These Three Remain (11 page)

As he pushed away from the tree, the alarm he had experienced at the import of his own words returned. He might as well have declared himself then and there; a more transparent intimation of a shared future was hardly possible! Darcy stalked back several yards down the path toward Hunsford and then returned, only to repeat the exercise. The look of surprise on her face had confirmed to him that she had, indeed, taken his meaning and that a retreat from the position his emotions had led him to was immediately necessary. It was too soon. He had not weighed things to his satisfaction as yet! At the same time, he dared not trifle with her feelings or expectations! So, what had he done to retrieve himself ? He had plucked up a newspaper to mask his confusion and then asked her about being pleased with Kent!

Good Lord, what a blundering, caper-witted ass! Darcy stopped his pacing, a scowl upon his face, and rapped the malacca into his palm with stinging force. If the lady of the house and her sister had not returned soon after, there was no telling in what further ways he might have made a cake of himself! In self-disgust, he collapsed against a tree, but his gaze was drawn back down the path he had come. What, in the end, was the result of his morning’s foray?
She is entirely receptive, open to your attentions. She may very well expect them to continue after your rash words!
It remained only that he come to the point for her to be his, for the sweetness he longed for to become truth. But, for the life of him, he could not as yet follow through. The social impediments remained; and they were mountainous, the familial ones hardly less so. All their claims fell upon him, and he felt keenly the justice of their reproaches. For what did he not owe to his name, his relations, and his posterity? Such an unequal match contracted merely to satisfy his appetites! Could the happiness it held out to him survive the opprobrium he would face the rest of his days? “No more!” Darcy groaned. He knew himself to be incapable of bringing peace to the warring parties within him. Both reason and emotion had failed him; there was nothing for it but to let fate run its course. “No more,” he repeated, no longer a plea but this time a command. “Proceed as you have begun, and trust to God that fate will intervene, that something will happen to end this!”

“Fitz! Fitz, is something the matter?” Richard’s voice echoed from among the trees in the direction opposite that which Darcy had taken to Hunsford. In moments Fitzwilliam was before him, his breath coming in puffs.

Coloring briefly, Darcy hastened to assure him, “Richard! No, nothing is amiss!”

“Then why the blazes were you yelling?” His cousin looked at him accusingly. “I thought you were being attacked or had fallen or something!” He looked to his coat and waistcoat, giving them a tug back into place.

“Nothing of the sort,” Darcy answered, “but I thank you for the heroic charge to my defense. I fear that I was thinking aloud.”

“Thinking! All that racket was thinking?”

“Aloud, yes.”

“Thinking.” Fitzwilliam’s dubious regard almost put him to the blush again, but he stood firm. “Fletcher told me that you had gone out for a walk and was mum as the dead on where this walk was to take you. Now I know it was not in that direction.” He pointed behind him. “For that is the way I took until it was obvious that you had not chosen it. Which leaves only that direction.” He pointed beyond Darcy. “Unless you went blazing a new path.” The Colonel eyed his cousin narrowly. “It appears to my admittedly simple military brain that you are dressed uncommonly fine to be cutting new paths through Her Ladyship’s grove, leaving me to conclude that you have been to Hunsford already this morning!”

“Yes, that is true,” Darcy confessed but said no more.

“And the ladies were at home and in good health this fine morning, Cuz?” Richard cocked a brow at him.

“Yes, all are in perfect health, I can assure you.” Darcy smiled back innocently.

“Which prompted you to thinking — aloud, as it were?”

Darcy returned his cousin’s questioning stare with a calmness of mind that he knew would infuriate him as little else could do.

“My dear Cuz,” Fitzwilliam drawled, “it would give me no end of pleasure to plant you a facer for depriving me of a most agreeable visit this morning, and I would gladly do it if I did not fear spilling your blood over this new frockcoat of mine!” He tugged again at the front corners of the garment but then paused, a wicked smile slowly lighting up his face. “But I shall have my revenge for your taking leave this morning to visit without me! I have here” — Fitzwilliam patted his chest, surprising a rustling sound from underneath his coat — “a packet of letters that arrived express after you left. From London.”

“Georgiana!” Darcy immediately regretted his teasing. “Here, Richard, you must give it me at once!”

“Oh, must I?” Fitzwilliam laughed, placing his hand protectively over the place where it lay.

“Richard!” Darcy breathed his name menacingly, then all of a moment threw down the malacca, sent his hat after it, and unbuttoned the first button of his frock coat. Suddenly, the idea of a brawl with his cousin was very appealing. It answered more than one sort of agitation he had suffered this morning.

“Fitz, what are you doing?” Fitzwilliam took a step backward.

“Obliging you, if you can get over my guard.” The second button was undone as he spoke, and Darcy started on the third. “But I suggest that you follow my lead if you are concerned about blood!”

Darcy refolded the letters carefully and, without thinking, reached for the delicate ivory knob of the desk drawer before being brought up short by the sudden pain. Grimacing, he drew back slowly, a low groan whistling through his clenched teeth. Richard had a damned punishing right! The purplish bruise on his midsection would be a week in healing, but he discounted the annoyance as well worth the satisfaction of not only denying Fitzwilliam his “facer” but also prevailing so thoroughly in their contest that he had forced the surrender of the letters under the most favorable of terms. Darcy smiled at the memory of Richard’s protests and petulant agreement to those terms, but it faded as his regard returned to the letters still in his hand. One, indeed, was from Georgiana. Her precise script had arrived once more wrapped in a letter from Dy Brougham, sent express by His Lordship. Although it was wise to open Dy’s letter first, he had set it aside immediately, broken the seal on that of his sister, and settled in as comfortably as he might to give it his full attention. It opened with her best wishes for his health and that of their cousins and aunt, and continued on with an account of the extension of her studies beyond music.

