Sunday 10 May, three o’clock in the morning
The house was dark, everyone abed but one. In the library, a single candle flickered over a solitary figure in a dressing gown whose pen scratched rapidly across the paper.
The Duke of Clevedon had done his best to beat Long-more to a bloody pulp. Afterward they’d emptied one bottle after another. Yet he’d come home all too sober. It seemed there wasn’t enough drink in all the world to dull the ache in his heart or quiet his conscience and let him sleep.
Nothing to be done about the heartache but endure.
His conscience was another matter.
It drove him to the library. Then, even before he took up his pen to write to Clara, he knew how it must begin:
Be not alarmed, madam, on receiving this letter, by the apprehension of its containing any repetition of those sentiments, or renewal of those offers, which were last night so disgusting to you.
It was the start of Mr. Darcy’s letter to Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, Clara’s favorite novel. He could easily imagine her reluctant smile when she read it. He continued in his own words:
I was wrong to make an offer, and you were right in all you said, but you said not half enough. Our listeners should have heard the thousand ways I’ve taken you for granted and tried your good nature and the ways I’ve thought only of myself and never of you. You’ve been true to me for all the time I’ve known you, and for all that time I, too, have been true only to me. When you were grieving for the grandmother I knew you dearly loved, I abandoned you to jaunt about the Continent. I expected you to wait for me, and you did. How, then, did I return your patience and loyalty? I was neglectful, insensitive, and false.
He wrote on, of the many ways he’d wronged her. She’d brought joy and light into his life when he was a lonely, heartbroken boy. Her letters had brightened his days. She was dear to him, and always would be, but they were friends and no more. Surely he’d known in his heart this wasn’t enough for marriage, but it was the easy way and he took it. He’d been false to her and false to himself, because he’d been a coward, afraid to risk his heart.
He acknowledged all his thoughtless and unkind acts, and concluded:
I’m sorry, my dear, so deeply sorry. I hope in time you’ll forgive me—though I can’t at the moment suggest a reason to do so. With all my heart I wish you the happiness I ought to have been able to give you and a hundred times more.
He wrote his usual affectionate closing, and signed with his initial, as he always did.
He folded up the letter, addressed it, and left it in the tray for the servant to take out with the morning mail.
Then, only the heartache remained.
Experience, the mother of true wisdom, has long since convinced me, that real beauty is best discerned by real judges; and the addresses of a sensible lover imply the best compliment to a woman of understanding.
La Belle Assemblée, or Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine, Advertisements for June 1807
Early afternoon, Sunday 10 May
The Duke of Clevedon blinked at the excessively bright light. Saunders, the sadist, stood looking down at him. He’d opened the curtains, and the sun was as bright as lightning bolts. When Clevedon moved his head, thunder cracked, right against his skull.
“I’m so sorry to disturb you, your grace.”
“No, you’re not,” Clevedon croaked.
“Mr. Halliday was most insistent,” Saunders said. “He said you would wish to be wakened. Mrs. Noirot is here.”
Clevedon sat up abruptly. His brain thumped painfully against something hard and sharp. The interior of his skull had grown thorns. “Lucie,” he said. “Is she ill? Lost? Damn, I told her that child needed…” The sentence trailed off as his drink-poisoned brain caught up with his tongue.
“Mrs. Noirot said we were to assure your grace that the Princess Erroll of Albania is well and safely at home doing sums with her aunt. Mr. Halliday has taken the liberty of asking Mrs. Noirot to wait in the library. Being aware that you would need time to dress, he saw to it that refreshment was brought to her. I have brought your coffee, sir.”
Now Clevedon’s heart was pounding, too, along with his brain, but not at the same tempo.
He did not leap from his bed, but he got out more quickly than was altogether comfortable for a man in his condition. He hastily swallowed the coffee. He washed and dressed in record time, though it seemed an age to him, even though he decided not to bother with the nicety of shaving.
A glance in the mirror told him shaving wouldn’t do much to improve his appearance. He looked like an animated corpse. He tied his neckcloth in a haphazard knot, shrugged into his coat, and hurried out of the room, still buttoning it.
When he came in, smoothing his neckcloth like a nervous schoolboy called on to recite from the Iliad, he found Noirot bent over the library table.
She was perfect, as usual, in one of her more dashing creations, a heavy white silk embroidered all over with red and yellow flowers. The double-layered short cape, its edges gored and trimmed in black lace, was made of the same material. It extended out over her shoulders and over the big sleeves of her dress. Round her neck she’d tied a black lace something or other. Her hat sat well back on her head, so that its brim framed her face, and that inner brim was adorned with lace and ribbons. More ribbon and lace trimmed the back, where a tall plume of feathers sprouted.
He, clearly, did not make nearly as pretty a picture. At his entrance she looked up, and her hand went to her bosom. “Oh, no,” she said. Then she collected herself and said, in cooler tones, “I heard about the fight.”
“It’s not as bad as all that,” he said, though he knew it was. “I know how to dodge a blow to the face. You ought to see Longmore. At any rate, this is the way I always look after an excessively convivial night with a man who tried to kill me. Why are you here?”
He was careful to keep any hope from his face as well as his voice. It was harder to keep it from his heart. He didn’t want to let himself hope she’d changed her mind. He was fully awake and sober now and wishing he were drunk again.
He could truly understand at last, not only in his mind but in his gut as well, why his father had crawled into a bottle. Drink dulled the pain. Physical pain dulled it, too. While fighting with Longmore he’d felt nothing. Now he remembered every word he’d said to her, the way he’d opened his heart, concealing nothing. It hadn’t been enough. He wasn’t enough.
She gestured at the table. “I was looking at the magazines,” she said. “I’m unscrupulous. I looked at your notes, too. But I can’t read your writing. You said you had ideas. About my business.”
“Is
