Mr. Darcy's Refuge (21 page)

“To my
engagement
, you mean? I admit I am.”

“To your engagement, then, if you will. Having talked to your father at length last night, during which we imbibed rather stronger spirits, I can tell you that his objection is not so much to Mr. Darcy as to his family, and to the assumption that Mr. Darcy must resemble his family in behavior.”

“His family? To the best of my knowledge, he has only a sister, and she is no older than Lydia. What could be objectionable about her?”

“To be more precise, he has a powerful dislike for the Earl of Matlock.”

Elizabeth could not help but laugh. “I can certainly credit that, but I am not proposing to marry Lord Matlock, and it is not as if my father would be likely to find himself in the company of Mr. Darcy’s uncle.”

“True, but you underestimate the depth of the animosity he feels. His grievances against Matlock – Lord Matlock, I should say – go back many years.”

“Years? But they just met!”

Mr. Gardiner took a long sip of wine. “No. They met again for the first time in years. They were at school together, or rather
we
were at school together.”

“He has never mentioned Lord Matlock.”

“I am not surprised. Lizzy, you have grown up without brothers, so you are perhaps unaware that, although we may manage to force a veneer of civility on young boys, they are in truth young savages, and I can attest to that as a former young boy myself.” He smiled at her. “Then we send those young savages away to school with other young savages, and we pretend that what occurs at those schools is something other than uncontrolled savagery. Unfortunately, it is often precisely that.”

“So you were all young savages together.”

“Matlock – Lord Matlock, but you must forgive me, as he was called simply Matlock at school, since he had inherited the earldom when he was still in short pants – was a poor scholar but excelled at savagery, a talent I gather he still possesses. Your father was several years younger, bookish and small for his age, and had no older brother or cousin there to protect him. He quickly became one of Matlock’s favored victims.” He fell silent for a few minutes.

Finally Elizabeth said, “And you?”

“I arrived two years later, and your father and I became fast friends. He had no friends at all before that – Matlock had seen to that. Matlock’s great talent was for humiliating the younger boys, and none of them would dare cross him. I was of very little interest to the others since I was not a gentleman born like the rest of them. My father had bribed my way into a school for gentlemen’s sons because he thought it would stand me in good stead in later years. In any case, Matlock targeted me as well, but not to the same extent. I was too easy a target since everyone knew I was nothing but a cit. That was the nickname he gave me – the Cit. It was quite mild compared to some of the other nicknames boys were given. The ones he gave your father were rather worse.”

A memory came back to Elizabeth. “Birdwit. He called him birdwit.”

“Yes. Birdwit instead of Bennet, you see. Birdwit and the Cit – that was what he called us. It rhymed so nicely. Birdwit was perhaps the least offensive of the names your father was called, and the names stayed with him throughout his school years, since naturally the other young savages followed Matlock’s lead. I do not wish to tell you about the many humiliations, both public and private, that Matlock forced upon your father, but you must understand that they were constant and vicious. I would not wish to see such things inflicted on Napoleon Bonaparte, much less on a helpless young boy. At times I feared that Matlock would accidentally kill your father with one of his ‘games,’ and I know that at times your father hoped that he would just to end his suffering.”

Horrified, Elizabeth covered her mouth with her hand.

“Needless to say, we both survived, as many boys before and since have done, and we eventually outgrew our savagery by our last years at school, as most boys did. Matlock was an exception in that he retained his savagery till the end, perhaps because he had come into too much power too young, or perhaps it was simply his nature to be cruel. From what your father says, he has not changed much.”

“From the little I saw, I would have to agree,” Elizabeth said. “His behavior was abominable.”

“Yes. Well. So your father read of your engagement in the papers, and went off to confront the unmannerly and brash Mr. Darcy who cared nothing for his opinion – yes, I know, Lizzy, but can you not see how it looked that way from the announcement? But instead of finding Darcy, he discovered Lord Matlock was uncle to your Darcy, who cared nothing for your father’s opinion, just as Matlock would have. Meantime, when Matlock discovered that the woman who had entrapped his precious nephew was the daughter of a man he held in such contempt, he flew into a rage. He accused him of being too weak to control his own daughter, and of letting his women rule him – well, you can see where this would go. He topped it off by telling everyone within earshot, which apparently included a neighbor of yours from Meryton, all the humiliating things he had forced your father to do at school, things that no gentleman would wish to have known about him.”

Elizabeth buried her face in her hands. It was too horrible to contemplate.

“And that, my dear, was the company your father kept until he reached you the next morning, determined to demonstrate that he was not a wheyfaced weakling who could not control his daughter, and equally determined to keep you safe from Matlock’s disdainful nephew. I do not condone his behavior toward you -- from what my wife tells me, it was appalling – but I hoped to give you a little more understanding of why he is being quite so unreasonable about your situation.”

