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Darcy surveyed the room, every gaze fixed upon him. He could not answer, for he could not confess the truth—not even to himself. It was not the eighty thousand pounds that tempted him. It was the lady herself, the one luxury beyond his reach.
“I will only answer a question from Miss Elizabeth Bennet. No one else.” Turning, he walked out.
CHAPTER FOUR
ET TU, CHARLOTTE?
“Lizzy!” Mrs. Bennet’s shrill voice came from up the stairs where she had taken to her sitting room with the aggrieved air of a martyr seeking a guillotine. “My head! My head! Come, child, and attend to me, you naughty, impudent, headstrong girl.”
Her mother had made royal carriage-horses of her slight fall, even though the apothecary assured everyone it was merely a graze of the skin—not even cracking the bone. After bleeding a thimbleful, she now believed her daughters owed her eternal devotion and immediate obedience.
Jane was already held captive to Mamma’s every whim, sponging her forehead with vinegared water, holding lavender sachets to her nose, and fetching biscuits and confectionery on the hour.
“Lizzy! Where are you?” Their mother shrieked. “You had better not be dead before you marry Mr. Darcy and secure your eighty-thousand pounds!”
“Coming!” She stomped up the staircase, if only to prove she had survived a sleepless night while two infernal phrases pounded in her head: “Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley” and “Lady Day ensuing.”
Her mother’s chamber smelled of dried herbs and the stale mustiness of a sickroom where the windows had not been unlatched since the King’s jubilee. Jane looked up from her ministrations, nodded, and departed with the gait of a little girl needing the chamberpot. Their mother lay against a barricade of pillows, her head wrapped in white linen bindings that made her resemble a wounded goose rallying for one last campaign at Michaelmas. Hill hovered by the washstand, looking as though she wished to be anywhere else on earth.
“There you are.” Mrs. Bennet’s eyes, despite the invalid arrangement, were sharp as pins. “I have been calling these ten minutes.”
“I came as quickly as I could, Mamma.”
“You were dawdling with a book, I suppose. Reading never did a girl any service when there are fortunes to be secured and settlements to be badgered.” She waved Hill away. The long-suffering servant shot Elizabeth a sympathetic glance before scurrying out with quick, short steps, no doubt in need of her own salts.
“I have no decisions to make,” Elizabeth said, as calmly as she could, which was not at all, given how tightly her molars were locked. “Uncle Henry played a malicious trick upon me, and I have yet to divine his madness.”
“His reasons do not matter.” Her mother waved it away. “Eighty thousand pounds, Lizzy. That is not anything to scoff at. And all you have to do is hold your nose and marry that odious, despicable, hateful man.”
“Mamma, would you marry him?” Elizabeth kept her hands busy tidying the array of medicine bottles and crumpled handkerchiefs. “You’ve seen how he treated our entire family as beneath him, how he sneers at you, Mamma, in particular. He looks at you as if you were some unfortunate debris left by a goose on the soles of his boots.”
“Lizzy, I will not have such insolence. Your father has wit enough to spare.” She took up a lace rag and dabbed dry eyes with ferocious vigor. “You must put on your boots and hike to Netherfield before Mr. Darcy departs and ask for his hand. Did you not hear him? He would not propose because he does not wish to appear a fortune hunter.”
“He does not wish to appear as a bridegroom.” Lizzy crossed her arms and tapped her heel against the Turkish carpet. “He came to Longbourn solely to inform us of his absolute indifference.”
Here, her mother’s gaze sharpened alarmingly for a woman with a head injury. “Do you truly suppose so? I am continually staggered by your total lack of penetration—you who pride yourself on reading character while your poor mamma is in want of the basic decorum and discernment.”
“Pray, Mamma, Mr. Jones says you are to rest, and you are not resting if you are thinking.” Elizabeth moved to draw back the curtains.
“I am not thinking. I know.” Mamma pushed herself upright so forcefully Elizabeth feared for the headstone… the headboard, she quickly corrected. “A gentleman does not ride with lathered horse through the ice and mud to dangle himself in front of a fortune and a bride without wishing to be asked.”
“Surely, you jest!” Elizabeth’s jaw dropped as she regarded her mother not as an invalid, but as a knight plotting to storm a drawbridge.
“Oh, no, Lizzy. I am entirely convinced. Mr. Darcy wishes to marry you, but his confounded pride keeps him from offering while your uncle’s snare hangs over him. He has laid the tinder; you have only to apply the spark. Go over to Netherfield and beg his pardon—or his hand, it matters little which!”
“But he has no incentive to marry me!” Elizabeth threw her hands up in disbelief at her mother’s twisted fantasies. “All he has to do is wait until Lady Day passes and he gets the fortune without having to have even hunted for it.”
“Precisely my argument!” Mrs. Bennet’s gaze gleamed as if she had solved a truly pressing mathematical problem on the order of Euclid or Pythagoras. “The man is present in Hertfordshire waiting for you, Lizzy. Waiting, because he wants you, you silly girl. Go without delay and make him the offer.”
“I am a gentlewoman, not a trollop!” Elizabeth whirled around the cramped chamber. “I am sending Jane back up here, because I must have air.”
“Air! What you require is a husband, and you have one cooling his heels at Netherfield if you would only swallow your ridiculous consequence—”
“I am going to Lucas Lodge,” she snapped back. “To see Charlotte.”
“Charlotte Lucas cannot help you marry Mr. Darcy!”
“But she is my friend, and she will agree with me, while all of you only see me as the barricade between you and eighty thousand pounds!”
