Before noon the following day, Mrs. Darcy, dressed in the Prussian blue frock specifically suggested by Lady Matlock at the shopping excursion, stood nervously in the front foyer of Matlock House. Although her presence was entirely expected, the poor butler of Matlock House still raised an eyebrow at the early hour of her arrival.
“Mrs. Darcy, the Countess left instructions for your arrival. Follow me, Ma'am?” he asked, though Elizabeth could hardly object.
Led past the front parlor, Elizabeth felt a small measure of confidence she was being treated as a member of family and not as a mere acquaintance. This confidence flagged almost as quickly as it rose, as the butler showed her into an ancient library, a room smelling of firewood and musty leather volumes that filled the walls.
“That will be all,” Lord Matlock dismissed the butler, and Elizabeth marveled for a moment that both the Countess and Earl enjoyed a cup of tea together and a buffet of pastries as they sat under the grouping of windows overlooking a stable.
“There, see, that one, are you certain that horse was not sired by Tempest?”
“That one?” Lord Matlock followed his wife's hand to see which horse she spied.
“No, that one, he has the most remarkable white marking on his forehead, see? There!”
“Hmm, how curious,” was all Lord Matlock would say, offering his wife an amused smile.
Elizabeth stood feeling as though she was intruding on their private time, and focused her attention on the hearth. The stones showed the Fitzwilliam family crest, and she recognized the shield with three crows from insignia she had seen in Kent at Rosings. She had assumed the standard was the de Bourgh family, but to see it in the London town house that had been home of the Earl of Matlock for generations, she corrected her previous conclusion. Darcy House did not boast any family crests or personalized decor.
“Please don't stand there watching us, and how are you so bright and cheery this morning?” Lady Matlock scolded her niece by marriage and pointed out the chair next to the table, presumably for Mrs. Darcy's anticipated arrival.
“I did not drink the punch,” Elizabeth said drolly, earning a laugh from Lord Matlock, but Lady Matlock scowled.
“No,” she said smoothly, glaring at her husband, “you threw your punch away.”
Elizabeth cringed. “I can explain.”
Lord Matlock rattled his teacup as he placed it on the saucer. “Your greatest champion in this house bravoed your actions, there is no need to offer an explanation.”
“Ah, the Colonel,” Elizabeth said, demurely.
“No,” Lady Matlock repeated again, leaving Elizabeth perplexed until Lord Matlock broke the ruse.
“Oh, do tell her, Mathilde. I have sat here the better part of an hour hearing your practiced apologies,” he scoffed.
Elizabeth sat up straighter in the chair, utterly confounded by the exchanges between two members of the aristocracy. She was fond of Lord and Lady Matlock, more than she could claim for any other "lady" or "lord," but the gaps in her understanding of their world taxed her patience.
Lady Matlock stalled by asking Mrs. Darcy if she needed refreshment, but Elizabeth had broken her fast before her visit. Now, she felt nauseated by the smell of food, but found such a feeling a common occurrence to match her nerves.
“I feel this is my cue to leave you ladies, Mrs. Darcy,” Lord Matlock stood up from the table and bowed in his guest's direction.
“Call upon that nephew of yours!” Lady Matlock shouted, as Lord Matlock began to leave the library.
“Shall I not summon him here?”
“Most certainly not! Mrs. Darcy is here!” Lady Matlock shouted back as her husband abandoned them, and the library suddenly fell quiet. Elizabeth managed a weak smile for Lady Matlock when they locked eyes for a moment, but just as she had negotiated with the dressmaker, Elizabeth held her tongue to hear what her ladyship would say.
After again being denied her offer of refreshment, Lady Matlock began with a compliment.
“I was happy to receive your messenger this morning. Without it, I had planned to come call on you,” Lady Matlock said, and Elizabeth lost her patience. Her guilt over the previous night and the troubles with Fitzwilliam afterwards weighed too heavily upon her.
“Please forgive me for dishonoring the family as I did, I am certain my debut last night could not have gone worse than if I had set out deliberately to sabotage it!” Elizabeth confessed, looking down at the table and marveling at the intricate lace design of the covering.
“Did you deliberately set out to sabotage the evening?”
“No! I would never,” Elizabeth assured her ladyship. The Countess of Matlock nodded.
“I believed as much, but I'm afraid my years of experience with your husband, well, let's say I did wonder if he put you up to it,” she explained, pouring another cup from the tea pot, only to blow out a frustrated breath when she realized all of the hot water was gone. Her hand reached for the bell to summon a servant, but as her fingertip grazed the metal, she thought better of it.
Taking a deep breath, her ladyship looked up to stare intently at Mrs. Darcy. “I am afraid that Lord Ravensdale intended mischief last night that did not have a place with my plans, and my friend, kind though she is, has a tendency to try to please too many in their requests,” she said.
“Savvy in the art of politics,” Elizabeth offered the most positive explanation she could as she digested the new information from her aunt by marriage.
“A politician's wife,” Lady Matlock spat, as though she described the height of vulgarity.
