Page 3 of The Matchmaker’s Mistake

“A half-day’s ride is a very reasonable distance for visiting one’s friends.”

“It is also a very reasonable distance for a son to travel if he is recalled to town by his mother to plan a wedding.”

She was not contrite. If anything, she was pleased. “You have always been clever,” she said. “I do not know why I continue to be surprised by it.” She was quiet a moment, but she had never been one to retreat. “Is the expectation entirely unreasonable?”

He took a weary breath. “Yes.”

“Fitzwilliam,” she said. “I wish only to explain my reasoning. Will you hear me?”

He gestured for her to proceed, but offered no assurances.

“I have made,” she said, “many excellent matches.”

“This is not one of them.”

She ignored him. “The Nieves connection, which everyone said was impossible. The Lexington girl, upon whom poor Lady Lexington had entirely given up. The Carringtons last spring—neither of them had the faintest idea what was happening until it was very nearly done.” She recounted these without boasting. Though his mother cherished the credit of having made a match, Darcy knew that the success of her schemes was her primary satisfaction. “Seven at my last gathering alone—even though Lady Castlereagh still claims that she made two of them.”

“I am aware of your prowess, Mother. I simply do not require your assistance.”

“Do you not?” She lifted her brows. “Fitzwilliam, I should like to have the Mount Street house opened before Georgiana comes out.”

The house on Mount Street had been his father’s gift to his mother, hers to use for her lifetime. It was smaller than Darcy House, with fewer bedchambers and no nursery, but large, grandly decorated rooms made especially for entertaining. There was more than enough room for Georgiana, a few guests, and all the servants the house would require. She had not yet removed to it, for she was mistress of this house while he remained unmarried. Darcy House, he was aware, was better suited for a family, and his mother was anxious for him to begin one—but he had not, until this autumn, understood how anxious.

He had told her before that she ought not to wait on him, but she had scoffed at the idea.

“I have in my immediate circle yourself, Richard, and Milton, all of you highly eligible and yet unmarried.” She lifted the teapot, discovered it was empty, and set it down again. “Lady Ralston asked me, with a great deal of sympathy, whether there was some difficulty. Sympathy, Fitzwilliam. From Eleanor Ralston, whose own daughter I placed three seasons ago.”

He felt this bore repeating, and so he asked again. “Have you ever considered that none of us want to be matched?”

She looked at him steadily. Then she said, with less composure than she had yet shown, “Milton is heir to an earldom, and I have not known him to even look at an eligible lady twice since he came of age. Richard speaks of his horse as though it were a wife. And you have just spent six weeks in the company of a handsome, accomplished young woman with twenty thousand pounds and have come home a fortnight early because she frightened you.”

“I did not return early because of Miss Bingley. Why should I be frightened of her?” This, at least, was true. It was not Miss Bingley who had frightened him.

“Of course she frightened you. When you are frightened and do not wish to show it, you are painfully polite and then withdraw.” She shook her head. “When you were younger, it made you say the most impolite things. Thank goodness you have outgrown that peccadillo.”

He did not trust himself to answer at once. There was, in fact, no answer to give that would not have been a lie, because he had not outgrown it at all.

His mother was an extraordinarily intelligent woman, and that was likely to make the next several months of his life very difficult indeed. He would have to be careful not to reveal the true source of his distress.

“I look at the three of you,” his mother went on, more quietly, “and I see men I love, good men who ought to be married and building their nurseries. And I cannot shake the conviction that if no one intervenes, none of you shall have the happiness you deserve. Milton shall be godfather to half of England and father of none. Richard shall have married his horse. You shall become a hermit at Pemberley and be spoken of in whispers at parties you have declined to attend. There shall be no Fitzwilliam heir, and no Darcy heir, and when I arrive in heaven I shall have to account to your grandmother for how I permitted it to happen.”

“Mamma,” he said fondly.

“I am willing to concede that I sound a little ridiculous. But I am not wrong, Fitzwilliam. Something is the matter with the three of you. I am the only person in this family who appears to have noticed, and I would like it very much if one of you—any one of you, I am not particular—would prove me wrong by the end of the coming season.”

He was quiet for a moment. “And you thought I would like Miss Bingley as a wife?”

“I thought that, as you spent so much time with her brother, she was a reasonable place to begin.” She considered her empty cup and set it aside. “I have a theory, Fitzwilliam, and this theory is well-founded, because it is the story of my own life.”

He settled back. He might as well be comfortable.

“Your father was the brother of my good friend Miss Darcy.”

“Yes.” This was his aunt, who had married a Neville and lived in Bath.

“I met him because Eleanor and I were inseparable from the age of fourteen. I knew your father four years before I understood what I felt for him, and by then I knew him entirely—not the man he appeared to be, but the man he was. That is a very rare thing, and it happened because I came to know him through a connection I already trusted.”

“I have never been informed that the manner of locating one’s spouse is handed down like an inheritance.”