Nameless by Julie Cooper
Chapter Twenty-Six
Istood silent in my surprise, and turned to Mr Darcy.
His jaw firmed, the only movement in his otherwise rigid posture. But something in what Lord Cavendish had said struck me as significant: “Cease protecting a woman who is dead and buried.”
Why in heaven’s name would he protect Anne de Bourgh at the expense of his current wife and future children’s happiness? I did not understand; but then, he would not allow me to. A wave of what might have been despair—and what was certainly anger—threatened my peace of mind. I wanted to storm out of the room like Lord Cavendish, perhaps throw things in my fury. I wanted to rage at him for all those secrets he held so dear. Somehow, I forced myself to calm.
Instead, sighing, I went to the settee nearest the hearth, sitting in front of the fire and staring into the flames. I did not know what he would do—leave, or go back to his desk and his letters and papers and pretend the conversation had not happened? Or, perhaps, was this why he had wanted me to stay for Lord Cavendish’s call—so that I would be forewarned how it would be? So that I would more willingly leave him? It was most disheartening.
However, he did none of those things. After several silent moments, he took a seat close beside me. Even, he took my hand in his own much larger one. It was so unexpected—and I was so relieved, after my dreary thoughts—that I scooted nearer to him, laying my head upon his shoulder.
“You have questions, I am certain, about Anne’s death. Because you have never asked them, I once thought you did not care to know the answers. Or, perhaps, you were afraid of the answers. I want you to know that I no longer believe either of those suppositions to be true. I rather believe you have patiently granted me my privacy until such time as I would more readily tell you the truth.”
“Not always patiently,” I admitted.
He let go of my hand to reach his arm around me, drawing me more firmly into his embrace. I could hear his heart thundering beneath my ear, the only sign of his distress. “In order to explain what I know of it, I must now mention circumstances which I would wish to forget myself, and which no obligation less than my duty to you should induce me to unfold to any human being. Having said this much, I feel no doubt of your secrecy.”
I nodded, feeling his lips brush briefly against the side of my head. His phrasing puzzled me—‘what I know of it’? Did he not know all? Some moments passed as he seemed to struggle to put his thoughts into words.
“The end began, I suppose, the afternoon she marched into my chambers and announced that she was ready to bear my child.”
I blinked up at him, and he grimaced. “She was expert at impediments to pregnancy, and had made it clear on our wedding night that she did not mean to have children any time soon.”
“Oh,” I said. “I was not aware there were ways to prevent it.”
“They are not always effective, but if one is cautious enough, they might be. I suppose I ought to have told you of them, in case you wished to delay. I am afraid I have been selfish, hoping to make a family with you.”
“I have no wish for delay,” I replied, looking away. “But…perhaps you are disappointed that I have not yet conceived.”
He tipped my chin up and bent to kiss me, a deep tenderness within the motion. “Of course not,” he said at last. “If it is to be only you and me, I will still be the happiest of men. There is nothing you could do to displease me, except to lose all patience with me.”
A weight lifted, a worry I had never acknowledged slipping away. I took a deep breath, and let it go. “So, she proclaimed her readiness for motherhood,” I said. “Did that cause so great a disgust within you? As you had not repudiated her, she could have become with child in any of her, er, liaisons, bringing you another man’s offspring.”
He let out a long sigh. “I suppose I should start even further back in time—when I learned exactly what pleasing her in the bedchamber required. I hope you will forgive me for being so coarse, but I fear you will not understand unless I am exceedingly blunt. She had a-a disgust of tenderness. She wished…she wished for pain.”
“What?” I looked up at him with some confusion; I did not understand. He explained further, though trying for delicacy. I had never in my life heard of such doings, and I confessed my revulsion.
“I admit, I do not truly understand either. I have known some, however, who have predilections that are unusual, and it does not render them evil, if both partners are willing. I will also acknowledge that I tried to-to more gently administer the punishments she demanded. It only infuriated her. I could not do it. What she needed in order to be, er, satiated, ruined every part of the union for me. We were as unsuited to be man and wife as two people could possibly be. I believed it was why she was unfaithful, you see. That she sought out partners who possessed similar…preferences.”
I shook my head, not in disbelief, but incredulity. It was too strange. And then an awful thought occurred to me. “Both Wickham and Mrs de Bourgh claimed to have hinted to the neighbourhood of your supposed abuse of Mrs Darcy. Could it be that she encouraged such abuse, and then blamed you for it?”
“For most of our marriage, she was extremely discreet, but that last year, well…yes, it became something of a game to her, hinting to others at the reasons for her bruises. My reputation was being slowly shattered.”
“You sound defensive of her choices, but she harmed you,” I shuddered. “However… titillating, I cannot believe violence, especially intimate violence, to be healthy or natural.”
