Mr Darcy's Christmas Carol

Part 7

Darcy bolted upright in his bed, the thundering of the rain from Meryton mirrored in the trundle of a carriage driving past outside his house. Strange, he thought. The wind must be blowing in just such a way that the sound reaches me...

He shivered, pulling his bedsheets to his shoulders, and glanced around the room. It was his own room: in his own house, in London. And yet, just a moment before he had been sheltering under a tree, he had been with Elizabeth, and with Wickham. And yet, not there, not exactly. It was as if some spirit was tormenting him, playing out some scene from a nightmare designed to plague him. Jane Bennet gravely ill, mourning a separation he himself had orchestrated. Elizabeth deceived by Wickham. The two of them talking together, laughing, mocking him – united, in fact, by their shared dislike of him. He shuddered, but this time it was nothing to do with the temperature.

"Twas a dream," he murmured aloud. "Nought but a dream." Elizabeth Bennet had appeared in his nightly imaginings merely because he had been thinking of her so shortly before turning in to bed. And why had he been thinking of her? Because she seemed set to haunt his daily as well as nightly imaginings. It is she herself haunting me, all the way from Hertfordshire. His lip curled in an amused half-smile. He was no lover of the gothic, and yet today he seemed to have slipped between the pages of just such a novel as those he despaired of Georgiana reading. He was Udolpho, plagued by mystery. Or Faust, with his past failings paraded before him. He shook his head. "Certainly, whatever I am, I am in need of sleep and good sense." How long had it been since a dream so disturbed him? And a dream that was full of the normal everyday life of a family in Hertfordshire he hardly cared for. It was imagining, only, and yet what if it wasn't? His heart constricted at the thought that this was not mere fiction, but a version of what was daily occurring behind him in Hertfordshire. He blinked, willing the memories to fade. What mattered it to him who Elizabeth Bennet chose to associate with? That she might be deceived by Wickham: that was the cause of his dismay. He certainly cared little enough who she formed attachments with. It was not as if he, Darcy, had ever intended on making her an offer.

He raked a hand through his dark hair and was relieved to feel his breathing return to normal. His pounding heart receded, and the dream itself began to fade from his memory. It was not so very unusual, he reasoned, to find one's thoughts returning to a place one left behind as recently has he had quit Hertfordshire. Nor was it so very strange to see the Bennets as a key feature of his dreams, as they had been the reason behind his sudden removal to London, intentionally or otherwise. That it was Elizabeth in particular to whom his thoughts returned was also perhaps of little enough significance. He could admit, here, in a darkened room with only his own self to acknowledge the truth, that his first assessment of Elizabeth Bennet had been wrong. Formed hastily, and in an attempt to deflect Charles Bingley's well-intentioned enquiry, he had dismissed Elizabeth as beneath his notice. How could she be, however, when he found her to be lively, spirited, intelligent and interesting, quite the most fascinating creature who had ever before crossed his path? And to think her placed in the middle of so unsuitable a family, in so unprepossessing a place as Longbourn? He shook his head in wonder. It was a nonsense, pure and simple. An impossible nonsense and he would do well to remove all thought of it from his mind.

He turned his pillow over so that he might find the cool side when again he lay down, staring into the blackness and waiting for sleep to find him.

I will not return to Longbourn, he instructed his subconscious. I will not return to Elizabeth Bennet, or to Wickham, or to Longbourn. I will not...