The Secret Mrs Darcy, page 1
part #1 of Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet Conjured Anew Series
Contents
Prologue
Nacogdoches
The Cabin
Inside
Pemberley
Longbourn
Dining at Longbourn
The Library
The Dark Wing
Letters
Stranded in Pemberley
The Coach
The Desert
Netherfield
The Cottage
The Deck
Dining at Netherfield
A Moonlight Walk
A Dark Morning
A Proposal
A Dark Day
Black Horses
Mistress of Pemberley
A Family Home
A Shocking Sight
Riding Out
A Race
Luncheon With Guests
Remaining Hopes
Fading Light
Preparations
The Ball
A Surprise
A Private Interview
Miss Bingley
An Urgent Matter
Epilogue
Epilogue - completed
A good marriage. Can that really be too much to hope for?
When Elizabeth Bennet travels with her sister Jane from Mississippi to the middle of Texas, a good marriage is all that she is dreaming of. Now she knows that it is the one thing she can never have.
Far from her Mississippi home and almost alone in the strange and alien landscape of Texas, Elizabeth Bennet finds herself compelled to marry a man who she finds entirely unsuitable. A marriage for sweet love had been her secret dream, but in the 1880s, it seems an unlikely prospect for a young lady of slender means.
All of her hopes are dashed by the man she is compelled to marry. Too arrogant, too opinionated, and altogether too handsome by half, Mr. Darcy is not at all what she was expecting when she and her sister Jane traveled from Mississippi.
Her sister Jane, on the other hand finds her own suitor most eminently suitable, but Mr. Bingley’s sister Caroline is eager to help but seems always to draw the couple farther apart instead of helping them to come together.
Perhaps romance can bloom in 188s Texas. Maybe it could if it weren’t for pride, presumption, prejudice and misunderstanding. That and the endless scheming interference of others. Can there be any hope for the two pairs of lovers?
The Secret Mrs. Darcy is a 62,000-word novel of sweet and clean delight.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 BY Georgina Peel, GPJ Publishing
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
The characters are all productions of the author’s imagination, apart from those characters and locations so famously bequeathed to us by Jane Austen.
Thank you, Jane Austen.
Photography:
Jyotirmoy Gupta
Michael Weidner
Prologue
JANE, DEAREST SISTER, TRULY, I believe that I must take all of the responsibility for the awful circumstances in which we now find ourselves. Not that it will help in the least toward releasing either of us from our imprisonments. It is so hard for us to be apart, Jane.
Of course that, sweet sister, is the worst distress of all for me. That my foolishness has brought you to this state and that now I am unable even to see you or to share these moments with you. Dark though many of them may be, and I cannot say which of us has the worse of it, you or I, but for myself at least, every instant would have been be immeasurably lighter if only I were able to clasp your hand and to see the light in your eyes.
It is a sore grief in any case to even consider that Mama may have been right in her warnings to us. Surely there is little that could be worse. I believe that I dread that thought almost as much as I would dread her coming to make good on her promise to visit. Which level of shame and humiliation would be the harder to endure, Jane? The situations in which Mama would find the two of us, or the lengthy and minutely detailed recount she would recite for us of all the warnings that she gave before we departed for parts unknown on this wild and hare-brained caper? Not to mention all the great store of fresh advice that she would feel be bound to craft and repeat for us both.
You should know that where I am kept is a place of sumptuous splendor, more comfortable than anything that either of us has ever known or dreamed of. I should be thankful for that, Jane, and I am. Truly.
I can never forget, though that it has come at the expense of my whole future. All of the possibilities, the great and small joys and delights that I may have expected from my life, they now are all dwindled to a single, narrow path. A long and straight walk through a barren world. A dry and dark gray passage.
As you well know, such a man could make many young women envy me. Indeed, we know of those who do, who have made designs upon him. For his formidably handsome stature alone, his stone jaw, his high, sharp cheekbones, the fire in his eyes and the thunder that rumbles beneath his voice, not to mention his almost mythical wealth. All those things coupled with his athletic energy and his huge, nimble hands would recommend him to any young lady. As we know, a number of such would take him if they could.
His integrity is well-known, of course. That is beyond question. His manners remain impeccable but he loathes me, Jane, and I don’t know if my feelings toward him could ever alter for the better. And what life is that? Well, it is the life that I have and, when I am not listing my weary woes to you, darling sister, I am concentrating every spark of energy that I have into making the very best of it. Without seeing you, though, all the time wondering how you are feeling and how you are coping with your own situation, I cannot ever truly be at peace. Not for a moment.