Elizabeth's mind swirled with questions. How had her ladyship come to know this? Had Lady Castlereagh intended her harm? Did she even now? Her brow furrowed as she became lost in her thoughts and missed more of Lady Matlock's censure of the situation.
“How Amelia could be so simple as to not think that nephew of hers . . . why when he was a young boy do you know I caught him sneaking into my rooms once while I stayed at Woollett Hall? Dreadful boy, and for him to ask her to assist in meeting you,” Lady Matlock grew angrier and angrier the more she talked about what happened without talking at all about the particulars.
“Pardon me,” Elizabeth dared to interrupt, and Lady Matlock looked relieved. “Did Lord Ravensdale claim we had not met?”
Lady Matlock nodded and Elizabeth laughed.
“But he did meet me, when Georgiana broke her heel. That afternoon!” Elizabeth shared and expanded about how he intimated he was keen to share their meeting with his aunt.
Lady Matlock fumed. She tried to speak, but found her anger to be too strong for her ultimate goals of apologizing to Mrs. Darcy and laying out how they would repair the damage to her reputation. Elizabeth waited a moment as she had seen a similar temper before, but then used the opportunity to speak.
“May I ask a question?”
When Lady Matlock nodded, Elizabeth proceeded. “That door, in the wall in that back drawing room. It was dark, but I think it was bluish behind him. Where does that go?” she asked.
Lady Matlock inhaled sharply. “It is a servant's passage that bypasses the main doors out to the gardens.”
“So he was taking me to get air,” she said, feeling better that her insecurities and anxieties had made her mind run away with fantasies of flight.
“He intended a seduction,” Lady Matlock said simply, removing Elizabeth's opportunity to rationalize Lord Ravensdale's behavior.
She blinked a few times. Lady Matlock nodded slowly at her but Elizabeth shook her head. “How could anyone know for sure?”
Lady Matlock sighed. She rose from the table and walked over to the window to spy the carriage being readied for her husband. With any luck, her husband and son would talk Darcy out of any retribution, but Mrs. Darcy still needed the plain-spoken truth about everything. More so than her husband needed it.
“Because after you and Darcy left, Lord Ravensdale drank prodigiously. He also lost a tidy sum in cards to your uncle. And as his lips loosened, he paid pretty compliments to you, and Lord Matlock did what the man always does. He made Ravensdale believe he was on his side,” Lady Matlock said with frustration as her husband's skills in charm had bested her more times than she wished.
Elizabeth stood, as sitting by herself seemed rather ridiculous. “So was I in danger?”
“Danger? No, not precisely. Ravensdale would never force himself,” Lady Matlock said, not adding that he would never have to stoop to such measures.
“That was not what I believed after he would not let go of my arm,” she countered.
“But that was to get you alone, you see. These parties are all famous for scandal. And it's the festive season . . .” Lady Matlock tried to explain the values and customs of a world that did not exist in Elizabeth’s limited society. The season of Christmas had been festive at Longbourn, with the servants all receiving extra portions of ale and special gifts from the family. But she had never known her parents to partake in parties and assemblies such as those described by Lady Matlock.
She was about to say as much, but then recalled a flash of memories from her childhood before she and Jane were considered out in society, a year her father insisted the girls share together. Her father had once come home late one night, without their mother, claiming she was staying with her sister Phillips. The next day, Mrs. Bennet returned, but it was not in the carriage Elizabeth recognized as her aunt's, it was one owned by the Longs, before the accident orphaned the two sisters, Clara and Bernice. She didn't know why this memory suddenly came to her, but the time of year and strange awkwardness she observed between her parents seemed to demand for a new understanding from an adult perspective.
Elizabeth closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. Her world had changed too fast and she needed her sister, Jane, more than ever. Was Jane's life in Hertfordshire so complicated as all of this? And would her life remain this frustrating once they removed themselves to Derbyshire and resided at Pemberley?
Too many answers eluded her, and Elizabeth found herself longing for a trip home to Hertfordshire, even though she had left there just a week ago.
“And now, we need to decide on a way to fix it,” Lady Matlock said, with a finality that shocked Elizabeth out of her own thoughts.
“Fix what?” Elizabeth asked, unashamed to reveal she had not been carefully attending.
“Your reputation, of course. Yes, Ravensdale deserved that punch splashed in his face, and I suspect Richard has a few other unpleasantries planned for the Twelfth Night Ball when he comes—”
“You mean Lord Ravensdale will be here?” Elizabeth sputtered, grasping the nearest chair for a small reassurance to her balance.
Lady Matlock eyed her curiously, but did not fawn concern over the young woman.
“To ban him would escalate the story beyond our imaginations. No, no, the most elegant solution is the simplest one. You will donate to the music society Amelia is enamoured with at the moment. She will rave about your patronage. You won't have to worry about Ravensdale at my ball, and afterwards, you and Darcy can remove to the country even though I do think that is a mistake.”
“My husband cannot tolerate London. We should leave for Pemberley sooner,” Elizabeth said, surprising herself with such a suggestion.
