By Force of Instinct (2 page)

of course, it was true that she did have a certain regard for his incisive intelligence, otherwise she would never have entered on the subject. oh, how had she missed it? even charlotte had noticed, and tried to warn her of it, but she had been blind, so blind …

“cousin elizabeth!” came the voice of Mr. collins. “We shall be late!

Make haste, make haste!”

With a sigh, elizabeth went downstairs and practiced on Mr. and Mrs.

collins the bright smile she was intending to wear in church. charlotte gave her a sharp glance, but interpreted her artificial behaviour as a response to the scurrying of Mr. collins.

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“cousin elizabeth,” Mr. collins scolded. “Lady catherine is quite firm on the subject of the desirability of promptness. Any tardiness on our part would be looked on with
great
disapproval and hardly show respect for the condescension she has demonstrated toward you!”

Fleetingly, elizabeth wondered how Lady catherine would have responded to elizabeth being presented to her as her future niece. she could not think, without a smile, of what her ladyship’s indignation would have been, but the smile engendered by this idea was rapidly smothered by the recollection of Darcy’s words on the degradation his attachment to her represented. she felt ill as she thought on the folly and indecorum of her own family and how it reflected on her, and how materially it had affected both her and Jane.

she reminded herself firmly that Darcy’s behaviour was as ill-bred as that of anyone in her family, though excessive pride could not be interpreted to be as humiliating a fault as the ignorance and complete lack of decorum of Lydia and Kitty or the stupidity of Mr. collins. But the style of his address during his proposal, and indeed throughout their acquaintance, deserved censure. no, that was not quite true either, her sense of fairness forced her to admit. He had been insulting and excessively proud on some occasions, but in most of their meetings she had nothing worse to accuse him of than being overly quiet.
Yet another failure on my part
, she thought.

Mr. collins was voluble in his relief when they discovered that the rosings party had not yet arrived at the church, and he hurried off to prepare himself for the service, leaving charlotte to fend for herself in greeting the parishioners. elizabeth, equally relieved although for quite a different reason, found her heart pounding each time she heard a carriage pull up outside.

she had not long to wait; soon Lady catherine swept in, her party following in her wake. she was prompt in demanding her share of the conversation, introducing the ladies to Lord and Lady Derby—“Mrs. collins, and Miss Bennet and Miss Lucas, visiting from Hertfordshire,” she said in a dismissive voice.

elizabeth politely expressed her pleasure in making the acquaintance.

When it came time for her to greet the rest of the party, she found that she could not bring herself to look directly at Darcy; she made her curtsey with her eyes firmly fixed on his cravat, and she knew that her cheeks must 11

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be flushed. she managed to keep her polite smile on her face, however, and was able to greet colonel Fitzwilliam and Miss Darcy with tolerable composure.

There were several minutes before the service was to begin, and elizabeth was for the first time grateful for Lady catherine’s propensity to dominate the conversation, as it relieved her of the burden of finding something to say. As she attended to her ladyship, though, she began to despise herself for her cowardice. she forced her eyes up to Darcy’s face, only to meet his implacably cold gaze.

That she had expected scorn and anger did not lessen the distress elizabeth felt on seeing it on his face. she held his gaze only briefly before taking the excuse of Lady catherine’s ongoing discourse to look away. she thought of how he had said that his good opinion, once lost, was lost forever.
How
he must be congratulating himself for his near escape from a woman of so little
perception and judgment!
she thought, humbled by her fall from grace and surprised that the thought of his disapproval troubled her.

When she chanced to raise her eyes to his face again, unable to resist the painful impulse of curiosity, she found him looking on no object but the ground. It was with the greatest of relief that she heard Lady catherine pronounce that it was time for the service to begin.

elizabeth was grateful that she was seated behind Mr. Darcy, where she need not fear his incisive gaze.
You must al ow me to tell you how ardently
I admire and love you.
How he must regret those words, those sentiments which had led to his harsh and unfair castigation at her hands! In addition to blindness and prejudice, she was also obliged to claim cruelty and short-temperedness among her many faults.

Her eyes drifted to him—the tousled dark curls against the brilliant white of his cravat as he sat proudly upright in the pew. she could not deny that he was handsome; she had acknowledged that even at the Meryton assembly when she first saw him. It was only his insulting behaviour and forbidding countenance on that occasion that had led her to disregard the appeal of his appearance. But good looks and a good fortune could not by themselves determine a good husband.
In vain have I struggled. It will not
do.
Although she wished she had dealt differently with his proposal, when she thought of his humiliating references to how greatly he had striven to rid himself of his feelings for her, she could not bring herself to regret her 12

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decision. An image came to her of his intent gaze as it had so often rested on her, and unaccountably she shivered, wondering at his thoughts on seeing her again.

The object of her thoughts was at that moment brooding on the question of whether his life could possibly become any worse. He could not help being viscerally aware of elizabeth’s presence any more than he ever had been, only now it was like an ache in his breast rather than the guilty pleasure it had so often been in the past. If that were not enough, he had to suffer through the sycophantic ramblings that her idiot of a cousin considered a sermon—a reminder of just how low he had sunk in offering her marriage.

And then there was
his
family … but he was not even going to think about that now.

He had spent the last two days struggling to convince himself that the elizabeth Bennet he had loved was a figment of his imagination; he had never known the real elizabeth Bennet at all, she of the cruel and spiteful words and the misjudgments. she was as misguided and capricious as all the other women he had known. He had taken her fine eyes and wit and spun them into a fantasy of a woman of real sense and feeling who would understand him, and now he knew that no such woman had ever existed.

