Page 62 of Bitten By Mr. Darcy
“I think she needs to be charmed out of her disappointment in Bingley,” he said. “I might as well do that. And I think you need her to help with your decision. If you become a vampire, losing your ties to your family will be painful, but the worst pain will be your sister Jane, will it not?”
She nodded. “Yes, I think you are right.”
“So, let us have her here with us, my love. Write to her.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
JANE BENNET WASnot one to make a fuss. She knew that she would have the best outcome in her life if she did what was expected of her, if she attempted to be pleasing and agreeable, and if she followed the rules.
This sort of behavior had served her well for her entire life, and then she had gone to that dinner with the Bingley sisters and the directive had been put in her head to come back there. It wasn’t hard to put a directive in Jane’s mind, truly. She was primed to be agreeable, primed to be pleasing, and primed to do whatever it was that people wished her to do. She had been trained to embody that all her life.
So, it was easy to charm her.
And then the bites happened, and she’d never felt anything like that in her life. She hadn’t known it was possible to feel so much intense pleasure, and she began to wish to have it, for herself, and this was the real problem with everything now.
The problem wasn’t that Jane didn’t remember being bitten or remember the pleasure, not really. That was likely a good thing. Jane would have had a hard time reconciling what had befallen her with her own understanding of the world. She would have specifically had difficulty continuing to believe in her own goodness if she had known that she craved the biteof vampires. She would have wondered if she were, in fact, too deeply sinful to deserve anything but sheer punishment.
So, forgetting all of that was a good thing, but…
She wanted things now. She wanted things for herself.
She was not certain how to exist in that reality.
The problem, it seemed, was that the very world was not designed for her gratification. It might be designed to gratify certain people—very rich people, or, well, men—but it was not designed to gratify simply everybody.
And perhaps this was a good thing, Jane would think to herself, for it would be a very bad world if everyone were simply out for himself, taking what he liked with no thought of anyone else. It would be a very bad world indeed.
She would then think that her own desires must only be selfish and sinful, truly, that they were leading her towards a path of deep dissatisfaction, that she must return to her comfortable way of being happy with pleasing others.
And then, she simply could not be satisfied with others’ satisfaction, it seemed.
So, she was deeply sad.
Frustrated.
Angry, even.
It culminated in a sense of despair that seemed to weigh upon her, badly affecting her.
When she was finally invited to stay with Elizabeth and her husband, she did not truly care what befell her, not anymore.
Life at home was different now that the entail had been broken, it was true. Her mother was happier, knowing that Longbourn would be hers to live in until she died. Her father seemed happier, too. He had always been a joker, her father, but his jokes had often been somewhat mean-spirited, Jane thought, and now they were more joyful. He seemed to be smiling morewhen he looked at their mother, and she seemed to be smiling, too.
He had even started taking the advice of some of the tenant farmers about changing the crops that he wished them to grow, and he said that if they diversified, he might have some surplus that could be added to the girls’ dowries.
So, things were better, or at least, they should be, but Jane felt worse than she’d felt in her whole life.
She took a post coach to London and alighted on the doorstep of her sister’s town house in the afternoon, only to be told that neither Mr. nor Mrs. Darcy were currently available, and to be tucked off into a sitting room with a selection of books offered to her for hours. Eventually, it was time for supper, which did not take place until after darkness had fallen. This was not abnormal, of course, especially in the late winter, when the days were still relatively short.
Still, when she looked upon Mr. Darcy for the first time, an odd jolt went through her, and she felt as if she was on the verge of remembering something terrible.
“We must have a talk after dinner, Miss Bennet,” said Mr. Darcy. He was not eating, only drinking wine. There was something about the way his eyes glittered. She remembered looking deeply into glittering eyes like that…
She shook herself.
Elizabeth got her attention and asked more questions about home, wishing to know about how Charlotte could have possibly agreed to marry Mr. Collins.
“Well, I suppose she felt she was lucky, in a sense,” said Jane. “You know that she is older than both of us. She likely thought she would never marry at all.”
