Page 15 of One Night with Mr. Darcy
He took the bottle to his chambers and there he had one glass of it watered down, as was the way, then two fingers widths swallowed right down, and then he drank a pull straight from the bottle.
It was at this point that Darcy would no longer remember anything that he did that evening. This was owing not simply to the absinthe but the fact that he had been drinking heavily ever since he’d realized that Elizabeth Bennet was going to marry William Collins.
It was stupid that he was so mad for her.
She hated him.
He’d spent the entire time she was at Netherfield looking after her sick sister wanting her. He’d tried on numerous occasions to engage her in conversation, and all she ever did was make fun of him. He’d confessed his admiration to Caroline Bingley, hoping she would give him insight into the feminine mind.
Instead—horribly—Caroline had begun throwing herself at him, and he had been stunned by that. Now, thinking back over it all, he realized he should have noticed before that Caroline was smitten with him, but he had not. He may have inadvertently given her the impression that there was hope, and for that he mightily repented.
No, he could not marry Caroline Bingley.
But truthfully, he shouldn’t marry Elizabeth Bennet either.
As matches went, there were arguments to be made that Caroline Bingley was the better choice. There was at least some sort of dowry when it came to her, after all. And she at least cared about propriety, which Elizabeth couldn’t give a fig for, clearly and obviously.
Mr. Darcy did not care.
He felt as if he had spent so much of his life doing only what was expected of him.
A woman, a wife, a mother to his children—it was something he would decide for himself, everyone else’s opinions be damned.
Of course, he supposed he hadn’t thought much about the motherhood part of the equation, had he? He just wanted her.
It wasn’t strictly a sexual desire.
Maybe it was.
Darcy often felt sort of confused about all of that. His few experiences with sex tended to be drunken encounters in dirty rooms in strange places. Everything about sex seemed sordid and strange and sort of horrid.
Even so, he’d had his share of indulgences.
The problem with Darcy was that he was somewhat, well, hewantedto be proper, and he triedveryhard, but there was the damaged part of him, wasn’t there? And at some point, the damaged part wanted out.
Afterward, however, he always felt… soiled. Ashamed. Embarrassed.
He knew that strictly speaking, he wasn’t supposed to indulge.
Well, it was all confusing. It was one thing to go and sit in a pew and nod along to the droning voices at the pulpit forbidding fornication and excess drinking and gambling overmuch and staying out until dawn.
Everyone nodded and professed to agree.
But no one actuallylivedlike that.
What was more, you weren’t supposed to talk about the hypocrisy. If you did, people got defensive. Darcy didn’t really understand, but what he supposed was that, for other people, it was possible to compartmentalize one’s life. When one was in church, one simply forgot about one’s sins. When one was sinning, one simply forgot about God.
He wasn’t capable of this.
It caused him a lot of agony.
Thus, the drinking.
At any rate, it was all supposed to be fine if you were married. Sex was. It was even good. There was some edict in the bible to be fruitful and multiply, which was why people had sex. Well… it was a consequence of sex. He didn’t know if anyone was actually thinking about children when they were… Ugh.
Wretched, that, truly.
Everything in life seemed to require a certain amount of compartmentalization, didn’t it? Why did it seem so much easier for everyone besides him?
