“Yes, I know,” Ashby replied, taking his proffered hat from a footman and lowering it precisely over his impeccably oiled hair. “He is taking the Hertfordshire chit and buggering off to Nova Scotia.” He tugged the brim to a suitably jaunty angle and turned his back on the servant to receive his greatcoat about his shoulders. “Bon voyage and good riddance, I say. Though why he would not simply wait and find himself a fresh one in a less interesting state when he arrives there is anybody’s guess. The man is a fool.”
Fitzwilliam raised an eyebrow. “You are singularly well informed, Brother. I believe you are mistaken, though. Darcy did not mention to me that Bingley was contemplating taking anybody with him.”
“What does Darcy know?” Ashby muttered, tugging on his gloves. “I heard him say just now that he has not heard from his wife at Pemberley in two weeks. Mine had a letter from Bingley’s but two days ago.”
“They are not supposed to be writing to each other!”
“Sod Darcy and his bloody decrees,” Ashby grumbled. “Am I to stopeveryman’s wife putting pen to paper?”
He resorted to pouting like a schoolboy thereafter, glaring sullenly at Darcy as he and Anne joined them.
“What have you there?” Fitzwilliam enquired, indicating the small velvet drawstring bag Darcy had evidently received from Anne.
“A brooch my mother gave to Lady Catherine when she married. She desired that it be given to Elizabeth.”
“Why?” Ashby scoffed. “She did not even like her.”
Fitzwilliam cringed, but he was surprised when Anne answered, not Darcy.
“My mother had many objections to Mrs Darcy but disliking her character was never one of them. Indeed, by the end, she had formed a stout respect for her—a sentiment that I suspect was as much attributable to Mrs Darcy’s consistently principled qualities as to the invaluable contrast of your wife’s consistently vexatious ones.”
Ashby coloured deeply, and his lips went from pouting to snarling, but he did at least refrain from voicing his umbrage to his newly grieved cousin, instead settling for glaring yet more viciously at Darcy. Darcy walked away, leaving Fitzwilliam to bear the brunt of his brother’s prodigious indignation.
“Do shut up, man,” he interrupted at length. “It does you no credit to carry on in this manner. I comprehend that you took objection to Darcy’s letter, but it is not Elizabeth’s fault that her own sister conspired with your wife to spread gossip all over Town.”
“If Darcy does not like gossip, he ought not to have married so far beneath him.”
“And if you do not like your wife being unfavourably compared to other women, you ought not to have married such an irksome termagant.”
“Go to the devil, Dickie. You really are an arse.”
Thus, though he had travelled here in his brother’s carriage, Fitzwilliam returned to London in Darcy’s, whose humour thankfully improved every mile farther north they went. The spat with his brother did not trouble him a jot, for such was their customary mode of discourse. Ashby would likely have forgiven him by dinnertime. He would no doubt forgive Darcy also in due course, and unquestionably before Darcy forgave him.
That thought provided Fitzwilliam with the first true moment of wistfulness in the whole affair. For though they would resolve their differences eventually, Lady Catherine would have scolded them all back into harmony far sooner had she still been alive.
The same day, London
“You know where it is,” Darcy said, leaving Fitzwilliam to pour his own drink as he walked directly to his desk and the stack of letters there upon.
It had been a longer than usual journey home as a consequence of Rosings’ stable master sending out every other carriage before his, meaning they arrived at every coaching inn last in the procession of all Lady Catherine’s other London-bound mourners. Fitzwilliam had readily accepted his offer to dine at Darcy House before returning to Knightsbridge, though he declared his need for sustenance was not half as great as his need for alcohol since he had emptied his hip flask before they left Bromley.
“Anything?” his cousin enquired.
Darcy finished rifling through the letters and tossed the lot of them back onto the desk. “No.”
It was only the expectation of finding news awaiting him here that had allayed his alarm in Kent, but there was nothing from Pemberley. He rubbed a hand over his face and attempted to reason away his disquiet.
“There you are then, you see? I was right.”
“How so? I have no letter from Elizabeth.”
“And neither do you have a letter from my grandmother or Bingley telling you some harm has befallen her. Cheer up, old boy,” he added, proffering a drink. “There is nothing more troubling afoot than the discovery that your wife is a dreadful correspondent.”
Though he disliked it intensely, Darcy would rather that explanation than have his misgivings substantiated. That shewouldhave written was in no doubt, yet he supposed she might not have written often. Indeed, she could not have much news except in an emergency, and then she or someone else would have sent an express. And as Fitzwilliam had said, it was possible, even likely, that a letter had gone astray. Yet, one solitary note of commiseration seemed scant comfort from a woman more commonly overflowing withcompassion. And two or more letters were unlikely to have been lost.
Comprehending that reason might not prove sturdy enough armour against his encroaching sense of foreboding, he reached for the drink his cousin held out and took a sizeable swig. “Come,” he announced. “Let us eat.”
“Give them a fair chance to get it on the platters, Darcy. We have only been here five minutes.”
