Page 64 of Till Death Us Do Part: Book 2
His rapprochement with his sister, Georgiana, who hadnotappreciated being fobbed off on relatives for six months after her debacle in Ramsgate, and having a sister appear and disappear without ever meeting her; hadnotgone well. However, he did his best to make amends, and she gradually found either forgiveness or practicality in her heart. The young lady successfully came out in society at eighteen and married at twenty, to a man whom she seemed to love and esteem, which was all Darcy ever wanted for her. She lived a quiet life with her husband and young children, just as she preferred. She was still the most proficient pianoforte player he knew, but she never mastered the easy musicality he had heard in his wife before her passing, nor had she ever mastered the salon or drawing room as Mrs Darcy had.
The Master of Pemberley had spent a year in mourning, as was proper. He was amazed to find that Elizabeth’s subterfuge in London preceding her death had been entirely successful, so he found his and her reputations pristine. He found Miss Caroline Bingley singularly unhelpful, as she said she had introduced his wife to a few people. Miss Bingley explained that Mrs Darcy had been far kinder than she deserved, and she had nothing further to say on the subject. She was, in fact, extremely tight-lipped,and the only thing Darcy knew for absolute certain was that the lady no longer had the slightest interest in him.
Six months later, Darcy learned that Miss Bingley asked her brother to turn over her dowry and set up her own establishment, then shocked both men by leaving London entirely. Darcy had no idea why he was surprised, since he had yet to accurately predict the actions of any woman in his life.
Mrs Darcy’s false mourning in Pemberley had also done its work. The very few who knew it was not real seemed to gradually forget that fact, as if they were never certain in the first place. Elizabeth’s leasing of his rare tomes had even done its job. Partly because of that intervention, his relationship with his neighbours had improved considerably. It turned out that everyone in the world but him had the good sense to esteem his late wife at the first opportunity.
In some ways, the success of his wife’s schemes was advantageous, he supposed, but in other ways, he did not feel he had received his just punishment. He had no idea what would be considered just, but whatever it was, he had not endured it. He turned towards doing good works, at first as a sort of penance, but it soon became his greatest source of pleasure. He started schools, educated tenants, contributed massively to orphanages, invested in small businesses with young men and even a few women who had ambition but no money. He supported anti-slavery movements and even some of the groups agitating to allow women to vote. Mostly, he just tried his best to increase the good in the world.
Naturally, he eventually and reluctantly, entered the search for a wife, but did not have much to show for it. That was a subject he shut down quickly whenever a relative or friend brought it up, and most had learned to leave him to his own devices; aside from a few pointed glances at a calendar to remind him he was not getting any younger. He did all the usualthings courting men were supposed to do, both in London and Derbyshire, with nothing to show for it.
All that led to his Scottish holiday. He spent some time with local notables in New Town and some estates outside of Edinburgh, but he preferred to keep to some lodgings in Old Town. He wandered in and out between Old Town and New Town, looking into coffee houses, museums, bookshops, and random workshops, where he usually found a warm welcome, so long as he stayed out of people’s way. He even found a few enterprises he considered investing in. Edinburgh was called the Athens of the North, and he found the architecture and other parallels with the original fascinating.
The coffee houses of the city were a hotbed of intellectualism, where he was welcome if he held up his end of a discussion. He did not have to win the debate, which was just as well since he was fifty-fifty at best, and he felt he learned as much from losing as from winning.
He had just left one such discussion, where a university student’s rhetorical abilities tied him in knots. As he walked down a street chosen at random near Lawnmarket, he spied a very promising-looking bookshop.
He entered Thorne Books with real enthusiasm and looked around. The shop was neat and clean, which he could take or leave. Some bookshops looked like a troll lived there hiding his treasures, and some looked like a royal library where nobody was ever allowed to read or even touch anything. This was closer to the royal library than the troll cave. He suspected there were no hidden treasures, because the proprietor could no doubt find any book in the place by simply looking on the shelf where said book obviously belonged. While he sometimes enjoyed the disorder of a troll-cave bookshop, he mostly preferred neatness, so he very much approved. It was big enough that, if thecollection were well chosen, it might take days or weeks to explore it properly.
He turned to the desk where he had glanced a woman bent over a ledger on the way in, and, with a ready smile, thought to compliment the shop and ask for some recommendations, when he stopped dead in his tracks and gasped, swaying on his feet.
With a shaky voice, he gasped, “Elizabeth?” then louder, “Elizabeth! Elizabeth Darcy!”
The woman sat up abruptly and stared at him in nervous confusion. “Excuse me?”
Darcy strode over towards the desk. “Elizabeth. It is you. I could not believe it. Elizabeth!”
The woman stared at him hard, her eyes getting bigger and bigger, stood up from her stool, laid one hand flat on the counter, reached the other below it, and snapped, “Stop!”
Darcy faltered a bit, and took another step forward, but she shouted, “STOP!”while lifting the hand from the desk to hold it flat towards Darcy, palm forward.
He came to an abrupt stop. “Elizabeth. Please. I beg of you.”
The woman was shaking. “I amnotElizabeth, and I will ask you to leave.Now!”
With a shaking voice, he whispered, “Please!”
Her left hand changed from palm-out to a finger pointing at the door, and she snapped, “Go!”
Stunned, he tried one more time. “Please!”
She snapped angrily, “I amnotElizabeth. My name is Amanda Thorne, and I do not allow madmen in my shop.LEAVE! NOW!”
With shaking hands, Darcy bowed. “I beg your pardon, madam. My deepest apologies,” then he turned and walked out on shaking legs.
He walked past the window, then turning back, he saw the back of the woman, who was the absolute living image of hiswife, return a rather nasty-looking club to the shelf under the counter with shaking hands, and plop back onto the stool with a heavy sigh.
Two days later, Darcy decided to get to the bottom of the mystery. While he was still half-convinced it was his wife, somehow hiding out in Edinburgh, he could not becertain, since his memories of Elizabeth had not quite survived typhus and the passage of five years. The one thing he was certain of was that an apology was in order. In point of fact, an apology was well overdue, whether she was Elizabeth or the admittedly more likely possibility: someone else.
He walked carefully into the shop, hat in hand, trying to look as innocent and harmless as possible.
The same woman was putting books on a shelf from a small cart when he entered. She was about five yards from her desk, which he saw her glance at briefly, probably regretting her lack of a club. She angrily pointed at the door. “Do not even think about it! Go away!”
He made one more attempt. “I came to apologise.”
“Apologise by shopping elsewhere,” she snapped.
With a respectful bow, he turned and departed. Once again, he walked past the window, and turned to look back. He found her staring at him. She frowned ferociously, then shook her head, turned her back and walked away.