“I am to be happy to know, am I?” Darcy frowned down into the delicate paper balanced between his fingers. “The deuced hedge-bird!” What was Dy up to? This was doing it far too brown. He’d asked him to watch over her, not live in her pocket! Darcy had almost decided to send off a pointed note to his overly conscientious friend when a name farther down Georgiana’s letter caught his eye and sent a chill up his back.

“Sylvanie!” Darcy closed his eyes. “Good God!” He had hoped rather than believed that Tris would keep her at one of his estates for at least a half year before daring the gossips of London. Nothing of the events at Norwycke Castle had reached those itching ears, but the Viscount’s hasty marriage was enough to set the London cats among the pigeons. More to the point, what did Sylvanie want with Georgiana? Why concern herself with an introduction to a girl who had not yet come out? That there was a purpose behind this contrived introduction, he had not a shred of doubt. Might she see Georgiana as a potential vehicle for her revenge for the death of her mother Lady Sayre? “Thank God, Dy was there!” Darcy blessed his friend, knowing better than to suppose the punch an accident, and reached for his letter.

Darcy eased his body forward and grasped the knob, pulling the small drawer wide. Carefully, he placed the letters inside and shut it. “All is in hand.” As flighty as Dy appeared at times, Darcy knew that his word on a matter made it as good as done. He could not be pleased about the meeting of his sister and Lady Monmouth, but rushing back to London might be just what Sylvanie desired by it. No, he would stay in Kent, for Kent was where his future was to be decided.

“Darcy? I say, Darcy!” It was the laughter in Fitzwilliam’s voice rather than his call that dragged Darcy’s attention away from the marvelous way the sunlight was playing among Elizabeth’s luxurious curls. “I have never seen you behave so stupidly, Cousin! I swear, madam.” The Colonel turned to Mrs. Collins. “He is not usually so boorish as to ignore his hostess completely! Why, I have known him to string some half dozen words together at a go in a most cogent manner.”

“That, my dear Cousin, is because the military can rarely be depended upon to retain the meaning of a communiqué composed of any more,” Darcy shot back, now fully aware of his cousin’s amused gaze upon him. Impervious to the barb, Fitzwilliam feigned a swoon, bringing the entire room to renewed laughter. Blast Richard! But it was true. He had become distracted and had been full of nothing save the woman sitting across from him, haloed in the morning light from the nearby window. “I do beg your pardon, ma’am. Did you require something of me?”

“’Twas nothing of great import, Mr. Darcy.” Mrs. Collins’s smile was sincere, but so was the curiosity that marked the rest of her features. He would have to exercise better care over his wandering attention.
No, not wandering,
he corrected himself. His problem was the reverse; it was so very focused…and entirely upon Elizabeth. Her face, her figure, her hair, the way her voice trilled up and down the scale so enchantingly, the delicacy of her hands as her sure fingers bent to her needlework. He dared not even consider her eyes and those lips that now curved up at his repartee with Richard — or was it at his distraction? Blast! Darcy turned his face away to the window. This was his third call at the parsonage this week, the second with Richard, and he was no further toward making a decision than he had been Sunday. The problem, he decided, was that there were too many other people about! Although from his late experience he knew private interviews to be fraught with dangers and difficulties, how else could he gain the answers he required? How was this to be accomplished? He could not depend on another happy accident, nor would he skulk about the shrubbery hoping to catch her alone.

“Oh, you must never think so!” Mrs. Collins’s reply to something that Fitzwilliam had opined interrupted Darcy’s bemusement with his conundrum. “Miss Bennet is a very hardy sort, as are many of Hertfordshire’s young ladies. I have known her to walk from her home to Meryton and back twice in one day!”

Walk! Of course! How could he have forgotten? The memory of Elizabeth’s wind-kissed cheeks and bright eyes when she had been ushered into the dining room at Netherfield returned with a disconcerting clarity. She walked often and alone there in Hertfordshire. Did she walk Rosings Park alone?

“Is it true, Darcy?” Fitzwilliam lifted a brow at him as he pulled him by force back into the conversation. “Is Miss Elizabeth Bennet such an excellent walker as Mrs. Collins would have us believe?”

“Unquestionably,” Darcy answered him, and then, suddenly, inspiration struck! If she did walk and alone would that not afford him the privacy with her he desired? “I can vouch for her personally in regard to her enterprise in Hertfordshire, but whether Miss Bennet finds Kent worthy of her rambles, she must confess.”

“Ah then, does Kent tempt you, Miss Bennet?” Fitzwilliam smiled at his object. “Or perhaps I should ask, does Rosings Park? You must forget that we are Her Ladyship’s relatives and tell the truth!”

Yes, she took great pleasure in her walks, and the fields and groves of Rosings Park were become as dear a ramble as any in Hertfordshire. Darcy smiled as the scene in the Hunsford cottage replayed itself in his mind. Elizabeth’s confidential tone to Lady Catherine’s relations had been one he knew to be sincere, and the satisfaction which came with the assurance that he knew her mind, could interpret her meaning, was deep and abiding. Her delight had been unfeigned. So, here he was traversing the park as soon as the dew had lifted in a welter of anticipation of meeting her…alone. The rapid beat of his heart had nothing to do with the length or pace of his stride and all to do with his hopes. That unruly organ had resisted every attempt to bridle it, rein it in to a more seemly rhythm, from the moment he had awakened this morning.