Page 29 of Mr Darcy’s Inconvenient Wife

Chapter Fourteen

Darcy

“Mr Collins, I beg you! The poor little thing has been crying this quarter of an hour, and you know I cannot go down there. I cannot!”

Darcy stopped on the path. He had come out of the house for no better reason than that he could not stay in it. Miss Elizabeth had turned her back on him in front of half of Meryton, and he had not the least idea why. He had wanted cold air and a quarter of an hour in which nobody would expect him to smile.

He had not bargained for Mrs Bennet.

She was standing at the corner of the house where the kitchen garden began, with one hand clamped on Mr Collins's sleeve. With the other she was pointing at a low door set into the wall near the ground. It stood a little open. Beyond it, a flight of stone steps went down into the dark.

“It is the Lucases' youngest,” she went on. “She wandered in some minutes ago. I called to her to come out but she has not the sense to find her way out. I am so glad I saw you walking nearby to fetch you. Oh, you must come to her aid. You know how I suffer, Mr Collins. My nerves will not stand a cellar. The damp alone would be the end of me.”

Mr Collins looked at the doorway as though it might bite him. “I should not like to seem unobliging, madam. But I wonder whether a man in my position... that is to say, whether one of the servants might not be better suited...”

“The servants! And leave that poor child down there with the rats while we go looking for one?” Mrs Bennet put a hand in the middle of his back and shoved, so that he took a whole step forward whether he liked it or not. “You are a clergyman. It is your duty to bring a lost soul out of the darkness. I shall go and fetch one of the Lucases this minute.”

She picked up her skirts and was round the corner of the house faster than Darcy would have thought possible for a lady with such delicate nerves.

He had not moved. The laurel hid him well enough, and it did not strike him that he was listening where he ought not until Mr Collins had been standing alone for some little time. By then it seemed more awkward to step out than to stay where he was.

Mr Collins looked to the left, and then to the right. He pulled his waistcoat straight. He went up to the door in short, careful steps, stopped on the threshold, and leaned forward to peer down.

No sound came up from below, though Darcy listened for it.

Mr Collins stepped back. He smoothed his hair, took one more look round the empty garden, and walked off towards the front of the house with his hands folded behind him. He might have been taking a turn about Lady Catherine's shrubbery.

Darcy stared after him. He had thought the man a fool from the first evening they met, but he had never thought him capable of this. There was a child down there and the one person whose business it was to comfort her had gone back indoors, very likely to see if there was any cake left.

He did not stop to think about it. He crossed the frosty grass, ducked under the lintel, and went down.

The steps were worn hollow in the middle and slippery with damp. At the bottom, somebody had left a candle burning in a tin holder on top of a cask. The flame leaned away from the cold air coming through the door. It smelt of earth down there, and of apples packed in straw, and faintly of wine. Darcy picked up the candle and held it high. He could make out racks of bottles and a row of casks along the wall, and in the far corner a heap of sacking. He went over to it with some dread. It was only sacking.

“Is anybody there? You need not be frightened. I have come to take you back to your mama.”

Nobody answered. He went further in, bent to look under a shelf, and called again. His own voice came back to him off the low ceiling, and that was all.

Above him the door creaked. The strip of daylight on the steps grew wider, and somebody came down them with one hand on the wall.

“So this is where you have got to.”

It was Elizabeth. She stopped three steps from the bottom, so that for once she was looking down at him. In the candlelight her face wore an expression he had seen only once before, in the parsonage parlour at Hunsford, with the rain still dripping off his coat.

“Miss Elizabeth...”

“Are you hiding, Mr Darcy? Is that what cowards do when they are found out? They creep away into cellars?” She did not raise her voice. “I have been looking for you. Come up, if you please. I have a great deal to say to you, but I will not say it down here. Today has been bad enough without my adding a scandal to it.”

He did not move. He could not have said whether it was the word coward that held him there, or the way she had said it.

“You need not look so surprised. I know all of it. I know you knew about the actress. I know you knew Miss Bingley meant to ruin Jane's wedding, and you said nothing. And I know you had some plan of your own to part her from Mr Bingley a second time.”

Darcy set the candle down on the cask before she could see his hand shake.

“That is not quite true.”

“Not quite.” Her mouth twisted. “Then some of it is.”

“Some of it is.” He would not lie to her. He had tried saying as little as possible at Hunsford, and he had seen where that got him. “I overheard you and your mother talking together, about Bingley's money and what it might do for your sisters. I thought he was wanted for his fortune and nothing else. I thought he deserved better than that, and I meant to do something about it.”