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“No, thank you,” he replied. “I would like to be alone.”
Silently topping up his water glass, Elizabeth curtsied and bid him adieu.
Darcy had been completely enervated by his encounter with the duchess. He was suddenly filled with shame when considering the long-standing liaison that he had shared with a friend of his mother. What his mother would have thought of it he could not know; he had been too young when she died to view her as a person, only a goddess. He could not think his father would have approved of it. But more than anything, Darcy’s thoughts kept returning to what Miss Gardiner had thought of the encounter. He parsed every sentence that had been uttered, wondering what construction his lectrice might have put on the incident.
An hour later he was saved from his misery by the arrival of Dr Gordon. Darcy threw himself into his exercises with unparalleled vehemence, earning Dr Gordon’s praise despite his modest achievement.
Towards the end of the session, he heard the Darcy coach pull up outside and depart for Cheapside. Closing his eyes, he urged himself to try harder.
Chapter 35: In cognito
Elizabeth could feel only relief as she climbed into the carriage for the trip home to Cheapside late on Saturday afternoon. After an uneventful first two weeks in London, the last week seemed to have lasted a month. It seemed scarcely possible that she had worked for Mr Darcy for less than six days. She supposed the time dilation might be attributable to her fatigue.
She had been waking up several times a night, unable to completely turn off her mind when she went to sleep; awoken with memories of confused dreams in which Mr Darcy died; got out of bed laughing, claiming it had all been a sham; or carried her up the townhouse stairs to his bedchamber. Some of her other dreams, of inventions, seemed to be prompted by her efforts to be of use to him. They included pens that never needed to be dipped in ink, glasses that allowed the blind to see and mechanical mice that ran through the model townhouses. Admittedly she had difficulty discerning the use of the latter.
But she also acknowledged that the anxiety of deception was sapping her energy—the fear that she might be exposed at any moment by Mr Bingley returning or some other incident. Elizabeth felt she was barely keeping up. She knew she could not continue in this manner for long. Still, she had made it through to the last day of the week. One more week and she would have her first references and be able to move on.
The fact that her service to Mr Darcy was already half-over filled Elizabeth with a strange anxiety. Upon thinking this, her hand flew to the cameo that she had donned that morning as a talisman, to encourage herself to tackle the second chapter of the mathematics textbook after her stumbling performance through the first. Sliding her hand inside her pelisse, her heart jumped when her fingers touched bare skin.
My cameo! What could have happened to it? Reasoning it might have been disturbed when Farley helped her don her pelisse in the vestibule, she patted herself down, then stood up, stooped, in the carriage, hoping it would slide to the floor. Clara looked at her quizzically.
“Oh, Clara, I seem to have lost my necklace. You did not notice when you last saw me wearing it, did you?”
“No, ma’am. I remember seeing it when you removed your coat this morning. It was a bird, wasn’t it?”
“That is right, an owl. Oh dear, it was a present from my uncle and is one of my favourite things! Will you ask Farley and Mrs Flowers to keep an eye out for it?”
“Certainly, ma’am.”
Elizabeth settled back into her seat feeling crushed by her loss. But they had not travelled one hundred yards before the potential ramifications began to dawn on her. Mr Darcy had seen and remarked upon the cameo at the Netherfield ball—their conversation on the cameo had flitted through her head as she tied the ribbon around her neck that morning. Given his infirmity, she had thought herself quite safe in wearing it to work. What if it should come into his hands? He would surely recognise it if a servant described it to him. Oh, woe! Elizabeth spent the rest of her journey trying to retrace her movements that day. She remembered touching the cameo several times when she was reading the mathematical text. But try as she might, Elizabeth could not recall if she had still been wearing it after that.
Arriving home, she went straight to her room and threw herself on her bed. When Mrs Gardiner came up afterwards to check on her niece, Elizabeth claimed fatigue, asked to skip dinner, and when urged to take nourishment, declared she had eaten enough in Mayfair that week to feed a whole family; she could stomach no more. Worried, Mrs Gardiner went away, convinced that the earlier Lizzy returned to Hertfordshire, the better.
Elizabeth’s torment that night was short. After changing into her nightgown, she climbed into bed soon after her aunt had quit the room, falling into an exhausted and dreamless sleep.
When Elizabeth woke as the new day dawned, she had temporarily shaken off her anxiety over the cameo. No doubt, Elizabeth assured herself, she would arrive at the Darcy townhouse on Monday to be handed the errant necklace by Farley. What were the chances that it would come into Mr Darcy’s possession, given he was sightless and confined to his room? She had been very silly to get flustered yesterday.
Instead, she was buoyed by the certainty that she would meet Jane at church and have her company for the rest of the day. How much she had to tell her sister! Nonetheless, her relatives found Elizabeth unusually subdued on the way to St Paul’s as she began to realise how much she would also have to conceal. She had originally intended to tell Jane of her assumed name, prompted by her chance encounter with the Bingley sisters. But Mr Bingley’s visit on Thursday had drained that incident of any comedic value. Given his lack of honourable intentions towards Jane, no good could come of announcing his reappearance. Indeed, in retrospect Elizabeth realised that while she could find the incident amusing, it would probably only upset Jane given her recent disappointment. She decided she would not mention the Bingleys at all.
Elizabeth’s thoughts subsequently arrived at the secret of her employment by Mr Darcy. Unable to reveal the true identity of her employer to her aunt and uncle, she had hoped to unburden herself to her sister. Now, Elizabeth questioned that determination as well. She could not bear to tell her sister of her destruction of her uncle’s letter and the forgery of a new one. Jane would certainly think it wrong to have interfered with Uncle Gardiner’s efforts on her behalf, even if those efforts sought to defraud a man of part of his fortune due to an innocent encounter at a ball.
