Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife (5 page)

This episode unquestionably altered Darcy’s life, introducing a lifelong pattern of stern self-control. As he grew older, his natural reserve became a buffer, leading some to believe he felt himself above their company. If his manner came to be led in pride and conceit, it was borne of a perpetual stream of obsequious deference from men and women alike. In adulthood, he was known as a man of clever intellect and superior understanding. His manners were impeccable, if somewhat haughty.

Darcy was not vain, but he was proud, expecting perfection of himself, and would not brook less from anyone else.

His reserve was already firmly in place when he and Wickham left for Cambridge. But once there, he found concealed in his belongings a piece of paper bearing a London street address written in his father’s hand. He came to learn Harcourt was a house of good Mayfair address, known to most men of means. It was a place they could discreetly pass company with a woman possessed of both beauty and refinement. This lady required no commitment beyond a few hours of one’s time. A major rite of passage would have been for his father to escort him to such a place for his introduction to manhood. As that horse was already out of the barn, so to speak, his father chose to guide his son thusly.

With the single lecture his father had given him still ringing in his ears, Darcy had every good intention of taking his studies quite seriously and he set the address aside. Even with the caterwauling Wickham underfoot in constant search of his next conquest, Darcy strove to seek the moral high ground. So often did he rebuff Wickham, who constantly prevailed upon him to join in his rounds of drinking and wenching, Wickham took to calling him the “Archbishop.”

The sobriquets with which Wickham gifted him mattered little to Darcy, for in actuality, his libido was not necessarily inconsolable. He was merely less vocal about the women with whom he joined in physical congress. And, upon occasion, congress he did. But each of these rendezvous was, to his mind at least, unsatisfactory. If he disparaged Wickham’s bent for vulgar establishments and round-heeled women, Darcy could not say with utmost conviction his road was an improvement. For each instance of intimacy he consummated gifted him, not with satisfaction, but with new restricting axioms with which to lead his life.

There had been a rather titillating, if unexpected, experience when he was just eighteen with the infamous (he belatedly learnt) Twisnodde twins in their coach one night. But he had been so consumed with guilt for such debauchery, he was visited for months with the terror that he had left either or both of them with child. (For due to circumstance of drink, he could never absolutely swear whether he had had them both, or one or the other twice.) He vowed (first axiom) he would be most cautious within whose garden he spilled his seed; and (second axiom) never, ever drink more than one glass of wine per evening.

As he grew older, he occasioned affairs with women of station and allowed himself a passing interlude with a noted actress. He found her a disappointment and (third axiom) kept to his own social level thereafter. His understanding of honour demanded he never take a virgin, nor lie with a woman married or promised (four and five). Ultimately, though, he began to recognise an all too familiar expression upon the countenances of those with whom he intended intrigue. Just before carnal egress commenced, an expression of excited apprehension appeared. That, of course, announced that word of the generosity of his lovemaking (and that with which God endowed him, upon its behalf) had preceded him. He abhorred transgression of his privacy, and, in time, this abhorrence overtook any pleasure he might have had with his liaisons. His sixth axiom was instated: He would avail himself of no women of his social circle.

Of course, eliminating virgins, wives, the affianced, the forward, ladies of lesser rank, and those in his social circle from the reservoir of possible feminine gratification left little alternative. Finding no favour in self-gratification, he saw the irony that the two strongest needs he held—that of passion and that of privacy—were so perversely conflicting.

It would have been customary for a man of his position to take a mistress, but he did not seek a woman to dress his arm. His warm constitution sought only release, not company. Believing it a profound failing not to keep one’s physical needs under the same good regulation as one’s emotions, he strove to harness them both.

After a period of abstention marked by a profoundly ill-temper and a great deal of fencing, he decided, as a matter of expediency (seventh and final axiom), he would visit a lady at Harcourt. There he could chamber with diligence and privacy, safe in the knowledge that commerce exacted no threat of entanglement.

Once the urgency of that no-small need was taken care of, he could concentrate all his attention upon stern regulation of the rest of his sensibilities. That austerity was necessitated by the staggering onslaught of ladies in want of young Mr. Darcy for a husband. Eligibility, of course, demands little from its inhabitant. And, from his latent perspective, Darcy saw there were no wiles too unworthy, no scheme of cunning too disreputable. Each hopeful seductress saw the usual feminine arts and allurements met with devout stoicism. In this climate, it could be understood that Darcy held, if not conceit, at least a certainty of success when a woman’s affection came into question.

