Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife (73 page)

Getting free of the hospital compound was only the first hurdle. The woods were alive with soldiers willingly hijacked from duty digging grave trenches to police the quarantine. Most had encamped adjacent to the hospital after bringing in the wounded and were happy to eschew their shovels for guns once again. Thus, they were enthusiastic to a fault whilst ensuring the integrity of their perimeter.

Belayed almost immediately by a ludicrous duo in arms (one long, lean, and hirsute, the other a short, stout pilgarlic), Darcy and Georgiana had only moments to concoct a story. The best they could do was throw the blanket across Fitzwilliam’s face and innocently claim they were carrying off the dead for burial, supposing the just-relieved trench diggers would not deny someone else the job. It was the spare soldier who walked to the back of the waggon and lifted the edge of the blanket that covered John. With a distasteful sneer, he tossed the blanket back and told them to move along.

In any other circumstance, it would have been regrettable that Fitzwilliam had fallen unconscious from the pain of moving him. But as he did not stir whilst the man investigated the bodies, it was a necessary boon. But having their story believed once, it did not follow that it would be many times more. Thus, they left the conspicuity of the road. It was treacherous going, and several times they were well-nigh upended. Georgiana clung to the seat next to her brother, and the two reticent siblings shared barely a word. A look, a nod, a shrug spoke both question and answer.

Apart from the road, Darcy had only the most general knowledge of the whereabouts of Roux’s guesthouse. Hence, he was grateful to see some of Roux’s men near the villa in apparent watch for them. Two climbed into the back of the waggon, one giving direction from there. When the other moved to sit down next to John’s body, the man accidentally kicked it as he fell to his seat when the waggon started away. He said, “Pardon,” before quite expeditiously understanding the affronted person was in no condition to find offence.

In levity or not, this was not witnessed by Georgiana and Darcy. Both looked earnestly ahead in anxious anticipation of refuge. Roux’s hospitality was again bestowed. There were several servants at the guesthouse, they had it in order, and stood ready to serve tea. That most civilised of hospitalities had to await the removal of Fitzwilliam from the waggon and his being settled into the house. It was with that jostling that the consciousness that he had been fading in and out of during the trip was resurrected and along with it, the pain, and he moaned in agony. Whilst Georgiana tended Fitzwilliam, Darcy told a servant to tell her he had a task to which to attend. Thus, he was spared two miseries: the burden of Fitzwilliam’s cries, and the heartbreak in Georgiana’s eyes when he told her he had to take leave to bury John Christie’s body.

That they had fled the hospital did not suppose them free of typhus. Fitzwilliam, because of his wounds, was most susceptible, but Georgiana, by reason of her nursing duties, was very vulnerable as well. Even his own health was at risk, certainly not to the same extent as theirs. Undoubtedly louse-ridden (not by reason of station but of army blankets), John’s body had to be disposed of immediately.

* * *

It was less than a mile to the Roux family’s cemetery, and Darcy was surprised at its size (the Roux branch of the family was apparently more prolific than the Darcy side). It sat next to a little chapel, picturesque but vacant. Forewarned of his coming, Darcy did not have to explain to the caretaker who he was or his reason for being there. He and another man stood with shovels in their hands, the grave already dug and ready for occupancy. They had a slat-board coffin before them, its lid resting against the side, in wait of its future inhabitant.

Lifting him by rigoured arms and legs, they quite unceremoniously plopped John’s body into the coffin, and Darcy would have demanded caution had not the deed already been done. Immediate upon that affront, the caretaker reached out and rather roughly began to tug and yank at the rather fine blanket covering the corpse.

Darcy saw he meant to return it to him, and said, “Non! Arrêtez vous!” But he was too late, for before the man could stop, momentum drew the blanket from John’s face. With all the death he had witnessed, Darcy did not understand why he could not bear to see John’s dead countenance again. Nevertheless, it was revealed to him before the man could tuck the blanket back about him. The assault upon his sensibilities demanded Darcy take hasty leave. And he turned to do just that, when the caretaker called after him.

“Pardon, monsieur. Comment il s’appelle?”

Darcy stopped his retreat, turned and said firmly, “John. Jean, J-o-h-n.” He turned to go again, and again he was stopped.

The man called, “John quoi?”

What was John’s last name? A simple query. Few simpler. But some simple questions do not have simple answers. Darcy had no idea of John’s surname. It was not “the groom,” which was how he always had thought of him. Abigail’s last name was lost to him as well. If he ever knew it. The one thing he did know, it was not Wickham, nor would it be so long as he had power over it.

Quite abruptly, he answered, “Darcy. John Darcy.”

