Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice Sequel Bundle: 3 Reader Favorites (63 page)

To return unwhole of body and mind, only to learn of the murder and mayhem that had occurred at home whilst he was gone, was devastating. And to come to understand that those he held most dear had been terrorised because of his inaction, lay waste to what little heartsease he yet had managed to squirrel away.

In time, the piece of shrapnel worked its way out. Too, he eventually understood from whence his melancholia brewed. Such wisdom, however, was not obtained with dispatch. First, he would have to suffer considerable self-recrimination because he alone had seen the ogre Reed’s lascivious leer at Elizabeth and had not called him out.

Elizabeth’s convalescence was not brisk. The restoration of her health demanded she keep to her bed. Had it not, Darcy guessed she would have hibernated there regardless.

Unable to mourn for her child, she did not once inquire of him. It took no professor of philosophy to convince her husband that she was still in emotional jeopardy because of that refusal. He knew they needed to talk of it, but had not the slightest notion of how to broach the subject, nor any words of comfort if he did. In his uncertainty, he reverted to the familiarity of reticence. He stayed close, but quiet, despairing for his failing.

Gradually, her body grew stronger. Her spirit, however, did not. The eyes that had once danced so provocatively when they had lit upon him had turned leaden.

Most frightening was the solemnity that had engulfed her. She sat in silence, staring through the lattice of the casement into the distance. She did not smile, nor did she weep. The one revelation of despair was the handkerchief she knotted ceaselessly about her fingers.

With each of Jane’s attempts to draw conversation from her about the tragedy, she simply turned her head to the window as if she did not hear.

As if he somehow refused Elizabeth’s mind to suffer more than his own, Darcy found new territory upon which to agonise.

The baby had been large even for a month early. Dr. Carothers had said those very words. Darcy saw his own impressive height and frame, of which he had held himself quite proud, as accusation that he was the perpetrator of Elizabeth’s torment.

Hence, he tortured himself unremittingly with the notion he had impregnated her with a baby too large for her to deliver. For the first time, he thought of Elizabeth as not simply the woman he loved, but the woman who had to bear his children. He had always thought of her as nothing less than healthy and robust. Her rosy complexion and full bosom might suggest her hardy and nubile, but he knew well too, she was also fine-boned and narrow-hipped. The succulent tightness of her womanhood from which he had so revelled in pleasure should have forewarned them of this danger. But he had been too blinded by desire. Would he have had the self-constraint to practise withdrawal or even abstinence had he known the future? That was not a question he pondered, for regret and remorse demanded all his time. He was terrified yet that having another baby might kill her. He could not bear to query the physician if Elizabeth might have been able to have born the baby safely had it not been breech.

Eventually Darcy understood that Jane’s solicitous attentions, not his, engendered a more expeditious convalescence for Elizabeth. The hovering spectre of his private anguish aided her recovery no better than it had her labour. Thus, for a few hours at a time, he allowed himself coaxed from her bedside. Bingley and Fitzwilliam were bent upon a little sport in the field upon his behalf.

They knew little else to do. Even in the knowledge of how deeply Darcy loved Elizabeth, neither would have believed that Darcy, a man of strength and fortitude beyond any other they could name, could be so broken by the tragedy.

Whilst they awaited his company one evening, they talked of it.

Bingley said, “’Tis not that this is not the most grievous of all life’s many sorrows, for it certainly is. But Elizabeth survives, and they shall have other children.”

Only he and his brother had survived from their mother’s four births, hence Fitzwilliam hesitantly agreed, “True, no one knows of a family, neither earl nor cottager, that has not lost children.”

It was unspoken, but both knew as perilous as infancy was to a baby, childbirth was to the mother. It could be surmised that Darcy and Elizabeth might look upon it as fortunate, under the circumstances, that Elizabeth was not taken too. In a particularly philosophical turn, Bingley very nearly remarked that Darcy’s seeming obsession about the loss of the baby and Elizabeth’s health, which was obviously improving, might stem from never having been deprived of anything he had ever wanted. Fortune allowed him to glance to the darkened doorway. Darcy’s visage was shadowed, but discernible. Bingley held his tongue.

Fitzwilliam observed the alteration in Bingley’s expression and his eyes moved from Bingley to the door at his back. Darcy stepped into the room. The men were silent. Darcy did not reveal whether he heard their remarks or not, but spoke just of the weather, Bingley’s daughter’s latest words, and asked Fitzwilliam when he might be well enough to return to his regiment. After a leisurely partaking of a glass or two of
claret, the gentlemen decided to retire. Fitzwilliam took the stairs but Bingley had not yet quit the room, howbeit he had taken steps in that direction, when Darcy called after him. When Bingley turned, the look upon his friend’s face very nearly made him flee. But not in fear.

