him, and thus leave him alone?

“Darcy,” Bingley said in a half-warning tone. “I believe we were all gathered to watch Emily draw. Do draw something, my dear little bun.”

“I am not food!” Emily retorted as she sat down and scraped the pen eagerly over the page where Darcy had written nonsensical notes. A great deal of ink spattered onto her apron. “There! A fish!”

The scrawled lines failed to depict a fish.

However, if Darcy were in a charitable mood, he might admit they possessed a slight similarity to a fish, if one had never actually seen one, which was an enormous improvement over her art of only three months ago.

Bingley and his sister praised the image as being remarkably lifelike.

“I shall put it in my portfolio!” Emily exclaimed. At that declaration, the nursemaid, Rose, smilingly offered her charge the old leather document case that the little girl had stolen from her father some months before to keep her ‘business’ in.

Shortly afterwards, the child was sent up to the nursery for dinner, and Darcy and Georgiana retired to dress for the evening.

Since Bingley had told them that there would be an assembly so soon after their arrival—an excellent opportunity to meet the rustic horde of neighbours—Darcy had given serious consideration to whether he should allow Georgiana to attend.

His sister had only turned sixteen the previous month; she was still full young for society.

But a small assembly in an insignificant market town was only half out. Or at least by the standards of theton. Not Almack’s. Not a presentation to the queen. Not five hundred persons of great wealth stuffed into a room made for a hundred and fifty. No dukes, nor earls, nor even, according to Bingley, impecunious baronets.

A perfect opportunity to permit his little sister to experience the questionable and oft (by Darcy) questioned delight of a room crowded with dancers, freely flowing wine, inferior music, excessively sweet sherbets, and giddy maidens without proper supervision too deep into their cups.

Darcy would find no more pleasure in a ball attended chiefly by persons of a lesser station than he would in one filled with those of the highest fashion; howeverGeorgianamight find greater comfort in a room without people whom she would be forced to converse with frequently, and where the damage of giving a poor impression must be mitigated by the poorness of the unimpressed.

Darcy at least did not think that he would need to attend so closely to matters of reputation in a room filled with persons he would not see every time his concern with the business of the nation dragged him to that awful, stinking, crowded, muddy,sinful place, gilded with manure and the love of money, that cesspit known to all the world as ‘London’.