The man did no more than blink at this information, and he and his compatriot of spades put the lid upon the coffin. Darcy had taken himself quite unawares with his own unprecedented liberality with his heretofore-exalted family name. But it felt right. If it caused comment, he cared little. The consecration of name was compleated, yet he paused, reconsidering his leave taking. At the hospital, amid the moans and screams could be heard the constant drone of a priest who moved amongst the dying men anointing and exacting extreme unction. John had probably had some holy water splattered upon him, but Darcy did not think mass redemption enough. In lack of knowing John’s religious persuasion for certain, Darcy chose to gift him his.

Hence, instead of hurrying away, Darcy stood and watched the men lower the coffin into the grave, and shovel the dirt over it. He endeavoured to retrieve some snatches of appropriate scriptures from his memory of his Common Book of Prayer, but with little success. Funeral words were not those he endeavoured to keep with him. But as the men finished their job and stood looking at him from their resting shovel handles, he spoke a prayer that did come to mind.

With the “amen” yet ringing, Darcy announced to the men who seemed startled at his directness. He told them to engrave the words “Honneur, Courage, Bonté” upon the headstone. He did not spell it in English, the translation was obvious. There were no mutes to hire, no watcher to guard the corpse, few refinements of passing were to be had. But Darcy did give the grave-diggers an extra coin to climb the church steeple and toll the bell. Thus, John was put to rest: with a first and last name, church bells, and at least one mourner.

The trip back to the guesthouse in the now empty waggon was grim for Darcy. He had thought that once he found Georgiana safe, he would be awash in joyous relief. But the burial of John in a land far from England made Darcy feel every mile of the distance betwixt France and home. And it was a lonely feeling.

This sense of desolation did not lift by the time he returned to the cottage. A melancholia settled over him that he would be unable to shake for some time. It was undoubtedly brought on by the horrific sights he had witnessed, John’s death, Fitzwilliam’s wounds, and being so far from Pemberley and Elizabeth. All were things that would have been hard enough to bear separately. Hence, glumness could be expected. And he probably would have had the strength to weather them had he not become aware that the percussion of the gun that had been fired at him, while sparing his head, had reinstated his deafness.

At first there was only a profound ringing sensation, tantamount to, if not surpassing, Darcy’s previous impairment. This reverberation was a substantial annoyance, but he could nevertheless hear. However, just as MacFarqhuar had prophesied, it was an ominous knell. For in the intervening hours betwixt the gunshot and the burying of John Christie’s body, what little Darcy heard became garbled. By the time he stood graveside, only the gravedigger’s staccato delivery allowed him to understand a single word the man said. Upon the return to the cottage, the clattering of the waggon wheels was compleatly indiscernible.

Having ridden a nag, seconded a half-witted litter bearer, and well-nigh had his head blown off, another might have considered himself fortunate only to be in want of his auditory sense. Darcy, of course, was not another. His arrogance may have mitigated to a degree over the years; however, humility had most definitely not encroached upon his ego. To successfully eschew his disreputable mount and abdicate his labourer status (and Mott as well), only to be subjugated by such a ridiculous infirmity, was as infuriating to him as it was inescapable. Of course, that was the severest trial to Darcy—the very impotence of his will in the matter.

His pride, as always, demanded he mask any personal imperfection, thus he concealed his deafness with all the duplicity of a particularly artful card-sharp. In such close quarters with someone who knew him so well, this chicanery was unprofitable, for Georgiana found him out almost immediately. Quite aware (acutely, exceedingly, even excessively aware) of her brother’s pride, she allowed him some time to think he had fooled her before telling him his charade was futile. Knowing their nature and relationship, not surprisingly she did not confront him directly with his deception.

Rather, she stood in front of him and inquired, “Did it happen from the gunshot at the hospital?”

He nodded. There was really nothing else to say.

There were far more pressing concerns. As Georgiana went about making a celandine poultice for Fitzwilliam’s eyes and various herbal embrocations for his leg wounds, Darcy knew their most frightening predicament would be were any or all of them infected with typhus. That the case, Darcy dared not contaminate anyone else with the disease; he called together the servants Roux had assigned to them and frankly explained the danger of contagion if they stayed. Though refined in appearance, Roux’s people were common folk, illiterate and superstitious. Hence, it was quite unexpected when not a single servant bolted for the door upon the announcement of possible plague. Their eyes widened and not a few took to clutching talismans, but none deserted Roux’s cottage.

The matter of pestilence and death addressed, Darcy turned to a more daunting endeavour: that of speaking to his sister about her romantic entanglement.

For days he struggled with what to say to her, what to inquire of her, even whether to speak to her whilst she scurried about tending Fitzwilliam. The quarantine that confined them alleviated the possibility of Georgiana returning to aid at the hospital, and of that, Darcy was relieved. As the days passed, it appeared they would escape the epidemic, and he certainly did not want her to seek further risk. He could never compleatly shake his unease, but finally a little peace ensued.