He was mortified for himself and furious with her, and the worst of it was that the instant he had laid eyes on her again, standing in front of the church, he had wanted her every bit as much as he ever had. He hated her for her power over him and despised himself for a weak fool.

As attuned to her presence as he was, he could not fail to notice that she was lacking her usual sparkle that morning. He hoped that this meant that she had realized what a dreadful mistake she had made, and that she was going to pay for the rest of her life for listening to George Wickham’s lies and then spewing her venom all over Fitzwilliam Darcy. she would end up a poor spinster, dependent on the charity of her family, or married to some ignorant pig of a tradesman, she who could have been mistress of Pemberley.
If she is suffering now, it is no more than she deserves,
he thought with vindictive fury, and then closed his eyes in pain, knowing that all he had wanted when he had seen those dark circles beneath her eyes was to take her soft body into his arms and kiss those tempting lips, and to tell her that she need not worry, that he would take care of everything …

But fantasies would not provide him any answers, he told himself grimly.

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And if his uncle said to him one more time, “It would be different if you were married and settled, but with a bachelor lifestyle, it simply will not do,” he would not be responsible for his actions. He could ignore Lady catherine’s repeated demands that he marry Anne immediately; he had a lifetime of practice at that, but to face the accusation that it was
his
fault that he was not married just at this bitter juncture was more than a man should have to bear. He realized that his fists were clenched, and that he had not heard a word that elizabeth’s embarrassment of a kinsman had servilely uttered—not that it was any loss.

He could see that Georgiana was looking at him strangely. He took a deep breath to calm himself and forced a pleasant smile to his face, at which point she resumed the sullen expression that she had worn ever since her arrival, a reminder of her obvious disappointment with him for his inability to make all her problems disappear. What had happened to the sweet, docile girl she had been? sometimes he could still see that girl, but more often these days she seemed angry with him about one thing or another.

colonel Fitzwilliam thought it was but a matter of her being at a trying age, but Darcy could not help suspecting that the whole George Wickham affair had something to do with it. Georgiana could not know, of course, how harshly he continued to castigate himself for his error in choosing Mrs.

younge as her companion. The thought brought back the all too familiar refrain of reproaches:
Why did I not question her references further? Why did
I al ow myself to believe that her amiable manner implied impeccable morals?

Why did I send Georgiana off with her so quickly, instead of keeping her under
my observation for a longer period of time? Why did I give in and agree to let
Georgiana have her own establishment in the first place when she was still so
young? The entire situation was wholly my fault.
no, on the whole, Darcy did not think that his life could be substantially worse.

He was forced to reconsider this a few minutes later when he heard his aunt issue an invitation to Mr. collins and his party to come to rosings that evening. He ought to have expected as much; she had done so the previous two sundays as well, but he had thought that with so much of her family around her, her interest in having her pet clergyman fawn over her would be diminished. Apparently he was to have no such reprieve, and he was beginning to think of the excuses he could make when he saw elizabeth turn her head away in an attempt to hide her distress at the idea, 14

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and he knew that he would not be able to stay away. He damned himself for his susceptibility to her.
Remember, she thinks you devoid of every proper
feeling and completely lacking in honour,
he reminded himself.
She is nothing but a silly girl who would throw away an opportunity most women spend
their lives dreaming of because she was offended by your honest scruples.
With a stab of pain, he heard her voice again saying,
“You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy,
if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way,
than as it spared me the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had
you behaved in a more gentleman-like manner.”

What spiteful fate had determined that the woman he loved should be the one woman in the world who wanted nothing to do with him? He wondered whether such a turn of events constituted a tragedy or a farce.

He managed the semblance of a civil nod to elizabeth and the rest of her party before forcing his feet to carry him away from the woman who had so bewitched him.

elizabeth felt quite unequal to company following the painful excursion to church, and knowing that she would be required to face an even more excruciating version of the same torture that evening, resolved to take some time to herself for reflection in her favourite manner. she therefore excused herself for a solitary walk after luncheon, brushing aside charlotte’s protests regarding her pallor and recent headaches. sooner or later, she knew, she would have to face her friend’s growing suspicions that all was not well with her, but she could not begin to face that task at present.

Her feet led her without conscious thought to her favourite grove. on recognizing where she was, she felt a moment of panic, knowing now that it was where Darcy had often sought her out in the past. she realized, though, that she was quite safe, as there would be no place that he would more fervently avoid at present. He had, after all, made the state of his current regard for her more than clear, that his feelings were cause for shame and could not be forgotten too soon. His cold look in church demonstrated that he had lost no time in putting those tender feelings behind him. she could not blame him; she certainly deserved no special notice after she had abused him so abominably.

Her sense of shame over her behaviour led directly to thoughts of the unhappy defects of her family, the subject of yet heavier chagrin. she burst 15

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into tears as she thought of it, and from actual weakness leaned against a tree as she wept. she had always avoided acknowledging the extent to which the lack of fortune of the Bennet girls, combined with their mother’s improprieties, materially affected their prospects for marriage; it was easy enough to say that she should not marry where she did not love, but Mr.

Darcy’s words were forcing her to face the truth that even the beautiful, gentle Jane had only had the one suitor when she was sixteen before Mr.

Bingley, and elizabeth’s assets were certainly no greater than her sister’s.

she was sufficiently deep in her own distress as to be unaware of approaching footsteps. Darcy stopped short at the sight of her across the grove, immediately thinking to leave before he was observed. At the realization that she was weeping, however, he was torn by uncertainty. He could not be sure of the cause of her distress, but it could be assumed to relate to his disastrous proposal. A part of him longed to go to her and comfort her, while at the same time it felt only proper that she ought to suffer as he did.