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“Thank you for the courtesy of asking Miss Elizabeth. So many people just demand the information. I understand the curiosity, the fascination even over the events. As for myself, I was on the staff of General Napier with the 50th Infantry of Foot. It was a tough retreat, most of all in the hills above A Coruna itself. I was shot but was lucky, the bullet merely grazed my side. It stung like the devil at the time but given General Napier was badly wounded and thought dead I had nothing to complain about. We were heartened to hear he had been saved by the French and he made a full recovery. He was paroled back to us, but that was much later.”

“I remember reading that the 50th were in the rearguard, you must have been among the last to embark and escape.”

“We were loaded on the penultimate day, our Spanish allies stayed and allowed us to retreat.”

“Do you remember where you embarked?”

“Do you know A Coruna harbour Miss Elizabeth?”

Darcy was patently eavesdropping now. He saw Miss Elizabeth flush at the question.

“No, although I have seen the chart. My uncle is involved in the shipment of grain to our Spanish allies and one of the captains involved in the transport came to dinner one evening.”

Darcy was mostly standing behind Miss Elizabeth but he could see the edge of her smile as she remembered the occasion.

“I rather disrupted the separation of the sexes with so many questions. I was lucky that he had some of his charts with him in his map case. It was fascinating as he described the bay, and the harbour. As I looked at the chart I was also thinking of the reports at the time.”

Several people had joined the group and Darcy could see that Colonel Forster was pleased at the questions, and the recognition. And he had every right to deserve the recognition. Wounded in action while conducting a fighting retreat, that was always something to be proud of. Forster continued.

“We were rowed out from the beaches and jetties on the north side of the bay. We were in the lee of one of the defensive works for the harbour, Castillo de San Anton. I have always remembered the name, as one of my captains was Anthony Smyth,”

“Well thank you for sharing a few of your memories Colonel. We all here are in your debt.”

Darcy had to step sharply back as Miss Elizabeth stepped away from the circle around the Colonel. He watched her walk over to the daughter of their host. In doing so Darcy was acutely aware that Miss Elizabeth was a lovely woman. Different in physique, and temperament, to her older sister but no less beautiful. And she was extremely well read. The battle of Corunna was nearly three years ago. Darcy got no further. Miss Elizabeth had called the town by its Spanish name, A Coruna, rather than the anglicised name of Corunna. She also remembered a specific regiment. That was quite remarkable. He would test his cousin the next time they were together, he doubted Richard would have that level of recall.

And she was utterly open about her uncle being in trade, making no effort to disguise the fact. Shipping grain from the Americas was a significant undertaking. Her uncle’s business was clearly not a small enterprise. Yet it was also stark evidence of his status as being in trade, which in turn would limit his niece, all the sisters, when they were being courted. Few gentlemen would connect themselves to a family with such close, and well known, ties to trade.

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Fitzwilliam Darcy thought of himself as a rational man, he was renowned within his friends for being overly analytical, yet he found himself thoroughly confused by a young woman. A week after the event at Lucas Lodge it was the turn of the Long family to host a dinner. For once Miss Bingley had not made them ‘fashionably’ late and they arrived with the throng of other guests. He had watched Miss Elizabeth give a bottle of brandy to their host. Mr. Long’s reaction was one of extreme gratitude but the arrival of so many of the guests at the same time delayed further comment.

Later Darcy observed an animated discussion between Mr. Long, Sir William Lucas and Miss Elizabeth. He wished that he could have been closer to hear what was being discussed, and significance of the gift of brandy. What the evening did allow for was a very belated introduction to the two Bennet sisters he had not yet formally met, Miss Mary and Miss Elizabeth. Despite the social lubrication of a verbose Sir William it was stilted and awkward. Miss Mary fled from his presence almost immediately, and he used that word advisedly. Whereas Miss Elizabeth seemed to take great delight in being dull and, he would swear, deliberately obtuse. He knew that she was well read, had an impressive memory and was always at the centre of conversation. Yet with him she gave him no openings. What was worse was that as soon as she was free from his presence she immediately returned to her normal behaviour.

Later that evening, sitting swirling a glass of port, he came to the inescapable conclusion that Miss Mary had heard his dismissal of her at the Assembly. Judging by the behaviour of the rest of the family he did not think the event had been recounted to any of them, other than Miss Elizabeth. Miss Mary avoided him completely whereas Miss Elizabeth had been as rude as permissible within the confines of polite discourse. What he was struggling with was how to fix this? And why he felt the need to fix it?

Here his pride was rebelling against the obvious solution of apologising to Miss Mary Bennet. She was quiet, he had not spent sufficient time with her to really get a read of her character. He had not spent much time with Miss Bennet but he had observed Bingley with her, and listened to his daily panegyrics on her angelic qualities. And of course he had spent too much time thinking about and observing Miss Elizabeth. All three young women comported themselves as was expected of gentle-born ladies. But it was not these three that were giving him pause. The language, the behaviour, the sheer volume of the mother and the two youngest sisters, he struggled to understand how the oldest three were related to the rest of the Bennets. And then there was the missing father. Darcy had met Mr. Bennet for less than five minutes when he had accompanied Bingley to visit Longbourn. Darcy had no feel for the man at all, other than judging him on his absences rather than his attendance. It was the behaviour of the rest of the family that his pride could not overlook. He had an apology to deliver, but something was holding him back.

