Page 36 of A Mismatched Compromise

“And when it is done,” Bingley said, his inveterate optimism not even allowing for the possibility of Fitzwilliam joining the unlucky few he mentioned, “you shall come home and marry an heiress and never think of Bonaparte again.”

“I shall come home and marry an heiress, certainly,” Fitzwilliam agreed. “For a younger son’s portion does not stretch to indulgences such as a wife chosen for her own merits. Darcy here may marry wherever his inclinations lead him, fortunate man, but I must marry where the money is, and console myself that I shall doubtless be quite fond of whomever brings the largest dowry within reach of my charm.” He said it lightly, with no heat behind the words, but Darcy knew his cousin well enough to hear the tighter note beneath the levity.

“Though I will say,” Fitzwilliam went on, with the recklessness found three glasses deep into a decanter of fine brandy, “that you are a lucky man, Bingley. If circumstances were otherwise, I believe I should make a serious attempt at Miss Elizabeth Bennet. She has wit enough for three drawing rooms and the courage to use it. A man could do a great deal worse than to spend his life being out-argued by her.”

Bingley’s answering laugh didn’t hit the easy notes it usually reached. Fitzwilliam, who, Darcy thought, had decidedly drunk enough, considering that he was naming things he would otherwise have left alone, tilted his head and looked at Bingley.

“You do not think so?” he said. “Has she not argued herself into liking you?”

There was a small silence. Bingley turned his glass slowly between his fingers, watching the brandy catch the candlelight.

“She is perfectly amiable,” he said. “She is kind, she makes no complaints, which I think she might be entitled to do, given the circumstances, and she has never once reproached me for…for anything.” He paused for another moment, then sighed. “But, no, I do not think she has argued herself into anything except the need to accept my proposal. And that, I think, is only because she is a sensible woman, and sensible women accept situations they cannot alter. She suggested that we have a long engagement, you know. I think she is hoping that we will find some way to proceed that does not require that we be wed.”

“Meanwhile, you are in love with her sister,” Fitzwilliam said. He was not asking a question. Darcy had not told his cousin of that aspect of the situation, but it was not surprising that he had discovered it. Bingley’s lack of subtlety would have revealed that secret — if a secret it could be called — to a man far less perceptive than Colonel Richard Fitzwilliam.

Bingley did not deny it, which was, Darcy thought, answer enough in itself. He simply looked into his glass for a long moment, and when he looked up, his usually open, cheerful face wore an expression Darcy had never seen on it before.

“I should not say so,” he said heavily. “I know very well that I should not acknowledge the truth, and I would never even hint toward such a thing to anyone but the two of you, and so I ask that this go no further than this room.” He looked at Fitzwilliam until the man nodded, with the gravity of a soldier used to keeping important secrets, and then to Darcy, whose own secrets made his assent rather heavier than it might have been. “I should not say so,” Bingley repeated. “But to deny it would be a lie. I love Jane Bennet with every part of my being.”

“What will you do, then?” Fitzwilliam asked, not unkindly, but with the directness of a man who had seen too much sudden death to value wasting time on trivialities like softening his words.

“What can I do?” Bingley asked, and Darcy could hear the frustration that had been building under his good humour for these many months. “I cannot break the engagement. It would be dishonourable and would hurt Elizabeth, who has done nothing wrong. She and all the other Bennet sisters would be ruined. But how can I marry her and call myself a man of feeling? How can I take a wife knowing I’ll have to spend my life trying not to think of her sister, or let my eyes follow her across a room and imagine… That is dishonour as well, even if no one but myself would ever know it.” Darcy sighed, thinking how touching it was that Bingley believed he had been guarding his feelings to the point where people could not read them clearly on his face.

Bingley sighed loudly and slouched deeper into the chair. “I cannot find any way through that does not cause some pain to virtually everyone involved. What is the worst pain? Which dishonour is greater? I cannot find the answers, and the wedding creeps ever closer.”

“Something may yet present itself,” Darcy murmured at last, aware that this was a faint hope faintly offered.

“You keep saying that,” Bingley commented with a tight smile. “I begin to wonder if you know something I do not.”

“I know a great many things you do not,” Darcy said, striving for lightness, “though none, at present, amount to enough to devise a solution.”

“You have been working on this solution with a great deal of energy for some months now,” Fitzwilliam commented, his tone bland, but his gaze piercing. “The library. The investigation. Letters. Questions. Invitations to Pemberley. We all know what a poor creature Bingley is, but that is still a great deal of effort, cousin, to overturn a friend’s engagement.”

Bingley grunted in amused protest at Fitzwilliam’s offhand insult. But Darcy flushed. “He is a particular friend,” Darcy said, aware even as he spoke that he had said the same thing several times before, and no one had yet been satisfied with it as an answer.

“He is,” Fitzwilliam said amiably. “And yet I notice that whenever the subject of Miss Elizabeth Bennet arises, which it does, I must note, rather often in your company, your particular friend’s engagement to her does not seem to be the quality of the young lady that is foremost in your mind.”

Bingley looked between the two of them, frowning. “What do you mean?” he asked, the quantity of brandy he had drunk making him slow to catch on to Fitzwilliam’s insinuation.

“Nothing at all,” Fitzwilliam said airily, his eyes bright. “Merely an observation. Darcy is welcome to correct me if it is incorrect, and I will apologise very handsomely.”

Darcy did not correct him. In fact, he found, rather to his own surprise, that he did not see any point in doing so after the evening’s confidences and the disregard for consequences inspired by the brandy. His cousin had already seen through his fictions, and Bingley had laid bare his soul, though everyone had already seen it quite clearly without his words. Why should he not follow suit?

“I admit I have not been entirely honest about my reasons for involving myself so deeply in this matter,” he said, his gaze fixed on the fire rather than on either of his companions. “I assure you, I did not plan it — I have spent some months telling myself it was not happening, in fact, attempting an extraordinary feat of self-deception even by my own standards. But I can no longer pretend that I have not come to feel a…a very great regard for Miss Elizabeth, a regard that I confess goes considerably beyond what is appropriate for a man attempting to assist his friend’s fiancée to extricate herself and his friend from an engagement that neither wants.”

His words were met with a brief silence, shocked on Bingley’s part, and satisfied on Fitzwilliam’s. “Good God,” Bingley said at last. “I had no idea. Not the smallest suspicion.”

“Good,” said Darcy, “for I have taken some pains to ensure that you would not. I give you my word, Charles, that I have done nothing dishonourable, in word or deed. I have not spoken of this to her.”

“Of course you have not,” Bingley said with a faint, rueful huff that was not quite a laugh. “I suppose I ought to be jealous, but that would be ridiculous. How is it, Darcy, that the two of us are here, in the small hours, discovering that we are in love with the wrong sisters of the same family?”

“It would, perhaps, be better to ask how it is that you are just discovering this now,” Fitzwilliam said, leaning forward with the decanter and refilling their glasses. “It has been most clear to everyone else of sense who spends more than an hour in your presence. To absurdity, my friends!” he said, lifting his glass.

Bingley did laugh then, and some of the tension in the room diminished with the sound. He threw back some of his drink, grimaced, and shook his head. “It is rather absurd,” he admitted. “In fact, it is the most absurd thing that has ever happened to me, and, thanks to my sisters, I am not unfamiliar with absurdity.”

Fitzwilliam was looking at Darcy. “What will you do?” Fitzwilliam asked quietly.

Darcy stared into the fire. “I mean to ask her to marry me,” he said.