Page 26 of One Night with Mr. Darcy
“No, not truly. He was good to him, very good to him, better than a man should be to the child of a servant, perhaps, but my father was always a father to me, and I never felt slighted by his attentions to Wickham.”
Mrs. Reynolds furrowed her brow.
“I may ban him from the house,” said Mr. Darcy in a low voice.
“But Mr. Darcy, sir, he…”
“He won’t like that?” said Mr. Darcy. “Good.”
But in truth, he won no battle with his realization. The damage Wickham had done to his sister was already done and Darcy might never know the extent of it. Whatever Wickham had done, he’d twisted Darcy’s sister up in it, so that Georgiana defended Wickham. Wickham and his sister had been friends a long time, in truth, since Georgiana was very small.
God, it couldn’t have been going on that long, could it?
Darcy prayed it wasn’t so.
But Wickham had a great deal of manipulative tools at his disposal when it came to his sister. And Darcy was her guardian. He was supposed to have protected her. He hadn’t. He’d turned a blind eye and let other people tell him he was being ridiculous and that he must not keep his sister from the parson of the parish.
He’d failed her.
“Yes,” he said aloud to the fire, alone in his study. “What a man I’ve become. I impregnate women and leave them to fend for themselves and do nothing for my own sister when she’s preyed on by some monster of a man.”
He hated himself.
He must do better, though.
He was going back to Rosings. He’d make it up to Mrs. Collins somehow. And he was going to get Georgiana away from the influence of that man. He’d save her as best he could.
He must redeem himself.
WHEN LADY CATHERINEdied, Elizabeth thought that this was not the way things were meant to have gone. She was inheriting Rosings, except that she wasn’t, because Mr. Collins still lived, so technically, her husband was now the owner of the estate.
Of course, Mr. Collins was bedridden and barely conscious of anything these days. The pain had become too much for him and the doctor who visited had prescribed laudanum. He had left strict instructions with the maid of all work who saw to them in the rectory that Mr. Collins must not be given too much of the stuff, for it would be easy for him to form a dependency and to increase his use of the drug exponentially.
Elizabeth knew that she should have been overseeing the administration of the medicine more closely, but Lady Catherine kept her quite busy. She was really at the woman’s beck and call, spending nearly every afternoon with her, reading to her, helping her make decisions about drapery, listening to Lady Catherine’s proclamations on every subject from the proper comportment of young ladies to the way dogs ought to be cared for.
So, Mr. Collins was quite deeply into the laudanum now. He slept a lot, but this might truly be opium dreams and not his illness. It was all wretched.
She felt a great deal of guilt over everything she had put the man through. Mr. Collins was a very ridiculous man, but this was not the fate he deserved.
At any rate, he was insensible to it all. She had not told him that he had inherited Rosings, and since everything in the will and the legal papers referenced her, she had been able to conduct all of those matters without him.
Still, she had no notion how long Mr. Collins would linger in this half-life, lying in his darkened room, coughing and filling handkerchiefs with blood, calling for bottles of laudanum and dreaming away what was left of his days.
She was preparing to move him to Rosings, but she did not know how she was going to explain it to him. He was always in a bad temper. She supposed she could not fault him for that. He had little to put him in a good temper.
It had to happen, however.
Technically, Mr. Collins still held the position of rector here in the parish, but he had been unable to do his duties for some time and a traveling parson from another region had been filling in for him. Now that Mr. Collins owned Rosings, he was to be entirely removed from the position and a new rector sought.
She brought Willie with her into her husband’s sickroom to break the news, though she regretted it immediately when Willie climbed up onto Mr. Collin’s bed and clambered over him, saying, “Papa, Papa, Papa!”
“Mrs. Collins, he’s loud!” Mr. Collins groaned. “Get him off me.”
Little Willie looked more and more like his true father every day, though he was a sunny and bright child who grinned a lot and got into more mischief than she could ever imagine staid and upright Fitzwilliam Darcy ever having engaged in.
Elizabeth swept the tiny boy up into her arms, where he squirmed and struggled, saying, “Down, down, down!” Willie was at a phase in his talking where he liked to mostly say one word thrice in succession. He was two years old, and he was not as advanced as Elizabeth remembered her younger sisters being at that age. Lydia, for instance, at two years old, had been holding court, telling long and intricate stories about her dolls and demanding that everyone cave to her each and every whim.
Boys were different, that was what people told her.