All of that was well and good. But now, sitting at a dinner with the officers of the Militia Regiment and various local gentlemen, Darcy’s understanding of the local society was disrupted anew.

“Gentlemen, I have been fortunate to be gifted several bottles of ‘blood brandy’, the first new brandy to be legally imported since Amiens. Shall we partake of this fine gift in the knowledge that French blood was spilled to acquire it?”

Colonel Forster’s cheerful speech was greeted enthusiastically. And so it should. ‘Blood brandy’ was the name given to a shipment of brandy from Spain. In the eight years since the end of the Peace of Amiens most cellared stocks had been consumed. And with the embargo on trading with the French, brandy had become increasingly hard to acquire, and involved dealing with smugglers. Near the end of the previous year it had been announced that a shipment of French brandy had been legally imported from Spain. And what gave it the name ‘blood brandy’ was the accompanying news that each case had been liberated by Spanish guerillas, killing and wounding the French guards on the supply wagons. There had even been cases of brandy from the supplies of the puppet king, Napoleon’s own brother. When the Spanish won several victories and approached Madrid in 1809 he had fled, allowing his personal supplies to be plundered. That any survived from the hands of the conquering troops was a miracle.

Darcy himself had purchased several cases when it was announced in December of 1810. There had been a mild frenzy as supplies were limited and everyone wanted to obtain at least some of this bounty. The total cargo had only lasted six weeks, by the end of January of the current year it had all been sold. So who had gifted a minor Militia colonel several bottles of this rare treasure? He did not have to ask the question himself, several enquiries were made by his fellow officers, and Hurst.

“They were a gift from one of the local families. From my understanding several of the gentlemen here this evening have also received such a gift.”

Forster had not named the family, presumably to stop people importuning them to receive a gift. But Darcy thought back to the dinner at the Longs, and Miss Elizabeth Bennet presenting Mr. Long with a bottle of brandy. He joined the disparate threads, and realised that he himself had met Miss Elizabeth’s uncle. Edward Gardiner of Gardiner Import/Export was the uncle in trade. He leant back and listened as the various gentlemen of the neighbourhood present confirmed that they too had received a gift of ‘blood brandy’. As usual Mr. Bennet was not in attendance but both Sir William Lucas and Mr. Long confirmed receipt, neither naming the family that gifted them the brandy.

Darcy was even more confused. Every young lady he met in town was jockeying to get married, far too often they had set their cap on him. The matchmaking mamas were even worse, displaying a frightening lack of subtlety in promoting their offspring. And everyone spent inordinate amounts of effort to ensure that there was no taint of trade upon them. He just had to look at Bingley’s sister to see a classic example of that. Yet here was a young woman who was unconcerned about that convention. Frankly she appeared to be flaunting her ties to trade, rather than downplaying them. Darcy just did not understand this behaviour.

And that was before the very pertinent point of who was gifting the brandy. It was not Mr. Bennet; the man was a virtual recluse. It appeared to be directly from Miss Elizabeth. Did her parents even know? It appeared that her uncle had gifted her at least a case of brandy, but why Miss Elizabeth and not her father. For someone who assiduously avoided his company Darcy was spending a lot of time thinking about her. She was interesting, fascinating and yet completely unsuitable. Darcy was vexed.

Chapter 10

When Bingley, Hurst and Darcy returned from their Tuesday evening dinner with the Militia officers it was to discover that not only had Miss Bennet been invited to dinner by the two Bingley sisters, she was still there. She had travelled to Netherfield Park on horseback and the weather had turned inclement on the ride. Arriving wet, she had succumbed to a cold and was now abed upstairs with a fever. Bingley was immediately worried for his ‘angel’ while Darcy noted Miss Bingley’s dismissal of her symptoms as nothing more than a ruse to stay at Netherfield and get closer to her brother.

Late the following morning as the party sat down to a quiet breakfast, the object of his vexation arrived, windblown and bearing the evidence of traipsing the lanes and fields on her journey. After a brief discussion Miss Elizabeth was guided upstairs to attend her sister. Darcy was then subjected to a coarse harangue about Miss Elizabeth from Miss Bingley. He did agree with the underlying point, to walk three miles alone on a windy autumnal day seemed foolhardy, and no he would not expect, or allow, his sister to undertake such a trek. But Caroline Bingley was incapable of making any point without going beyond what was acceptable. And it was for his benefit he knew, bemoaning Miss Elizabeth’s muddy boots and dirty hemline. It was nothing more than her trying to draw an unfavourable comparison between them. It was not like she had to mop and polish the floor, or launder Miss Elizabeth’s petticoat.