The day after Elizabeth and her entire party arrived, another party arrived, the last of the guests, according to Mr. Houseman.
Elizabeth was stunned to see that it was Mr. Darcy and his sister, Miss Darcy, of whom Elizabeth had heard much but had never actually met.
Miss Darcy was a tall and graceful girl, her figure well-formed. She was less handsome than her brother, Elizabeth thought, but still had a pleasing countenance. Miss Darcy smiled prettily upon meeting her, saying that this was the Elizabeth Bennet of whom she had heard so much.
Elizabeth blushed. “Oh, I’m quite unaware of anyone finding me an interesting topic of conversation, I’m sure.”
She was given little time to converse with Miss Darcy, however, for the girl’s brother steered Elizabeth away from everyone else in the company and over to a corner of the sitting room where they had been received. He crowded her and she backed away, for his expression was formidable and she was a bit surprised at all of this.
The last time she had spoken to Mr. Darcy, he had told her that he would not pursue her and they would only be amiable with each other, since she would be the wife of his cousin, Colonel Fitzwilliam. He was not acting in an amiable manner at the moment, and she was about to protest against it.
But he spoke, his voice low and lethal. “Why is it that you are introducing yourself as Miss Bennet when you are, in fact, Mrs. Fitzwilliam?”
She looked up at him, smiling. “Oh! Richard told you, then. Of course he would have. It seemed as if he told no one, but if you know—”
“Actually…” Mr. Darcy took a step back from her, putting his hands in his pockets.
“Actually?”
“Actually, he did not so much tell me, in truth. He and I are not exactly speaking at the moment.”
She wasn’t sure what to make of that. Her life had been turned upside down and topsy turvy as of late, and only one aspect where this had happened had been in her romantic life. She had never been much pursued as a woman, but recently, she had been nearly ruined by a Mr. Wickham, who was now dead, and then both Mr. Darcy and the colonel had wished to marry her.
Mr. Darcy had ceded her to his cousin, however, and now she was married to him.
Of course, her husband had left for the war, and she had yet to have a letter from him, though he had promised to write.
“He didn’t tell you,” she said. “Then, how do you know?” She put her hands on her hips in realization. “You spied on him. The both of you, with your spying!”
Mr. Darcy had the decency to look chagrined. “I did discover that he’d married you by special license through subterfuge, it’s true. I suppose I didn’t think about whether he would have told anyone. He didn’t?”
“Well, somehow he got the special license,” said Elizabeth. “He must have begged it from his father, I can only think.” His father was an earl, and had the ability to request such a thing from the archbishop, who could grant them. “However, I have never been introduced to his father, so I did not feel comfortable going and presenting myself to them. I decided I should rather wait until he returns.”
Mr. Darcy nodded slowly. “I suppose I can see your perspective.”
“I was not planning on being in public at all,” she said. “But then I found something interesting in the attic of Weythorn, and I could not stop myself from wishing to find out more.”
“Something interesting?” said Mr. Darcy.
“It’s about my father,” she said. “The man who contributed physically to my making, that is, not Mr. Bennet.”
Another thing that had rocked Elizabeth to her core was the discovery that she was not her father’s daughter, after all, but that she had been the illegitimate daughter of her aunt, Matilda Bennet. No one knew who her true father was, but Mr. Darcy had attempted to find this out for her.
Mr. Darcy had gone to speak to a man named Larilane, a French expatriate, a vicomte, who admitted to having a love affair with Elizabeth’s mother and to contributing the money to fund Elizabeth’s small inheritance and to giving her mother a house called Weythorn. However, Larilane denied being herfather, saying that Matilda had already been with child when he met her.
“What did you find?”
“I found letters that my mother wrote to Larilane,” said Elizabeth. “Well, not entire letters, truly, but the starts of letters, which she had begun and then set aside.”
“I see,” said Mr. Darcy.
“My mother indicated that she had eloped with the Duke of Neithern and that she was concealing her pregnancy from him. She didn’t wish Larilane to have told him of it.”
“Well, that might fit with the idea that whoever was your true father was battering your mother,” said Mr. Darcy. “A duke? An elopement?”
“Jane had invited me here, and I knew that there was a ball at Neithern’s house. I had told her that I would not come. I intended to stay hidden away until my husband returned from France.”
“That long?” said Mr. Darcy.