“You are right, Bingley, I have Elizabeth, or at least she is alive. However, unless you have had to endure what we have, I should think it most impolitic to make judgement to what lengths grief should be taken. I pray you and Jane never have reason for better understanding that the frequency of a tragedy does not diminish the wound when it is your own.”

Bingley was shaken. He did not fear his friend’s wrath, not really fear it. But to know something could so easily overtake a couple’s happiness, as it had for a union as strong as that of Elizabeth and Darcy, made him shiver in apprehension for Jane and the next birth she would face.

“What was it?” Elizabeth bid matter-of-factly.

“What was it?” Darcy repeated, uncertain he had heard her correctly.

“Boy or girl?” she asked.

“A boy,” he answered quietly, “named for your father.”

With studied deliberation, she replaced her teacup into its saucer. The censored subject was finally accessed. Daring not let it slip away, he asked if she wanted him to carry her to the gravesite. She nodded once, thereupon the wall of composure she had so diligently maintained shattered into a maelstrom of tears. As she fell face down upon the mattress, sobs began to rack her body. She was heaving as he picked her up and turned her to him, holding her tightly to his chest.

It was a not an unwelcome phenomenon. Anything was welcome to release her from her relentless melancholia. As she clung to him, Elizabeth had no notion that the weeping was not hers singularly.

“I could not do it. I let your baby die…” she sobbed again and again.

He soothed and shushed. In time, she listened.

In the hour they lay, a measure of healing took place. Eventually, her tears were exhausted, emotion spent. With her heaviest cloak about her, he carried her down the stairs and out of the house. The servants observing this sight stopped their chores and went to the windows in silence as the master carried the mistress up the path to the baby’s grave. Unbeknownst to him, the stone had just been set. Thus, they saw it first together.

He knelt, allowing her to place a small bouquet of winter roses at the base of the marble. Neither cried nor spoke. There seemed nothing to be said.

T
hat first spring after Hannah came into Mrs. Darcy’s employ was a heady proposition, indeed. She had never once ventured beyond Derbyshire in her brief life. London had always seemed an impossibility. Nevertheless, when the time came she boarded the second coach with Anne, Mrs. Annesley, and Goodwin without hesitation. Albeit she did not quite release a full breath until after they had reached the outskirts of the fabled town.

She had heard tales of London from her third brother, who had once travelled there. He claimed it so harsh a place that fine people stepped over dead ones upon the sidewalk without even looking down. The streets of London upon which they travelled to reach the Darcy house were quite wide and inviting. They bore no dead bodies that Hannah could see. There were, however, a few darker concourses leading away from this main avenue that might possibly contain these reputed corpses.

She narrowed her eyes as they passed each shaded street, telling herself she did not want to spot one. She peered quite conscientiously in want of not, regardless.

Interrupting her inspection, Goodwin asked her just what she was trying to spy. That startled her from her contemplation, and she shook her head stupidly. She could not recollect Goodwin ever initiating a conversation with her.

Those were to be the first and last words she heard from him for a time; the disembarkation in London sent them all into a tailspin of activity. Within this household maelstrom, a comeuppance occurred, the recipient none other than the houseman, Mr. Smeads.

As Hannah held Mrs. Reynolds in less than close affection, it was of no great surprise to her that she was even less enamoured of the son. For a reason unbeknownst to Hannah, London staff literally smirked upon invoking his name.

It appeared Mr. Darcy was unhappy with him for some misdeed. Hannah asked Goodwin if he knew what had come to pass. Goodwin answered in the negative (a grunt, meaning either “no” or “I refuse to answer,” which one Hannah could but surmise). If Goodwin’s curiosity did not coincide with her own, she found more willing mouths amongst the chambermaids to tell the history of the bedcloth.

Admittedly, it was Hannah who, much in want of repaying such salacious information, told them about the coachman Reed and that Mr. Darcy had thrashed him and cast him out. She was a little guilt-ridden for enlarging this tale from a single strike to a thrashing, but her audience was so in want of Reed being thrashed, she feared she simply could not disappoint them. (And she would have repaid the rather rude look Goodwin gifted her for gossiping by her sticking out her tongue at him, had not her conscience already been grieving her.)

Having situated herself in the good graces of the London staff with her tale of Reed, Hannah basked in the fineness of the city house. In time, the newness of her adventure
wore off and she begot a bit of homesickness. But if she busied herself inside and did not look out upon the bustling streets, she could convince her mind she was not far from home. If she did look up from her chores and out the window, however, it was a tremendous task to retrieve her attention from the fine carriages and distinguished-looking people.

At first, her sleep suffered from the excitement, but her appetite was unaffected. As at Pemberley, the town help partook their meals just a little less grandly than did family. But at Pemberley, Hannah remembered longingly, no one stood about checking to see how much food one had taken upon one’s plate. In Derbyshire, people partook until they were full, period. One might think Mr. Smeads fancied their dinner had been pilfered from his own plate, as parsimonious as the man was with a potato. She huffed about it diligently, but in silence.