Page 52 of The Fee Entail

Naturally, Jane stood to go and scold him as he no doubt deserved over his manners, but I took hold of her shoulder and squeezed it until she looked at me, then I just looked back at her chair until she went back. I was going to have to talk to her about that fiery temper one day. She seemed as if she had stored up twenty-two years of temper before the ball and had to get it all out before it burned her up.

I just went over to Richard, gave him a big sisterly hug, and told him it would all work out in the end. That is what you have sisters for, to smooth your way through life, to ease your burdens with the gentler sex, to calm you down enough to think.

Mary naturally rapped him on the forehead three or four times with her knuckles. “Lunkhead.”

Now that we had dispensed with hugs and sticks, and he seemed a bit calmer, Mary put on her thinking cap and started asking questions, as expected.

“Richard, you say she disliked you almost immediately, yet unless I am very much mistaken, you seem to have taken a shine to her.”

He looked thunderous. “Do not speak of her in such a flippant manner. I am in love for the first time in my life, and I intend for it to be the last.”

We all gasped at his audacity, but Darcy said, “Good man!”

“How so, Fitzwilliam?”

“Had I done that at the first assembly back in Meryton, things would have turned out very differently. Even had I come to my senses at any time in the first six weeks, things would be better. Richard knows all he needs to know. If this lady will have him, I approve in advance. Anyone capable of delivering a set-down like Elizabeth is much to my liking.”

That statement naturally got Mary thinking again. “What do you mean, a set-down like Elizabeth?”

Darcy chuckled. “Richard, pray repeat that set-down word for word. I know it is burnt into your memory complete with every nuance and inflexion, is it not?”

“How do you know that?”

“Take my word for it. Now quit wool-gathering.”

As asked, Richard told us word for word, and true to Fitzwilliam’s surmise, he did a pitch-perfect impression, and it did sound an awful lot like Lizzy.

Mary, smart girl that she was, finally asked the painfully obvious question. “Richard, did you ever in this entire debacle actually get her name?”

We were all smacking our foreheads in consternation at our idiocy, then gasped in surprise when he answered, “Miss Charlotte Lucas, and her ward is Miss Betsy Clymer.”

Mary said, “Nooooo!” while the rest of us just stared.

I was so agitated I could hardly get a word in. “She is from Meryton and is very well known to us.”

Mary was still sitting next to him, and she reached up to rap him on the head again, but decided to give him a hug instead.

“Charlotte is our best friend in the world, and she has wanted marriage and a family forever. She is usually considered ‘on the shelf’, a dreadful term if there ever was one. She once told me felicity in marriage was entirely a matter of chance, and it was best to know as little of your suitor as possible. Something dreadful must have happened if she is on her way to Scotland, and she will not visit Rosings, or even consider an obviously besotted son of an earl. If you told her your name, she would know exactly who you are. What are you leaving out, Richard?”

“Did I mention she is a few months with child and has no husband?”

He might as well have thrown a basket of ants on the sofa, as pandemonium ensued, with everyone talking, exclaiming, and hypothesising over the top of each other all at once.

We were silenced by a surprising voice. “Richard, why is this poor girl not sitting in my parlour as we speak?”

We all looked up at Aunt Catherine, who had glided into the room unnoticed, and we were all happy for her presence. She was certainly not an intrusion, and she calmed the proceedings immediately.

“She will not come. She expects the usual reaction for a woman in your position, and she has a strong aversion to my presence. She plans to leave on the morrow for Scotland.”

“She most certainly will not! What is her demeanour, aside from intelligent enough to avoid you? Think, boy!”

Not in the least perturbed by being chastised, he said, “She is nervous… very, very nervous… agitated in fact—at least in my presence—and she—”

He stopped talking abruptly, trying to recall the scene exactly, which I thought might be helpful, as in his agitation I was nearly certain he had only told half the story, mostly out of order and scrambled.

Finally, he said, “She is strong. Not just physically, but in spirit, but it has been damaged. She practically shuddered every time she glanced at me, which she mostly avoided.”

Mary said, “So, the missing natural father is a soldier!”