“It is rather early to be at home,” she said. “We are still eating. Have them leave their card.”
“Yes…well, she pushed her way past the footman. He did not feel he could lay his hands on such a lady without Mr Darcy’s permission. She said she has come from Kent and is not leaving until she speaks to Mr Darcy.”
A sound between a growl and a weary sigh escaped from his throat, and Elizabeth gave him a searching look. “My aunt, Lady Catherine.”
“The one who wanted you to unite your families’ fortunes by marrying her daughter?” When he nodded, she said, “I leave it up to you to decide when to receive her, but it seems she has not given us the choice.”
“She never does,” he muttered, rising. “Elizabeth, she is an arrogant, conceited woman, and I am very sorry for what we are about to endure.”
“Perhaps she has reconciled herself and now wishes to meet me and form her own opinion, like Colonel Fitzwilliam did.”
“Given her reply to my letter announcing our marriage, I doubt that,” he said as they climbed the stairs to the drawing room. “If she continues to abuse us, I will tell her to leave.”
“No, give her a chance to vent her disappointment. I can endure a little incivility if it means a family connexion is preserved. Maybe shehopes to see if I am in poor health?” When he gave her a confused look, she added, smiling, “If I am ill, perhaps I will die and you can marry Miss de Bourgh after all.”
She laughed, but Darcy feared his aunt might actually say such a thing. They entered the drawing room to see Lady Catherine standing, staring at the door, awaiting them. He greeted her and introduced her to Elizabeth, but she made no reply to Elizabeth’s salutation than a slight inclination of the head.
“Lady Catherine, given your last letter, I am surprised to see you here,” he said.
“Your sister’s headstrong, foolish choice is irremediable,” she said in her loud, authoritative voice. “That Lady Anne’s daughter should be wed to the son of the steward, a feckless gamester and seducer, is a travesty from which your family will never fully recover. I hold you responsible, Darcy.”
It was a painful blow, and he felt it all the way into his bones.
“He is not to blame, your ladyship,” Elizabeth insisted. “Georgiana made her choice in defiance of her friends’ advice and her own good sense, and she was taken in by a scheming man.”
Lady Catherine scowled. “Georgiana is a fool, but she was Darcy’s responsibility. She will be slighted and despised by everyone for marrying such a man.”
His aunt paced the room, gathering angry energy like a building storm cloud. “And the one thing that might have restored respectability to the Darcy name was your suitable marriage to my daughter. But you instead eloped scandalously with a young woman of inferior birth, of no importance in the world, and wholly unallied to the family!”
“She is a gentleman’s daughter, and I will thank you to not disparage Mrs Darcy. And she has thus far been received even better than I had expected.”
Elizabeth came to his side and said gently, “We met and married quickly, your ladyship, because we have a genuine regard for one another.”
It may not have been true when they married, but Darcy felt it was closer to the truth of their relationship now. He shared a look withElizabeth and saw, from her faint smile and the soft look in her eyes, that she felt the same.
Her appeal had no effect, and Lady Catherine grew louder. “Darcy, you were allured into marriage by?—”
“By the tenderest sentiments of mutual esteem,” he answered before she could say something vulgar.
“No, by a wish to be familiar with her person.”
Darcy winced as she finished her thought. Elizabeth’s mouth hung open in stunned mortification. Although he was attracted to her in Ramsgate, and even more so now, that he would tempt a virgin to transgress the laws of chastity and steal her away to Scotland for the purpose was insulting and appalling.
“What will she bring you in acres or coin?” Lady Catherine went on. “Nothing. The next quality a man looks for is beauty. You did not act according to reason in either case, but were governed by irregular appetites.”
His aunt gave Elizabeth a long look up and down. “You are pretty enough for a man’s purpose, but you should be ashamed of yourself for making Mr Darcy forget what he owes to himself and to all his family. You have shown such wilfulness of temper and every tendency to that independence of spirit, which prevails so much in modern days. In such a young woman as you, it is offensive and disgusting beyond all common offence. How dare you think you can raise yourself in the world by lowering Mr Darcy?”
His wife was red with anger, but she took a long breath before saying, “We are equals, your ladyship, and we married for affection and esteem, not for lust or station.”
“I have not been accustomed to such language as this,” she retorted. “And you,” she said, turning to Darcy, “have now shewn yourself very, very different from anything that I had imagined.”
“You have said quite enough, your ladyship,” he said warningly. “What did you hope to accomplish by coming here in this manner?”
“To learn if either of you could be reasonable. Scottish marriages are not ecclesiastical services; they are easier dissolved, if adultery or desertion be the case. I expect a woman like her capable of both.”
Elizabeth gasped and immediately went to the window, turning from the disaster unfolding in their drawing room.
“Young lady, I am speaking to you,” Lady Catherine said to Elizabeth’s back. “How much will it cost me to pay you to conduct an affair so my nephew can divorce you?”