“The ball is in two days' time, surely he can tolerate his own home in Mayfair that long.”
Elizabeth blanched. “Will we need to attend another night out?” she asked and Lady Matlock gazed at her with incredulity.
“Dinner, at Lady Jersey's, remember? That's where Lady Castlereagh will expound upon your incredible gifts to society and we will patch up this small rut in the road. By next year, your throwing of punch into Lord Ravensdale's face might even be a funny anecdote, if anyone remembers it at all.”
Elizabeth crossed her arms. “And what if I should refuse? What if I go back home and Fitzwilliam wishes for us to leave, this day, to go to Pemberley?”
“You stop him.”
Elizabeth threw her hands up in exasperation.
“Have your courses come in the last few weeks?” Lady Matlock asked, and Elizabeth shook her head in an immediate response of honesty. “Then you claim you are indisposed, you cannot travel.”
Elizabeth ignored the plan Lady Matlock suggested, and spoke softly. “My courses have not come since before my wedding,”
Both women gasped, and Elizabeth's hands absently cradled her small midsection that did not yet show any sign of increase.
“It is too early to tell, but come February or March, you shall know without question,” Lady Matlock offered her nephew's wife the calculations off the top of her head. She could not be certain they did not anticipate the wedding bed, as she and Lord Matlock most certainly had, and her niece's penchant for walking kept her figure thin enough that Mrs. Darcy might feel the quickening sooner than later.
“Why would it be a mistake to leave London?” Elizabeth asked, her hands not moving from her midsection, and knowing the time she trespassed on Lady Matlock's morning was nearing an end.
Lady Matlock walked over to the table and rang the bell. Almost instantly, the heavy wooden door opened and a maid and footman appeared.
“Please ready a room for Mrs. Darcy above stairs. She will take a rest before returning to Darcy House,” Lady Matlock said and Elizabeth waited until the servants were gone before she argued.
“I am not too tired to travel home. It's less than a half hour by carriage,” Elizabeth stated. “And I am not tired, I do not need a rest.”
“It's for the benefit of my nephew. If he insists you leave tomorrow like a fool, you can claim indisposition.” Lady Matlock tilted her head askance at the young woman before her, wondering why the machinations they were putting in place were so foreign to her.
Elizabeth stamped her foot, and Lady Matlock raised an eyebrow at the woman's sign of temper. “I still do not understand why we must stay in London?”
Clucking her tongue, Lady Matlock walked up to Elizabeth and took pity on the lack of understanding once she realized it was ignorance, and not insolence on her part. “Let us pretend for a moment you are carrying your husband's child. His heir?”
Elizabeth sucked in a breath, and Lady Matlock agreed with what such a moment meant to any young bride: a mixture of joy, anxiousness, fear, and resignation.
“Pretend he is one and twenty and you are looking for him to marry,” she continued, then stopped herself acknowledging it was difficult for someone barely that same age to think that far ahead. “Never mind that, the truth is the Darcy children will come, judging by how affixed you and my nephew are upon each other. A whole brood of them, if you are healthy and lucky. And in those years, your husband can easily remove himself to little more than a country squire.”
Laughing out loud at such a prognostication, as Elizabeth had been to Pemberley and seen the grandeur of the estate, Elizabeth shook her head. To imagine a master of such a land as Pemberly be thought of as no higher than her father's position in society, bordered on the ridiculous.
“You laugh, but listen. I am the Countess of Matlock because the coffers needed it. Why? Because a silly offense at a dinner in '62 cost the Fitzwilliam family the favor of the Norfolks. And with that favor went the investments in shipping, until your husband's grandfather made some desperate attempts in elevating companies with capital he could not afford to lose."
“My husband is brilliant. He would not make hasty decisions,” Elizabeth defended Mr. Darcy's prowess but Lady Matlock shook her head as she began to lead Mrs. Darcy to the door.
“You cannot know for certain what mistakes my nephew might make in different circumstances than he is in now. Surely, by now, you have seen the man does make mistakes?”
Elizabeth paused as the door opened and a maid appeared to help her up to the room for her rest that she suddenly felt was not unwelcome as it was a quarter-hour ago. Her mind rushed to the recollection of the previous evening, and how she still had not seen her husband since she left before he rose that morning. And there was the lines of the letter she had read, the contents of which she would not admit to Lady Matlock. Or anyone, for that matter, it was too shameful for her to even speak of her husband's lack of belief in her abilities.
As Elizabeth left the library with the maid, Lady Matlock directed her staff to send a note to Darcy House, explaining Mrs. Darcy's predicament. Taking the stairs of Matlock House with one hand on the railing and the other aided by a fetching footman, Elizabeth tried to give some semblance of frailty. She wondered if her husband wouldn't come rushing over at the moment of receiving the note, but then her thoughts turned meanly in his direction. From the last she saw of him, Mr. Darcy was in no condition to rush anywhere to rescue anyone. Least of all, her.
Yes, Mr. Darcy of Pemberley in Derbyshire made mistakes.