Tranquillity, of course, being a relative thing. It seemed tranquil. It certainly sounded tranquil to Darcy (for the ringing had ceased and he heard little at all). The house was harmonious, placid, and calm. Then again, not at all. Georgiana busied herself in Fitzwilliam’s sick-room, alternately reading to him when he was awake and embroidering when he was not. When her brother made a formal entry into the room each day to inquire of Fitzwilliam’s condition, she was always (at whichever specific moment he chose to enter) toiling furiously amidst some inordinately intricate handwork and quite unable to extend their conversation beyond the perfunctory.

This dedication to her sewing was a subterfuge of limited effectiveness. Georgiana and Darcy both knew it was only a matter of time before he cornered her elsewhere in the cottage to confront her about the method and madness of her disappearance from Pemberley. Because the confrontation was inevitable, narrowing the field of contention to a manageable number of subjects would be his most trying difficulty. Georgiana’s own most vexing perplexity was hardly a new one, that of being the sole officeholder of Sister to Fitzwilliam Darcy. For she knew that title demanded she give him an unabridged elucidation of the why, when, how, with whom, and wherefore of having absconded from Derbyshire.

Whilst they awaited for Fitzwilliam to heal enough to travel, idleness was not Darcy’s weightiest vexation, merely the most central. Unimpaired by the constraint of time (and his deafness every excuse), he composed a detailed questionnaire about her disappearance for Georgiana to compleat, the ludicrousness of which was entirely lost upon his analytical sensibilities. Albeit they were quite similar in temperament, it is not argued that all wisdoms are necessarily distributed equally amongst siblings. Thus, Darcy would never understand, however logical the survey or industriously she endeavoured to account for the ambiguity of love, a document would never be able to uncover the vast shades of his sister’s mind. Hence, the anticipated breviloquence of a written instrument of Georgiana’s travels and travails was not to be. Any equivocation upon the matter was put to rest when she tore the unanswered instrument in half and handed it back to him. Of this, he was disproportionately unhappy.

Isolated and thwarted, not only by his own disability, but his sister’s obstinacy as well, their sojourn at Lille became increasingly intolerable for Darcy. Georgiana went about her duties, humming with maddening congeniality. Diversions were few. His need to see Elizabeth manifested itself with an ache in his chest so palpable at times he actually feared it would literally burst his heart. Of this torment, of course, he spoke not a word, and endeavoured to soothe his soul by writing her endless letters.

Another excuse to be vexed that Georgiana had vandalised his set of inquiries was the scarcity of paper. (He did not reproach himself, however, for using precious paper to write them in the first place.) Thus, in addition to his usual small script, he resorted to the pauper’s device of cross-writing a letter already filled front and back at ninety-degrees, thereby economically doubling the length of the letter. The added bother of this particular stratagem was that it was challenging to read (if not outright prohibitive), but Darcy knew well that circumstances made that not of great consideration.

Every day he compleated a letter, carefully folded and sealed it with red wax, thereupon, in his most elaborate script, directed it to Elizabeth. But these lengthy, heart-wrenching tomes to his wife journeyed not. Bundled in his lap, fertile with endearment but barren of destination, they sat as he awaited futilely upon the wide, bougainvillaea-shaded portico for some rider to happen by. Alas, most days the countryside was still as stone.

When Darcy did not sit, he paced. The only movement upon the road was the mysterious daily dispatch of Roux’s waggon, empty but for a bevy of servants. Whatever the pilgrimage, it returned heavily laden, its contents shrouded by a tarp, his three men squeezed into the driver’s seat. Day after day, without fail the waggon ventured. Aloof (some might even say supercilious), Darcy was not normally curious about a neighbour’s business. However, unrelenting leisure might well drive the most indifferent of souls to scrutinise the most insignificant of endeavours.

Thus, when a goose intended for their supper took flight and had the misfortune to become entangled in the spokes of that waggon’s passing wheels, Darcy took advantage of the ensuing chaos to stroll over to the arcane tumbrel, flip back the canvas and peer in.

Quite deliberately, and with the excuse of their possible typhus contamination, Darcy had refused Roux’s many invitations to stay or even visit with him in his villa. It was quite obvious his cousin’s manner of maintaining the lifestyle to which he was accustomed throughout some rather horrific social upheaval had been of dubious (if not outright dishonourable) means. As judgemental as he knew himself capable of being, Darcy did his best not to censure his cousin’s life choices, not having had to live under the burden of extended revolution.

But his brief investigation of what was transported in Roux’s waggon told him his cousin’s avocation, which might have once been only considered unscrupulous, had now expanded into the undeniably felonious. For Roux’s waggon had been filled with what could only be surmised as the spoils of war. Judging by the length of the daily trips this plunder came from his neighbours’ vacant homes (having drunk the wine and admired the artwork, Roux knew just where any abandoned valuables would be found). Had he been confronted about his thievery, Roux might have justified it by pointing out that his own looting was hardly one step ahead of both armies. Marauders abounded. Napoleon’s “scorched earth policy” was as much an excuse for pillaging as bringing the conquered to their knees by way of destitution, and hardly specific to the French.