“No, no, I do not mean to sound as though I endorsed her preferences; I only wish to make you understand that it was not her predilections upon which my dislike was founded. Long before I discovered her first affair, my opinion of her was decided. It was her insensitivity, her manipulations, her disloyalty and arrogance, her conceit and selfish disdain for the feelings of others, which were such as to form that groundwork of disapprobation, on which succeeding events built to an immoveable dislike. I found nothing, utterly nothing, I could respect in her, and her sexual preferences were the least of it.”
There was little I could say to this. I felt awful for what he had endured, and continued to endure, at her hands. I could only tuck myself in closer within his sheltering arms, and hope he could feel relief within that simple connexion. After several moments of silence, he spoke again.
“But as I told you, she approached me in my chambers boldly demanding a child. I am still dumbfounded by her tactic, as she usually showed great skill in conversation, especially in manipulation of a person from whom she wanted something. Upon reflection, I am convinced that by that point, she no longer truly even saw me as a man, only as an object controlling something she wished to be hers.”
“What did she say to you?”
“‘In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I wish my child to be a Darcy,’” he repeated woodenly.
I flinched at her tastelessness.
“I was beyond expression. I stared, coloured, doubted, and was silent. This she considered sufficient encouragement, and then was not more eloquent on the subject of my suitability for fatherhood than of her deeply rooted dislike. She hated me, my judgmental attitudes, my inability to allow her the freedoms she required. In one sentence, she expressed how much she wished her children to be handsome, intelligent, responsible, and constant, as she admitted my virtues; in the next, how she had struggled to conquer any such consideration. She had nearly allowed Wickham to get her with child a dozen times, she said, wholly for the delicious irony of it. But his birth was not high enough, and she demanded better blood in any child of hers.”
I felt sickened, his tone impassive as he continued his revelations, and could only stroke his broad chest in a small attempt at comfort.
“I was disgusted, as you might imagine. I attempted, at first, to simply end the conversation, but she was determined to press on, until I was roused to such resentment as I could hardly bear. Incredibly enough, I could easily see that she had no doubt of a favourable answer. She spoke of wishing forgiveness for her past indiscretions—and anxiety lest I could not give it—but her countenance expressed real security, so certain was she that I longed for a child of my own. She did not understand that I had discarded any such dreams years before.”
“How did you respond?”
He sighed again. “I thought it most likely that she was already with child. Believe me, I had considered the possibility a thousand times. And despite her denunciation of his birth and station, I thought it even odds it was Wickham’s get—I had heard rumours he was in the area, and I had no doubt she had been with him. But one cannot possess a faithless wife and fail to plan for such an outcome. I had already determined what I would do years before. To tell you the truth, it was almost a relief that the day had finally come, I had dreaded it for so long. And it was not so bad, truly, as I had once believed it would be. My feelings towards her had ceased to be full of hurt or hatred—mostly indifference.”
“What had you decided?” I asked, curious. “There are probably not a dozen men in the kingdom who could greet such news with apathy.”
“Not apathy, not really. Only a sort of fatalistic acceptance. I told her that I would welcome a child, but it would never be my own. I had already made my will. Pemberley would go to Georgiana and her heirs, if any, but I promised I would not openly repudiate any children she brought to me, that I would see to their education and careers, and if female, their settlements. That I would protect them from her choices and lack of character to the extent that I could, that she could live at Pemberley, or any other Darcy property, for my lifetime only—and never in the same home as they would live. That she would be left with everything she brought to the marriage, less those settlements, but nothing more. I could not think it right that either she or her children inherit the Darcy fortune. I still had some hope, you see, that Georgiana’s marriage could, eventually, be salvaged, that perhaps this legacy might even motivate them to resolve their difficulties.”
This was all very astonishing to me, for while ruining her, it also would completely ruin the discretion he had hitherto fought so hard to maintain. How it must have infuriated her, to have the tables turned and to find herself a victim of her own scheming! I hardly knew how to respond. “Her settlement allowed for that outcome?”
“Her settlement was poorly written and my attorneys, whom I trusted, took advantage. I did not mean for it to be so, but by the time I was searching for possibilities, I saw them easily enough.”
“She was angry, I take it.”
“Oh, quite. I had believed, when I planned for this very conversation, that I would feel revenged at best, satisfaction at least. But I felt nothing at all. Resignation, I suppose, while she railed at me. I told her that if I could feel gratitude for a single word she uttered, I would thank her for her opinion of my character—but that I had long since ceased to care. I succeeded only in enraging her. Sometimes I hear her furious words echoing in my dreams.
