Charm and Enchantment by Case Josie

Author:Case, Josie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pemberley Dreams
Published: 2020-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

The rain had stopped. Lizzie sat astride the mare; it was easier to keep her skirts clear of the grass that way. And Darcy led the horse by the reins; that way they could talk.

“Does any of that make sense to you?” said Darcy.

Lizzie rubbed the horse’s neck, a think solid and warm, reliable and earthy.

“It makes sense to her,” she said. “ I suppose that’s what matters.”

“Will it work?”

“She has no reason to lie,” said Lizzie. “She has all the power.”

“She likes playing games.”

But Lizzie felt that the old woman had given them the truth. Darcy seemed to accept that too.

“At least it’s something practical,” he said. “Something that might be managed.”

“They might even come to it under their own steam,” Lizzie said, though she doubted it.

“Lydia might,” said Darcy. “But Wickham never will.”

And that was the crux of it. Lydia might be wooed with a modicum of charm. But Wickham’s heart demanded a bag of loot. Notwithstanding the loot he already had.

“Still,” said Lizzie, wheeling back to Darcy’s earlier statement. “It might be managed.”

But the side-effect of it, the thing they hadn’t mentioned, but that lurked at the front of both of their minds went unacknowledged. And neither of them could bring themselves to be the first to broach it. If the reversal was successful and they both came back to themselves, then the marriage of Lydia and Wickham would be the marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy.

It was a matter of faith to Lizzie that she should only marry for love, and not convenience. What Charlotte had done, she could never do. No matter the cost. Maybe that was the real test, to see if she would stand by her convictions; convictions so easy to declare in temperate times, so hard to stand by when times got difficult. So there were moral, as well as practical considerations to be dealt with. She knew not which would be the harder test.

That she had come to respect Darcy, she acknowledged, that he had been a support in her trials, she appreciated, that she had once trusted Wickham’s word against his, she regretted; but she would not push herself towards a higher regard for him, she would not fabricate a false love, simply to ease her way towards a resolution of her troubles.

At last she said, “Perhaps I shouldn’t have stolen Lydia’s fortune.”

Darcy laughed. It was a harsh, bitter sound.

“I fear your ten pounds would not be a great enough lure for Wickham.”

All right. There was a place to start.

“What would be a big enough bait?” she said.

And that was how you moved forward. One step at a time. A journey of a thousand miles, and so forth.

They left the trees behind and Lizzie shifted back so Darcy could mount in front of her and they hiked up the pace. The mare at least enjoyed the more vigourous motion; the whipping wind, ‘the water, mosses, slaps and styles’. And Lizzie felt her own blood rising. She felt it in Darcy and

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