Darcy knew Roux’s merrymakers had abandoned his conviviality under the threat of a rather unpleasant pestilence, and one could only suppose that gentleman’s trafficking in women thwarted, his boredom was eased by the thrill of larceny.

At least Darcy hoped it was monotony that drove his cousin’s thievery, not an inborn criminality. Increasingly, the spectre of the Darcy family name besmirched by the inclusion of a libertine of Roux’s magnitude was not a comfort.

* * *

Ennui the only thing accelerating with any rapidity in their little cottage, Darcy’s substantial leisure allowed him to reflect upon the evening he had spent at Roux’s. The disclosure that so close a friend and relative of his father’s was an outright panderer was, indeed, a shocking revelation. But Darcy had initially concluded Roux must have descended of late into the occupation of buttock-peddler, else a man of his father’s integrity would never have associated with him. Which was why contemplating upon just why Juliette Clisson was present at Roux’s that eve was such an unsettling endeavour.

Initially, it seemed merely coincidental. Juliette was very much a demimondaine, that complementing Roux’s inclinations quite fittingly. More than a few serendipitous turns of fate had altered Darcy’s life (a chance encounter with Elizabeth led to their ultimate unity), therefore, he was not entirely disdainful of the part coincidence played in one’s destiny. Nevertheless, just as Elizabeth’s inability to dismiss him from her thoughts led her to visit Pemberley that day, thus allowing their re-acquaintance, he knew providence was almost always guided by connecting events. Darcy had not thought to query Juliette how she knew Roux, but he believed it quite probable theirs was not a new friendship.

As highly principled as he had known his father to be, Darcy had not once criticised that he had directed him to cool the youthful fever in his blood at a house of accommodation. Howbeit, he had chastised himself severely for accepting that advice with such enthusiasm. As to how, coincidentally, his father had directed him to the very house whence Juliette Clisson plied her trade, was a course of thought he believed it best not to pursue. Hence, he did not.

He pursued his sister. The time he did not spend searching the road for a surrogate post-boy, he stalked Georgiana. Possibly to deter her brother, she had no specific routine once leaving Fitzwilliam’s sickroom. Thus, Darcy took to skulking about the hall, not unlike a particularly rapacious spider, awaiting his sister’s inadvertent passing into his path. After a great deal of evasiveness (and no little ingenuity), Georgiana eventually bechanced upon him. Determined to discover unequivocally her romantic situation, he stepped in front of her, arms folded and a look upon his countenance that told her he had had quite enough of her intrigue. Knowing his quarry would slip away at any moment, he came directly to the point.

“Do you believe yourself in love with Fitzwilliam?”

At her brother’s condescending implication that she truly did not know her own mind, she dropped her gaze to the floor and closed her eyes tightly in a vain endeavour to squelch her anger. Hence, when she did look to him, her eyes were defiant. With well-trained sufferance (and with compassion for his loss of hearing), she answered with a single nod.

“Does Fitzwilliam return your esteem?”

Although the question asked nothing more, neither nod nor shake of the head was offered. Georgiana merely shrugged. Thereupon, rather merrily, she encouraged her brother to let her pass with the back of her hand and flounced (yes, it was a flounce, he knew a flounce when he saw one) down the hall. This was an exasperating predicament. Captive of a house, hostage of his ears, now introduced to impudent flouncing from his own sister. It would not do.

As there was little alternative, his indignation was eventually exchanged for reluctant resignation. Fitzwilliam’s recovery was slow, and Georgiana’s devotion apparent. Acquiescing to Fitzwilliam’s reluctance of being pitied, Darcy tried not to hover about him, often only coming to the door of the room to see how he was faring. From thence, he would, as often as not, observe Georgiana holding Fitzwilliam’s hand as she bent over him, her ear turned to his lips. That luxury, of course, was denied to Darcy and there was little he would not have sacrificed just to hear the familiar cadence of Fitzwilliam’s voice declaring himself better.

For Fitzwilliam truly did not look better. At least what you could see of him. For bandages yet covered his eyes and the side of his face. But his leg wound had stopped oozing, and he had ceased periods of delirium, both signs of improvement. The good tidings of these developments were, however, usurped for Darcy by a shock upon his sensibilities of unprecedented proportion.

For upon one of Darcy’s trips to the door of Fitzwilliam’s room, he accidently intruded upon the occasion of Fitzwilliam’s daily sponge bath. The office of chief bather was held by Miss Georgiana Darcy.

“Georgiana!” Darcy said (or possibly shouted, for he spoke far more loudly than ever could be explained by his deafness).