In Sickness and in Health: A Variation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice by Frances Reynolds

Author:Frances Reynolds [Reynolds, Frances]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Quills & Quartos Publishing
Published: 2023-07-09T23:00:00+00:00

Darcy was lost in his own thoughts on the journey back to Netherfield, not that Bingley’s incessant chatter on the subject of Miss Bennet’s many perfections required his attention, and Carter was doing a splendid job of nodding and agreeing at all the right moments. It had been a mere five days, not even an entire week, since Miss Bennet and Miss Elizabeth had left Netherfield, but to Darcy that first sight of Miss Elizabeth had felt like being offered water after wandering the desert. If he had hoped that separation would dim his affections—and the part of him still concerned with status had hoped exactly that—it had been for naught. He had been raised to view eligible women in a certain way: through the lens of wealth and connexions. Affection was of course greatly to be desired, but was understood to rank well beneath dowry and lineage.

Such concerns seemed so trivial to him now. He had, in these last weeks, seen families torn apart by death. He had seen some of those who remained turn from each other in despair and even anger. But he had seen other families, among them the Bennets, begin to knit themselves back together through the kind of love which allows grief to unite rather than sunder.

Money and connexions were not healing these wounds. Certainly, such advantages had not prevented his own parents from becoming more silent and bitter towards each other as each successive attempt to provide the Darcy name with more descendants than himself alone ended in failure. Darcy had long wondered if a desire to be free of the oppressive atmosphere of Pemberley had been as much a factor in his mother’s death as Georgiana’s difficult birth. His father, he suspected, had given his wife scarcely a thought after consigning her body to the ground. Though both had been good, upstanding people in many ways, they had been personally incompatible, and slow to forgive any injury from the other, real or imagined.

That was not the life, or the marriage, he wished for himself. He had not known precisely what he did wish, only that he wanted to be contented at the very least, and that it would be very difficult to achieve such a state if there were little amity in his most intimate relationship. This, he considered, must be why he had always felt a visceral revulsion for the vapid heiresses and grasping social climbers from among whom he was expected to make his choice.

Such tepid images of mere complacence had been his vision of the future only weeks ago, until a bright and witty girl from a family of no consequence and his own wayward heart had conspired to make him long for more. He now knew that he wished for more than mere contentment—he wanted to love his wife, and to build with her a family that would come together in the face of even the worst troubles. He wanted his children to grow in a home filled

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