When he went with Bingley to Meryton, the flagrant occupation of Elizabeth’s mother in obtaining matches for her five daughters with men of wealth influenced Darcy to believe Mrs. Bennet to be exceedingly ill-bred. (Every mother’s duty was this objective, but to be too overt was unseemly.) However, his appreciation for Elizabeth’s fine eyes soon came perilously close to nullifying disregard for her family. That would not do. A man of his station could never consider marrying injudiciously, even though his good friend Bingley was tempted by Jane Bennet. Darcy hied to London and went, with considerable haste, to Harcourt to remind himself of his seventh axiom. -However, the very entanglement he had hoped to avoid was already well underway. At Harcourt he consummated carnal union, but found little release and no pleasure.

The following April when he had chanced upon Elizabeth visiting her cousin next to his aunt’s house, Rosings Park, he realised he could no longer deny his love.

Her flat refusal of his proposal of marriage flabbergasted him. Personal prudence had seen that he had never been refused by a woman for anything, ever. Angered and mortified, it was of no comfort to him to know that she realised his vanity. Clearly it had led him to believe her in serious want of his application of marriage.

With impetuosity hitherto unknown to him, he repaired to London, resolving never again to think of Miss Bennet. But when last he visited Harcourt, he sat in sullenness, enveloped in a black desultory cloud. The woman before him was not Elizabeth Bennet and he simply would not have her. He left angry, but at no one but himself.

It was not a feeling to which he was accustomed.

There had never been any doubt in his mind about his world or his place in it. Until he met Miss Bennet, his mind was in the same staid, structural order as his life. The fault of his disorder lay entirely at her feet. Therefore, with perverse pig-headedness, he vowed if he could not have Elizabeth, he would bear celibacy. All axioms were excised.

Fortunately for his constitution, Elizabeth relented, lest he might have actually burst. Although no one else, not even his beloved, knew it, Darcy had reached a state of utter capitulation to her. As a man of considerable personal courage, there was a single thing that he looked upon with unmitigated fear. That was the moment when she would learn of his unconditional surrender. He hoped she would be kind.

Viscountess Eugenia Clisson was revered as the most beautiful woman of St. Etienne. Her daughter Juliette was cast in her image. By reason of that resemblance, one might have expected her father to look upon Juliette with increased favour after his beloved wife’s death, not, in his grief, refuse to look upon her at all. But he would not.

Viscount Clisson spent his days at his wife’s grave. His evenings were spent commiserating his loss with his mistress and a carafe of rather good Bordeaux. He spoke little to his sons (who were used to dismissal) and ignored Juliette (who was not). This unhappy alteration in Juliette’s situation might ultimately have been resolved had not her father’s inattention to political upheaval kept him from currying favour with whatever entity was in power in France at the time. He, perchance, could be forgiven for not keeping closer watch, for even those under more rapt attention found it a dodgy business. Rebellion and chaos ruled. Even so, the Viscount could only weep for his wife, gulp his wine, and make love with his face, finding in all three a much better occupation of mind and body than government. He eventually saw his error in judgement, but by then, it was too late.

* * *

In the last shuddering breath of the eighteenth century, French dynasties were -abolished, power inverted. Royalty was alternately in and out of favour. Unfortunately, it was out of favour when Viscountess Clisson died, allowing unguarded insurgency to usurp the Viscount’s property. His vineyards were burned, cattle slaughtered, and property confiscated. Six soldiers of the revolution, their wives, nine children, four chickens, and a laundress stood without contrition upon his portico as Clisson vacated his villa to them. He weathered this affront with little more than a sniff of his aristocratic nose (happy enough not to lose his head along with his house), but his evacuation was only as far as his own goatherd’s shanty. There he ensconced his mistress in one of the two rooms. The goatherd, his wife, and seven children appropriated the two-sided windbreak used to house milking does, oblivious to the odour and the goats’ inconsolable bleating at the intrusion.

Hence, except for a matter of decor, Viscount Clisson continued to mourn just as he had (albeit the alteration of scenery required a little more wine). And as they were all over fifteen, enfants d’ Clisson were left to fend for themselves in the single adjoining room. That it was a bit crowded was the kindest thing that could be said for the accommodations, hence, the children of pere Clisson looked for better elsewhere. Her brothers took officerships in the French army. Juliette took out a powder puff, dusted her exceedingly lovely bosom, and boarded a coach for Paris.

