“Go and see her,” I said softly. “Hmm.”
“The other idea is to move on, Darcy,” he said. “Go meet other women, fall in love with someone else, drive her from your mind. Go and seek out strumpets and—”
“You know I don’t visit strumpets.”
“Yes, I suppose,” he sighed. “Your propriety borders on priggishness sometimes, however, Darcy.”
I supposed I could be considered righteous, and not always in a way in which it endeared me to others.
“You’re going to go back to the country to see her, I suppose,” said the colonel.
“I think so,” I said. “I am only considering how to bring it about. I suppose I can write to Bingley and see if he will allow me to stay there, but I do not wish to reside under the same roof as Bingley if I can help it, I find.”
“Why not?”
I was not going to share Bingley’s secret with him, so I ought not have said anything in the first place. “Oh, it is nothing. It is only that Bingley and I do not get on very well in close quarters.”
“I see,” he said. “Well, there is that house that we have in Redbourn, you know? That’s not so very far away, is it?”
“It’s quite close,” I said. “Do you think your family would mind if I stayed there?”
“I cannot see why they would,” he said. “After all, there is no one staying in it now. I shall speak to my mother about it and let you know what she says. And I have a bit more time left on my leave, so if she agrees, I shall accompany you.”
I shook my head. “Oh, you don’t have to do that.”
“I know I do not have to, but I find I am ever so curious about this girl of yours. You have not even told me her name or anything about her except that she’s pretty.”
“Well, I do not know anything about her,” I said.
“You know her name.”
“Elizabeth Bennet,” I said. “She has a nice singing voice. Her parents seem to hate each other. Her mother has an even nicer singing voice and she is sort of, well… there is a reason that Miss Bennet is beautiful. She inherited it.”
“Her mother is pretty?”
“For a woman much older than me, yes,” I said. “She has an elder brother. She goes and reads books to a woman named Lady Susannah who is apparently leaving everything to her.”
“To Miss Bennet or to her mother?”
“Miss Bennet, obviously,” I said. “And because of this inheritance, apparently, she does not wish to get married. Ever. At all.”
“Oh, this is why, here it all is,” said the colonel. “She’s a challenge. You wish to get the pretty girl who is dead set against marriage to marry you.”
“I do not actually wish to get married any time soon,” I said. “No, I wish to go to the country and see her and lose this obsession with her by seeing she is nothing to obsess over, as you say.”
“Understood,” said the colonel. “I shall do my very best to make sure that happens.”
Within a week, my cousin and I were settled together in the house in Redbourn, which was not far at all from Meryton, and quite close to Longbourn.
My cousin, whose first name was Richard, was of the opinion that we must simply go to the Bennet household and call. “There can be no other course of action,” he said. “You have been introduced to the family, so you may do so, and you can bring me along and introduce me. Then, I shall be able to ascertain whatI can about the family itself, the parents who dislike each other, the brother, the singing voices, the beauty, all of it. It is what we must do.”
“We cannot do anything like that,” I said. “We cannot call upon them. I won’t hear of it.”
So, we went to Meryton.
There, we saw members of the regiment, and my cousin saw that Mr. Wickham was there, and he was astonished that I should leave this bit of information out of my narrative.
“Well,” I said, “I suppose that I did stop worrying too much about it when she said that she was against all marriage in general.” Richard and I were standing on the street in Meryton, tying our horses up. Wickham himself was across the way, far enough off that he had not spotted us. He was in the company of other officers in the regiment, and they were with a chattering group of young women in their bonnets and gloves. “I had thought, you see, that she might be taken in by him.”