Stressed by the thought of further concealment involving her sister, Elizabeth’s mind drifted instead to her changing views on Mr Darcy. From a young age, Elizabeth had been skilled in portraiture with a pencil. At one stage she had dreamed of being an artist, but she had never had enough money to afford the tuition to translate her talent to brushes and paints. Still, she had always loved to watch portraitists at fairs, how they built up the picture gradually in layers. She thought their process rather like the study of character, a much cheaper hobby that had become her favourite pastime as she grew up. She had started Mr Darcy’s underpainting in red and dark brown—that was his arrogance and pride. During her stay at Netherfield, she had laid down the flesh of his face. He was human after all, not unattractive with his patrician nose, intelligent noble brow, and adorable dark curls, sadly cropped now after his illness. It was an interesting portrait that had begun to be compelling once she added the details, the little smirk that quirked on his lips whenever he gave Caroline a subtle set-down that sailed completely over her head. Sometimes the portrait resembled her father, sometimes herself, but it still was not quite a real person; it was a caricature. At the Netherfield ball, she thought she had finally glimpsed the real man of flesh and blood, the insight that would have allowed her to put the glow on his cheeks and the shine on his brow. He was a man who embodied all her dreams of an ideal lover—strong, sensitive and intelligent. He had certainly fired up her senses that night. But then he had slipped down the servants’ stairs and out of her life altogether. His likeness had been lost in the halls of her memory.
When Elizabeth had met him again in Mayfair, it was hard to recognise her ideal lover in the despondent and angry man who lay in Mr Darcy’s bed. She started her mental portrait again, this time with a pencil, which seemed somehow more appropriate to her new uncertain circumstances. His intelligence emerged first, striking her defensively, telling her he did not need her help. Then his bravery became apparent. Elizabeth thought that she had glimpsed that at the Netherfield ball—his willingness to go against convention to expedite outcomes. After their fall, he had carried her up the stairs himself rather than wait for servants to do the job for him; returned her cameo personally when the servants had been preoccupied with the running of the ball. How sad for a man of action to become completely dependent on others. But she saw him fighting against his infirmity, determined to continue what he had started despite his illness. His struggles had earned her admiration and her determination to help him. Mr Darcy need not be reduced to a passive role in life by his misfortune. From Georgiana, Elizabeth had learned of his kindness and humanity. She had finally felt she was beginning to know him. She was chuffed that he might have considered her as a potential partner, had fate not intervened to reduce her own circumstances. Unlike her aborted painting, her new mental sketch was more in her medium, but still incomplete.
Finally, his mistress had intruded, and Elizabeth realised with dismay she did not understand Mr Darcy at all. The affinity she imagined between them did not exist. She was a maiden and he was a man of the world. She was the daughter of a country squire while he, whom she had thought of a similar estate, was a member of the Ton, despite his lack of title. He had liaisons with duchesses. Elizabeth realised that the gross disparity in their circumstances should have been obvious to her from the moment she had stepped inside his townhouse in Grosvenor Square. She supposed that finding Mr Darcy there in such a state had made her temporarily forget her surroundings. Her focus had been entirely on him.
What of the duchess? She was as arrogant as Elizabeth had originally assumed Mr Darcy to be. The thought of their affair somewhat disgusted Elizabeth. Just how old was she? Her young face was belied by the colour of her hair as well as the way she kept calling him ‘dear boy’. An old family friend? Elizabeth had heard that the Ton were almost incestuous, but it seemed a little nauseating just the same. Was Georgiana aware of their relationship? Given her innocence, Elizabeth suspected not. Perhaps the whole affair had been conducted under his little sister’s nose.
Mostly, Elizabeth felt an overwhelming sense of disappointment. Just when she had discovered that she might have had Mr Darcy’s regard, however briefly, in the past, she became aware that the affinity she had imagined between them was false. Miss Elizabeth Bennet was hopelessly outclassed by a duchess and probably also by the duchess’s favourite, Lady Sophia Amberley, whoever she was. Miss Frances Gardiner was beneath their notice.
When the carriage stopped outside the church, Elizabeth immediately saw Jane wave and begin to weave her way through the other parishioners, shadowed by Mr Gardiner’s footman, Mick. The sisters exchanged a heartfelt hug before helping to herd the little Gardiners into church.
Over lunch, Jane shared her week with her relatives, dutifully starting with a recitation of her days in the schoolroom before launching into the more animating topic of her first visit to the opera with the Garths as companion to Cherise. Then, feeling she had dwelt too much on herself, Jane asked Lizzy how she had fared in her first week in service.
Having already related her experiences with the colonel’s cousin ‘William’ to her aunt and uncle each evening: her reading, the model of the townhouse, the wax tablets and her handling of the correspondence, Lizzy gave Jane a summarised version. Elizabeth realised she had erred during her earlier recitation in mentioning that ‘William’ was interested in mathematics, a topic that could have easily caused her some problems if her uncle had questioned her closely. After all, how many senior wranglers lived in Mayfair? Fortunately, Mr Gardiner had been tired that evening and that, along with his interest in more practical aspects of science, had probably allowed her to avoid the quagmire that night. In her retelling for Jane’s benefit, Elizabeth spoke blandly of texts in Greek, Latin and Spanish as well as the novel she was reading.
“Oh! It is so sad that he is blind!” said Jane. “So young! Do you know what malady caused his loss of sight?”
