Page 9 of Fitzwilliam Darcy, Exile

“What is that, if not spying?” Darcy tugged at his cravat, the room too warm. “There are few things I despise more than disguise. I will have nothing to do with this plan you suggest.” He looked to Richard for support.

“He has a point, Darcy,” Richard said reluctantly. “You told me yourself that you know almost nothing about her. What if she has spent the last ten years being groomed to be the perfect Mrs. Darcy? What if her family has filled her head with expectations of wealth and position?”

What a dreadful thought.

“Or,” Reynolds added, “what if she resents the arrangement as much as you do?”

Darcy rubbed his face. This is why he had fled—to spare them from this exact situation!

“What is a brief sojourn into the country?” Reynolds shrugged as though the matter were not of life-changing import. “It will do you good and, if you are fortunate, you might learn a little bit about Miss Bennet.”

“It is dishonest and imprudent.”

Reynolds leaned forward, expression grave. “Like it or not, Robbie, her future is intertwined with yours. Pemberley's tenants and servants depend on your next step.”

“He is right,” Richard added quietly. “If this arrangement still stands, if your inheritance depends on it, you need to know if Miss Bennet will make a good partner.”

“My mother. Barnaby. Cook. All of them rely on you now.”

Feeling his arguments burst and scatter like startled birds flushed from their cover, Darcy grappled with the duty he wished to discharge with honor and this terrible injustice to Elizabeth Bennet. If she was anything like him, she would have spent the last ten years defying the arrangement. “What if she hates me?”

Offering no reassurance, Reynolds poured Darcy another drink.

CHAPTER 4

Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy,

This is the twelfth letter I have written to you since that odious day wherein my good deed was punished most severely. Either I am exemplary in my tenacity or foolish to continue writing letters my parents forbid me from sending in the post. How convenient that nobody has a direction to mail your correspondence, or you would soon learn what a strong-willed creature I am! Your father is aware of this, I am certain, despite my family’s habit of intercepting my communications of discontent. A gentleman in possession of two residences and the presumption to steal my autonomy ought to become accustomed to hearing my grievances.

Pray forgive the sharpness of my pen. Frustration makes me frank—that and knowing that you will never see this letter and, therefore, I may be as piquant as I wish.

Are you even alive? For all anyone knows, you might not be. Or perhaps, as my mother most fears, you have married another and are blissfully happy living in a foreign land. Somewhere warm and exotic.

The ripe age of one-and-twenty looms before me, and I admit that I dream of you being happily settled. Pray do not for a moment believe me benevolent. No, my motive is too self-interested for that quality. I wish you settled so that I might not have to spend a day more of my youth waiting for a wedding I never wished for to a man I have never met and may not like. (How is that for frankness? Although, to be fair, you may not like me either. I may be frank, but I am reasonable. Well, most of the time. Reason too often thwarts my plans, and while I live as a rational creature, I own that I often do so with some resentment.)

I am to reach my majority in a few months, and I do not know what it will mean for me. Will it grant me any more power over my fate or is it merely the passing of another year of my life without any indication of you noting my existence? Do you know who I am? Do you trouble yourself to think about me at all?

I know who you are—Fitzwilliam Darcy, heir to the finest estate in Derbyshire. My family reminds me of it every day. They tell me that gentlemen do not abandon their birthrights, especially not one so lovely as Pemberley is reported to be. They dream of its grandeur while I roam our humble, rolling hills and pretend that the property I care for is mine, that my future is mine to decide. I manage my father’s estate, balance the ledgers, and negotiate with merchants twice my age, yet I cannot negotiate my own freedom.

You will return one day to claim your inheritance, and me along with it.

It is unjust, and I find myself in the vexing position of being afraid to hope, and yet unable to stop hoping entirely.

Still, I continue writing,

And waiting,

Your reluctant betrothed,

Elizabeth Bennet

Elizabeth jabbed her quill into the inkwell, attempting to appear calm and unaffected should anyone else in the room look her way. She had been gracious in her letter. Fitzwilliam Darcy had to be the most selfish, irresponsible, unfeeling man in all England… or wherever he was… if he was anywhere.

Jane, her eldest sister and by far more forgiving than Elizabeth, would remind her that some misfortune might have befallen him. However, after ten years with nary one communication from him, Elizabeth would accept no other excuse for his prolonged silence than death. Not that she was so heartless as to wish him dead, but he might as well be for all the answers he had denied her. And so, with each passing day, her vexation at a man she had never met but to whom she was forever bound compounded.

Mary, the third in the line of five Bennet daughters, played a lively tune, impervious to Elizabeth’s stormy mood.

Her sisters had reason to be cheerful: they had the Meryton Assembly to look forward to next week. Mr. Hill had gone into the village and would return with the post, including their subscription to La Belle Assemblée.