There, word had it that poverty abided more easily than in most of the great cities of Europe. Still, the newly impoverished Juliette realised quite with dispatch that being poor lay not amongst her proclivities. Having the refinement of the privileged, her mother’s beauty, and not a whit of her father’s insouciance, it took her no more than a se’nnight before she found introduction to a Marquis of the most meritorious ilk (that of longing for feminine company). He was not handsome of face nor figure, but was endowed with considerable riches and had more charm than his wealth would have demanded of him.

Juliette’s decision to align herself with the Marquis was an excellent notion in that he required nothing more of her than to grace his arm at the theatre every other night (his wife accompanied him alternately) and allow him into her bed three times a week. He bestowed gowns, jewels, and a generous allowance upon her. And, as providence inspired the Marquis to embrace an affection for wine which rendered him asleep mid-coitus more often than not, quinine pessaries and a little luck assured motherhood did not jeopardise her employment.

However, another encumbrance did.

It soon fell apparent that the happiness of Juliette’s situation was to be exceeded only by its brevity. For her middle-aged lover was arrested for crimes against the revolution whilst asleep in her bed, hence they were both whisked forthwith to the La Force Prison. As she had been in his company, Juliette was found guilty of the Marquis’ offence as well (she never determined exactly what this was, presuming it his flagrancy of wealth and Bourbon blood, both of which he held in copious quantities).

Even with so severe a transgression before the court within the Palais de Justice, until her sentencing Juliette’s greatest vexation was what indignities prison would inflict upon her complexion. The tribunal in charge of their fate, however, saw her penalty differently. And, as misfortune would have it, shorn of her glorious tresses, she stood in the tumbrel directly behind the impugned Marquis as it wended its way to the guillotine (that, unequivocally, being a far more heinous end than bad skin). Although they were not the only ill-fated in the cart, Juliette and the Marquis were first relegated from thence by reason of station (amongst those remaining were three Carmelite nuns and a man who had feisted in court). Thus, Juliette was standing at the foot of the scaffold pondering her own impending doom, when a basic quirk in the law of physics was exhibited.

For the Marquis’ affection for drink was exceeded only by his affinity for food, this brace of indiscriminate habits rendering his an exceedingly corpulent neck. Upon its release, the guillotine blade fell soundly (acceleration, velocity, and force). But when it encountered the Marquis’ apoplectic neck (mass) the blade merely wedged itself, denying the doomed man immediate decollation. The Lord High Executioner gaped at the sight in disbelief and then looked to his deputy in bewilderment. In all their beheadings, this had happened not once.

It is suggested that the Lord High Executioner’s post was an exceptionally demanding employment. Yet, it was not compleatly without its reward of applause. That was not what he heard then. The crowd had ceased its cheering and begun to jeer. Ominously.

Juliette had never given her lover’s throat much thought, hidden as it was beneath his many chins. But at that moment, it would seem, the significance of the Marquis’ endomorphic anatomy only escaped the notice of the three Carmelite nuns, who still stood in the tumbrel awaiting their own execution by singing a very pretty (and appropriately mournful) dirge. For it was foremost in the minds of everyone else. The driver of their cart, the gaseous juror, the bloodthirsty crowd of onlookers, the gendarme who held a vigilant gun upon the felonious nuns, the Lord High Executioner, the Deputy Lord High Executioner, and, presumably, the Marquis himself.

The Lord High Executioner ceased his bewilderment and immediately ordered the Deputy Lord High Executioner to finish the job lest the crowd turn upon them. The Deputy Lord High Executioner saw no choice but to relinquish the dignity of ritual and climbed atop the wood moulding that held the blade in an attempt to force the contraption to do its job. Unfortunately, his efforts were to no avail and incited the increasing disdain of the crowd. In the face of that ever-escalating malevolence, the deputy had the excellent notion to jump up and down upon the top of the blade and only from thence was success at last found.

Such was the Lord High Executioner’s immense relief, he was felled by a swoon and dropped to the floor of the scaffold across the Marquis’ newly decapitated corpse. The Deputy Lord High Executioner, however, did not faint, for the show was not over and no theatre wings held a more anxious performer. For the Lord High Executioner in a faint left his role quite empty and his deputy saw his first opportunity to escape his own thankless job. For the severing of a head could only be compleatly appreciated upon its display.