There are times here, I must confess it, when I feel as though I have condemned myself to an endless incarceration. My consolation is the hope that I still have for you, Jane. The possibilities are still open for you and you may yet make, though I hate to use Mama’s phrase, ‘a good marriage.’
In some dark moments, I have even wondered about the wisdom of my haste in evading Mr. Collins’ efforts to engineer an interview. Maybe I was wrong in thinking that he would have made a proposition to me, but truly I doubt it. I am still sure that was his intention. Perhaps I should have allowed him to make an offer.
Maybe, Jane, I should have stayed in Pass Christian and accepted Mr. Collins as a decent man. Accepted him and taken him to be my… no, I cannot even write the word. No, Jane. That could never be. I cannot say if what I have now is very much better than that would have been, but I am sure that it is no worse.
Your situation may feel like an imprisonment for you, too, Jane, although I hope sincerely that it does not. I believe that yours will be a better outcome, darling sister. I really am sure that your position will turn around to be for the best. There is surely still a way in which it may be transformed and turn out to become all that you had hoped it would be. It can happen for you, Jane. That hope sustains me and I really am sure it is true.
I still can not bring myself to believe that the gentleman whose sweet smile greeted us, who bounded out to welcome us at the railroad depot and lit up at the first sight of your face could have had a single false intention in his heart. Nor that his true and honest feelings for you could have been swayed by so much as an inch.
From the very second that he saw you and all of the time that we rode in the carriage together, he could not peel his eyes from your smile and he was obviously as happy as a dog with two tails.
Perhaps the people in these strange parts really are so very different from the good folks of Mississippi. More different than either of us could possibly have guessed. Can it be so? They are wily, for sure, and forthright and sometimes even loud, but can it be that they would all be so scheming and deceitful? I cannot believe it.
No, I will not allow it. Not for an instant. Hopeless though everything may seem now, and I cannot deny that I have been close to despair for more hours than I would wish to count, I feel sure that there is cause for hope. Some whole other explanation will spring at us like a Jack in the box or the rabbit pulled from a magician’s top hat.
Something more innocent and wholesome has driven these awful turns of fate. The meaning of them must be something far less heartless than what you and I have feared.
For myself, I know that I have made the rashest judgement and this is at the root of it all. This is why I feel that all of the blame lies squarely at my feet alone. Only with me. You acted only to follow an innocent whim, Jane. You had an open-hearted impulse when you reacted to the note in the newspaper and your playful heart was true. It was I who dove in with both of my clodhopping feet and rushed to plan the next steps.
You alone know that all I had hoped for, all that I wanted for myself at least, was a good marriage. Or at any rate, a decent one.
A perfect marriage clearly must have been far too much to ask.
It was I who leaped to join in with what I’m quite sure may have amounted to no more than an innocent game on your part. Had I left well alone, maybe that is how it would all have remained. I can imagine a number of ways that all could have turned out for the best were it not for my idiotic interference.
Or perhaps you would have taken a different course altogether. You might well have come on your own and you could have been met with a far better situation. No, Jane, my over-eager determination to attach myself to your adventure, that is where ev
It has been some days now since I sent a letter to you, darling sister. Not because I don’t think of you, that could never be. No, it is because, while I greet each morning with all of the energy that I can muster, when I sit down to write to you at the end of the day, an all consuming wave of emotion comes over me as I feel how very much I miss you. Then, as I sit to write, my pen is driven to say all of the things that I have not said in the daylight hours. Even the things I have not allowed myself to think.
You are my confidant as you always have been and so, Jane, it is as always to you that I tell the feelings that are deepest in my heart. It is to you that I write my longings, my fears and all of my regrets. Knowing your situation as I do, so painfully, I cannot burden you with a letter like that, like this and so, darling Jane, this will be the third letter I have written for you, and a third that I will not send.
And there is the other thing. Of course. The thing that I must tell you. This is the real reason I have written these many letters and then in the end not dispatched any of them to you. It is always when I get to the point of addressing this most pressing matter that the words melt away and flee from me entirely and I become unable to go on.
What I have to tell it to you, my main and most urgent reason for writing but, dearest Jane, I do not for the life of me know how to begin to say it.
Nacogdoches
A COLUMN OF THIN white steam puffed lazily up out of the sighing red locomotive. Two passenger cabooses and a goods van clanked and clicked, creaking in the wide, washed out plain.
Nobody was there to board the train and only two passengers clambered out. Two young ladies, each holding their bonnets with one hand and their skirts with the other. They squinted into the midday sun as they stepped down, cautious and unsure.