“‘This, then, is your opinion of me!’ she said. ‘This is the estimation in which you hold your own wife! I thank you for explaining it so fully. My faults, according to your calculation, are heavy indeed! However, my offences might have been overlooked, had not your pride been hurt by my honest confessions. These bitter accusations might have been suppressed, had I with greater policy concealed my desires, my needs, instead flattering you into the belief of my being impelled by unqualified, unalloyed inclination—by reason, by reflection, by everything. But I am unashamed of my feelings, when you threaten to rob me of my future. They are natural and just.’”
His voice, even in the retelling, rang with her remembered passion.
“I do not understand her expectations,” I admitted. “Most men would have thrown her out.”
“Why should she have expected anything except my compliance? Our history together had proven to her that she would have her way, no matter the provocation. What did I do when she lay with my own sister’s husband? Nothing. Nothing at all. Had I expelled her in the past, she might not have grown so vain and heedless. I was completely emasculated in her eyes. I cannot even blame her for her conclusions. It is only with time that I have been able to see it all.”
Protests rose to my tongue—she had manipulated him and abused him. Perhaps, legally, he held all the power, yet emotionally she had managed to entangle and entrap him until he was under her thumb. But he would not like for me to point out how he had been vulnerable and maltreated. “You did what you thought was best at the time, and tried to honour your vows and your moral code irrespective of hers. Did you tell her to leave then?”
“No. Only that she could not have made me the offer of bearing a child in any possible way that would have tempted me to give her one of my own. Even then, I reassured her that I would certainly do my best to care well for any children were she to bear someone else’s. Even then.”
There was so much self-reproach in his words. I lifted my head again to look at him, but he would not meet my eyes, so I raised my hand to his cheek and moved him so he would have to. “Listen to me: at one of the worst times of your life, your thoughts were of innocent children for whom you would be legally responsible. Why do you castigate yourself for it?”
He only sighed again. “It all sounds so impossible now, to say these words aloud. Impossible and shameful. I ought not to have burdened you with them, when they are like poisonous water in my belly. It makes me ill to remember.”
“Then I shall ask Mr Donavan for a poultice. They do not render me ill. I am as fit as I ever was, except for knowing that your first wife was an even greater dunderhead than I first thought.”
He shook his head at my impertinence, for it was nothing less, but something lightened in his expression as he told me the rest of it. “At last she played her final card. If I would not give her the Darcy child she required, there would be a scandal to end all scandals. I would be known as an impotent weakling before the world. She would destroy my sister’s marriage, finish her work of destroying my reputation. She threatened everything I had feared since first beginning to learn of her character. She promised complete and utter humiliation, for me, for Georgiana and Bingley, for the earl and his family.”
I did not interrupt; his words were coming faster now, as those poisonous betrayals slipped from his soul.
“But she had waited too long. Of what had I to be proud? My life was a lie. Pemberley and its happiness, its advantages, were lies. I truly was a weakling. Too many already believed me to be an abuser. The earl would still be an earl, and could weather any storm. Georgiana’s marriage was in ruins regardless. I, to whom disguise of every sort was an abhorrence, had participated in, even encouraged, one of massive proportions. I would no longer.” He took a deep breath, and slowly exhaled.
“I told her that I would take Georgiana travelling for a time. We would do our own Grand Tour, and if Anne wished to ruin herself, her name, her reputation and standing amongst the ton while we were away, it was entirely up to her.”
I nodded. In my opinion, he had hardly exercised an eighth of the authority he had over her, but it simply was not in his nature. He did not understand her, had never loved her, had grieved that he could not make her happy to the point of allowing great personal mistreatment, and, finally, allowed her to become irrelevant—leaving her to her own destruction, while attending to the sister he believed to be hurt by his mistakes.
“It sounds like an excellent plan,” I agreed. “I can hardly imagine a different solution, truthfully. Her lies, obviously, had taken on some peculiar sort of reality—she appears to have learnt to believe them. I suppose she did not care for your decision, though.”
“An understatement. She erupted in fury—that is when she told me that she had first betrayed our marriage vows on our wedding day, and gave me multiple particulars regarding her proclivities and many paramours that I wish I did not know. But something happened within me, as she spewed her threats and filth. Instead of alarming or destroying me, she only became more weak and wretched in my eyes.”
“She was pitiful,” I agreed. “I suppose it proves the old adage, ‘Wickedness never was happiness’.”
“Indeed,” he concurred. “I once saw her as a force to be reckoned with, as a woman of great charisma and talents. I do not understand why she tossed away those gifts, but they had become illusory. I advised her that she was growing too old to maintain the sham by outward appearances alone, and if she did not take great care, all her charms would vanish with her youth and beauty.” He appeared thoughtful for a moment. “You know, I believed myself perfectly calm and cool at the time, but I revealed a dreadful bitterness of spirit.”
“I hardly think anyone could be blamed for a little bitterness, in such a situation,” I offered.
“Perhaps not. But at any rate, that was when she turned, picked up a sharpened fire-iron, and attempted to run me through with it.”