The Deputy Lord High Executioner retrieved the Marquis’ sundered cranium from the basket where it had landed and held it aloft to the ovation of the crowd. Alas, the Deputy Lord High Executioner was not used to bowing nor to royal pate adornment, hence when he dipped his chin and pointed his toe, lifting the Marquis’ head high, its weight separated it from its adorning wig. The Deputy Lord High Executioner flung away the empty peruke and was sent upon a run after the head, for it rolled about for an absurdly long time before coming to a stop, its features fixed with a look of appalled (and extended) incredulity.

A torrential guffaw imbued the crowd and whilst that merriment ensued, the Deputy Lord High Executioner managed to recapture the head and hold it up long enough to reckon protocol satisfied. Thereupon he seized the opportunity to declare the day’s festivities over, lest the loss of his own head provide a needed encore. (Reasonably, the Lord High Executioner himself would have escaped this affront, for he was still at the mercy of oblivion and it would provide the crowd no entertainment at all to witness the beheading of a man insensible of the insult.) The Deputy Lord High Executioner hastily vacated the scaffold and tugged his employer from atop the truncated remains of the dead Marquis. The Deputy Lord High Executioner was taller, but the Lord High Executioner was heavier (having, by reason of his gloriously ignoble occupation, similar predilections as the Marquis), hence, the Deputy Lord High Executioner had to grab the Lord High Executioner by his boots in order to drag him down the steps of the scaffold. The Lord High Executioner’s head hit each of the ten steps, one by one, rendering him even more benumbed.

The gendarme who stood holding the gun upon the malefactors still in the cart was much occupied by his duty, hence could not help load the Lord High Executioner onto the tumbrel. Thus, the Deputy Lord High Executioner ordered those same felons to assist. Throughout these horrifying proceedings, the nuns had stood mutely in the cart, their mouths agape (due less to shock than the fact that they had stopped singing mid-note). But their oath of duty bade them render aid. The intestinally indecorous man, however, was still in a snit over his bodily functions condemning him and refused to help. With only four in service, it was an ungainly procedure to hoist the Lord High Executioner onto the cart and had the disadvantage of landing the back of his head in the middle of a generous pile of manure still clinging to the floor of the tumbrel (by reason of its recent service as a dung cart).

Of course, the Lord High Executioner was not immediately aware of this, hence, it was not of immediate concern to his deputy. What was of immediate concern was that they take their leave whilst the crowd that had swarmed to the Marquis’ torso was still busy ridding him of his fashionable attire (his tasselled shoes had already disappeared).

The Lord High Executioner’s deputy encouraged the driver of the cart to make haste. This sallying encouragement was, indeed, needed, although the driver should have known it imperative to make away. But the man hesitated. For his duality of position demanded that he drive the prisoners to the guillotine and return with their headless bodies, whereby he would be paid to bury them. The Marquis’ body (along with remuneration) still lay atop the scaffold. The Deputy Lord High Executioner immediately saw the driver’s dilemma (for he, too, was a man of wages). Upon his pointing out that if the mob overtook them, there would be little need of money, off the little waggon went, its two wheels groaning and squeaking. Progress was, however, a little slow.

Juliette had watched this entire event unfold, quite entranced. She did, however, have the presence of mind to jump into the retreating cart. The leap was impressive for one who seldom leapt, but because her hands were still tied behind her back, the landing was not nearly so pretty as the jump.

Yet no less fortunate, for she landed face down atop the face up, but still senseless, Lord High Executioner. Although she was of slight frame, the percussion of her landing roused him to consciousness, and providence claimed fortune in that the crevice of her unpowdered, but still lovely, bosom wedged upon his nose.

Because the Lord High Executioner’s swoon had lent him amnesia of the recent unfortunate incident, he was compleatly beguiled by the fragrance (and bounteousness) of Juliette Clisson’s décolletage as the cart rattled away.

* * *

Although what came to pass was not entered into historical reference, it was still part of it. For, although the Carmelite nuns and feisting man did not, Juliette escaped the guillotine. And if in time it were suggested to her that a lady should be admired for her mind and not her physical charms, she would not argue. Nevertheless, she knew her wit did not save her that day. Perhaps her mind told her to run after the cart, but it did not land upon the Lord High Executioner’s face. Nor was it her mind the Lord High Executioner kissed that night before he fell into glorious wine-induced sleep mid-coitus.