“I… Thank you.” Elizabeth’s voice was strangled. She drank some wine to cover it, but swallowed a bit too much, leaving her coughing.

“Well, my dear, I hope that was only the wine, and that you are not catching a cold from that drafty window. Your father does not know that I planned to tell you this; he thinks I am trying to reason with you. He would be mortified to discover that you knew any of this history, and I hope you will not tell him.”

“No. But can you tell me what he plans to do with me? Am I to stay here indefinitely? What is he telling everyone about Mr. Darcy and me?”

“I do not know what his plans are for you, and I doubt that he does either. I suspect he brought you here simply because he knew I would understand what had happened, rather than as part of some greater purpose. Whatever he decides, I have faith in your good judgment. Since you agreed to marry Mr. Darcy, I will assume he is not like his uncle.”

“No, he is not. He is scrupulously fair and honest to a fault. He was trying to protect me from his uncle.”

“Well, I am glad to hear that, and I hope that at some point your father will be able to as well. But I will wish you goodnight now, my dear.”

After he left, Elizabeth spent a painful half hour staring at the ceiling as she tried to assimilate this new view of her father. Was this why he always refused to travel to London for the Season, but instead hid in his library at Longbourn? She had sometimes wondered why he was so prone to disparage even his own family. Perhaps he had grown so accustomed to insults that he saw them as natural.

Chapter 11

The next morning, Elizabeth awoke with a headache, which she attributed to her distress at being trapped in her room and her uncertainty about what to do about her father’s dictum, but by breakfast-time, she found it painful to swallow. After a fit of coughing that brought a concerned Jane to her side, even Elizabeth had to admit that her usually strong constitution had failed her this time. She had fallen victim to a cold.

Jane fetched Mrs. Gardiner, and soon Elizabeth was tucked into bed with a warm brick at her feet and a pile of handkerchiefs beside her. “There is no need to fuss. It is merely a cold and will pass. It is just that I so despise to be ill,” Elizabeth said.

Her words fell, as she expected, on deaf ears. Jane insisted on sitting with her during most of her waking hours, but from what little she said of the family below, that might have been as much from her desire to avoid the continued tension between Mrs. Gardiner and Mr. Bennet over the subject of Elizabeth.

Her father’s contribution to entertaining Elizabeth while she was ill was to send a message through Jane that he hoped her sickness would pass quickly. She had not expected anything else; he had never shown much interest in their childhood illnesses. Jane took it harder, since she still held out hopes for a reconciliation between the two, and it grieved her to see any fault in someone she loved.

On the third day of Elizabeth’s illness, Jane appeared with a letter in her hand and a troubled demeanor. “I have received a letter from Mary,” she said.

“And what is the news from Longbourn?” Elizabeth croaked.

“Mary says…” Jane turned the letter between her fingers. “She says that our mother has been very distressed since receiving word from our father that the engagement between you and Mr. Darcy was nothing but a fabrication. She moralizes at length about the sort of person who might place such an announcement as a prank without any thought for the consequences to the two principals, so I assume that is what they believe happened.”

“Well,
that
is an original explanation, I suppose. I expected something of the sort.”

“But it isn’t true!”

“I am well aware of that, but given that our father wants to keep me away from Mr. Darcy, he has no choice but to deny the engagement. If our mother were to believe that Mr. Darcy wanted to marry me, she would do anything in her power to bring us together, even if it meant marching me to his doorstep.”

“But she detests Mr. Darcy! It is all a misunderstanding, of course, but she took against him that first night at the assembly.”

Elizabeth gave a wan smile. “She may detest
him
, but her feelings would be very different about his ten thousand pounds a year. She would marry me off to Satan himself if he had such a fortune and was nephew to an earl.” A bout of coughing lessened the sting of her last words.

“He cannot expect us to lie to her on his behalf!”

“Be careful what you say, Jane, if you do not want to find yourself joining me in my prison cell! Either he assumes you will be biddable, or he plans for you to stay here where you can do no harm.”

“Lizzy, you must try to talk to him again, and I will as well. Perhaps between us we can make him see reason.”

Elizabeth sneezed into a handkerchief, then turned her face away. “It would make no difference. He will never give his consent. He means for me to have to choose between him and Mr. Darcy.”

“He may yet change his mind.”

“If our uncle and aunt have been unable to convince him, we stand no chance. No, all we can do is to wait quietly until my birthday, and then I will marry Mr. Darcy… assuming he has not changed his mind or been persuaded by his aunt and uncle against allying himself with a family such as ours. He might already have done so, but I will remain in ignorance of it for all these months since he cannot tell me of it.” She used the handkerchief to mop the ready tears from her eyes.

“I cannot believe he would be as fickle as that.”

“We will have the answer to that in December and not a moment sooner.”