Vampire Darcy's Desire [Regina Jeffers] (fb2) читать постранично, страница - 3

“Mr. Darcy!” his valet, Henry Sheffield, called as he rushed over to tend to his employer. Covered with ashes and soot, his clothes torn and disheveled, Darcy lay in a defeated heap upon the soft earth.

Georgiana righted herself and crawled to where he lay. “Fitzwilliam,” she begged between fits of coughing. “Oh, please… please…talk to me.”

“He is hurt, Miss Darcy,” Henry told her as he jerked off his coat and wrapped it around her light muslin gown.

“Help him,” she pressed.

By that time, footmen and neighbors had rushed forward, carrying lamps. Mr. Phelps, the owner of the house to the left, examined Darcy’s body.“We should not turn him; he has several lacerations—no telling what might be in the wounds.”As the man spoke, Darcy’s body arched, seeking air before choking on the same gulping breath.“Georgie,” he managed to say between barking gasps.

“I am here,” she assured him, draping her soot-covered arm over his shoulder.

Mr. Phelps took charge. “Lift him to his feet, and be careful about it,” he ordered. “Jemmy, go for the doctor.You others help Mr. Darcy to my house.”

Two footmen shoved themselves under his arms, arranging them about their shoulders and supporting his weight as they nearly dragged him towards Phelps’s open door. Townspeople scrambled to the bucket brigades to put out the fire. Darcy’s head hung low, and he tried to recover his senses as the servants struggled under his weight. Finally, he forced his gaze towards the gathering crowd across the street. Then, intuitively, his eyes fell on George Wickham, a figure wrapped in a long black cape and sporting a beaver.With a wry smile and a nearly imperceptible salute, he disappeared into the crowd.

Darcy could do nothing more tonight; he stopped Wickham this time; he was lucky. Could he do it again? Could he kill the man who plagued his family? “Come, Georgiana,” he urged, demanding that his body relax back into the arms of the rescuers. Then he allowed the men to help him up the steps to Phelps’s town house.

CHAPTER 1

It took more than a day to explain it all to Georgiana. At first, she did not believe him, but the truth lay all around them. He explained what he knew of her acquaintance with Wickham—how she met the pretender one day in a village shop—how she saw him several times about the estate—how she thought him to be a friend of her brother’s. Slowly, with Darcy’s explanation, Georgiana realized Wickham offered her no future.

His seduction held no dignity. Instead, the man provided a ghastly corruption. He had promised marriage, and Darcy’s darling Georgiana naively thought his to be an honest proposal. The shame she felt at knowing she had succumbed to Wickham’s deception was bad enough, but the truth Darcy later provided of the man’s real reason to target her—he feared might complicate Georgiana’s recovery.

Darcy secured her safety away from others, and he reinforced his sister’s London home with every known amulet to protect her. If others knew to what extreme he went in order to ensure her unassailability, they might think him deranged.Yet the opinions of others never swayed him—call it lunacy, but he chose alchemy to fight perfidy. Georgiana promised to wear her half of the iron double crucifix. Darcy inlaid it with jewels and placed it on a finely woven chain. He explained that he would wear the other half, keeping them connected.

Finally, he hired Mrs. Lillian Annesley as his sister’s companion. Besides being well educated, the elderly woman possessed one quality that placed her above all other candidates for the position. She was a psychic, a Seer. In fact, she was the reason he went to Ramsgate in the first place. He passed Mrs. Annesley on a street near St. James on a cold, windy afternoon. Immediately, this

He spent the six months following his confrontation with Wickham trying to find his enemy again; and although he had various detective agencies searching for just a sighting of Wickham, his rival disappeared into the bowels of London’s underworld. He would resurface eventually; Darcy knew that to be a fact, just as it was a fact that Darcy would kill Wickham when he found him again.

After his face-off with George Wickham, Darcy reevaluated his own life and his plan to bring this malediction to an end. As a member of the British aristocracy, he had inherited his estate and his position in society from his father.Through a system of primogeniture, he should pass it on to his heir, but Fitzwilliam Darcy planned something else with his position. Besides the land, he had inherited from his ancestors a propensity for evil. Since learning at the age of sixteen of this quirk of nature, he fought against it taking over his life. Because of this struggle, most of his peers saw him as an eccentric; yet the aristocracy easily overlooked eccentricity, and even depravity among its members.

Society expected Darcy to take a wife, but he held no such plans. He pretended to want to marry; he attended social functions, but hung on the perimeter of the group, making it appear that he looked on the season’s offerings with a discerning eye. In reality, his search would never come to fruition. Darcy would have no wife—no children—no love in his old age. He would simply never marry, allowing his “eccentric” character to be the excuse. Instead, he would make sure Pemberley thrived and then leave it to Georgiana’s heirs. He would not pass on the unnatural to a

As such, he claimed problems on his estate kept him from London during the spring and early summer season. However, he knew that he had to make some social appearances to keep the tongues from wagging, so in late summer, he joined a friend, Charles Bingley, at a house party given by the Havershams in Sus-sex. During this time, Bingley repeatedly pressed him to help him acquire a piece of property.

“I need your counsel, Darcy,” Bingley pleaded.“Caroline wishes for me to take an estate to establish our family. I found one in Hertfordshire, which I let for the year, but I possess no expertise in this area. Please consider coming with us—help me to determine whether this is a sound investment before I choose to buy it. It will be just Caroline, Louisa, my brother Hurst, and I.We will meet my neighbors and have a quiet time.”

Darcy quickly agreed. He could hide away from social obligations for several months because Bingley offered him the perfect excuse. Hertfordshire was close enough to London that he could make the periodic day trip to check on Georgiana and Mrs. Annesley. Luckily, Bingley, one of his closest friends, good-humoredly tolerated Darcy’s need for solitude and his other idiosyncrasies. The only downfall to the plan was maneuvering around Caroline Bingley, Charles’s sister, who had set her sights on Darcy when her brother became one of Darcy’s closest acquaintances several years earlier. Of course, avoiding one woman’s attentions was a superior plan to a ballroom full every evening of matrons pushing their daughters into his path.

Michaelmas, therefore, found him with Bingley’s family at Netherfield Park. Over the first few weeks, he and Bingley spent their days riding out across the estate, examining the out buildings, visiting with cottagers, planning renovations and repairs, and enjoying each other’s company. Darcy cherished these moments of normalcy, although they were often peppered with torment.When

A member of the landed gentry, Mr. Bennet, noticed his paleness. “Are you all right, Mr. Darcy?”

“Something I did not eat,” he responded with an ironic smile.

Bingley came to his rescue.“My friend eschews meat.”

“I never knew a man who did not eat meat,” Mr. Bennet remarked in surprise.

Darcy pulled himself up to his full height, knowing it would give him an advantage. “We British seem to think a meal is not complete unless we gorge ourselves, but we are a society plagued by gluttony. How many men do you know who suffer from gout? Many civilizations thrive on a cuisine of grains, vegetables, and beans.Yet I am not a total cretin, Mr. Bennet. I am known to eat fish regularly. Since my twentieth year, I have never known a sick day, Sir. I do not know whether my life choice has anything to do with it or