From the sparse, red-painted railroad depot, a young man strode briskly into the dazzling sunlight. Eager and dapper, he wore a tall hat and a maroon frock coat. The spring in his step and the gleam in his eye beamed energetically while at the same time, he squinted shyly. His smile was wide and handsome even if it stretched a little tight.
He blinked as he thrust his hand forward.
“Welcome to Nacogdoches, young ladies. Are you the two young ladies…” He didn’t stammer exactly, it was more that his words were in such a hurry to get out that they tripped over each other. When he caught sight of Jane, following down the steps from the car after Elizabeth, he colored and his chest swelled.
Stepping back to take in a better view of the two sisters, the young man looked earnestly into Elizabeth’s face but his eyes flickered over her shoulder as he asked her, “Are you… is one of you Miss Jane?”
Elizabeth’s heart jumped. There should surely be two young gentlemen. Her instinct told her that this was not the man she was expecting or the one whom, she hoped, should be expecting her. She stood on tiptoe to peer across the shoulders of the smiling young man. As she rose, her spirit sagged.
Nacogdoches railroad depot was washed out in the blaze of the Texas sun but as Elizabeth Bennet raised her hand, sheathed in a white lace glove, to shield her eyes from the glare, she saw only one carriage. There was nobody else here to meet the train.
Clouds of white steam drifted out and back from the locomotive. The hiss and clanking, ticking metal was a lull after the shudder and clatter of the train. Hot steam and the bright haze added to her sense of displacement.
New horizons stretched around an alien landscape. This air in this inland patch of arid Texas smelled dry. It was dusty. Unlike the coast of Mississippi or the wetlands of Louisiana. The brush of the hot breeze lifted the peak of her bonnet and she squinted against the harsh light. Following her down the steps, Jane put cheer into her voice with an effort that Elizabeth felt more than she heard it.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, as Mama would say,” Elizabeth turned but could only blink against the dazzling light, “Two young ladies, tired and far from home, must be in want of a warm welcome, a comfortable carriage, and happy homes for their destination.” Jane’s parody of their Mama cheered Elizabeth and raised both of their weary spirits. Inside the railcar had been hot and dry.
The bracing novelty of travel at such extreme and unfamiliar speed and the constant rattling shake of the carriage had stretched their nerves the last four hours.
Change in dress styles and manners as the train passed through Louisiana and into the famous Lone Star State made Elizabeth realize how much she would have to adapt to deal with people and a society she knew nothing of, nothing at all. She feared she may have bitten off more than she could chew when she decided to venture into this strange land, believing she could make her way. She wondered now if she had been right to have put such a faith in her own ability and strength to bring the two of them here.
It might be said that the decision to come had been Jane's and, as the older sister, the responsibility might fall to her, but Elizabeth was under no illusion. What brought the two of them here had been the enthusiasm that she had put into the scheme herself. Whatever fateful consequences there might be would be hers to bear, whether anyone else knew it or not. Where Jane had wavered, she had taken her confidence from Elizabeth.
She felt empty, as though she was to blame for her sister and herself traveling for long, dusty hours to the precise middle of nowhere at all. The mournful train whistle sounded, readying to depart and leave them. She knew that it urged her to hurry. To step down and disembark. Instead, the sound stirred an irrational urge to turn back, to leave with the train.
She stepped down with a feeling that the forward motion of her whole life might depart with the locomotive and leave her behind. The mournful whistle seemed to signal her last chance to change her mind before it chugged away to the far horizon without her.
Jane’s dry and bleached complexion and the narrow squint of her tired eyes seemed to mirror Elizabeth’s own fatigue. She adored her sister’s determination to make light of their circumstance, to anticipate the best. And, she was sure, nobody but she would see past the glow of Jane’s fresh loveliness to notice the strain and stress in the corners of her eyes.
Her eyes in any case were alight now. The young man who came to greet them certainly brought a welcome for Jane and it was one that lifted her and revived her.
A red-faced railroad man and a lanky porter had kindly heaved the trunks from the train and piled them with their cases at the side of the tracks. Looking around, all that Elizabeth saw was the train, the depot, and a seemingly endless expanse of reddish flat land and scrub.
Jane’s joyous gasp was unmistakable, seeing the young man who greeted them with such warmth and enthusiasm. His open smile was certainly the most welcome sight they had seen since they departed from Meryton two whole days ago but Jane was transported even more by the sight of him now. Understandably, since his smile was very much for her.
