Austen FanFic — Between The Night And The Morrow — chapter 3

Second chapter here

First chapter here

This was originally written for the Derbyshire Writers guild, where it’s not finished, but I’ll finish it if there’s enough interest. Meanwhile it allows me a leisurely breakfast with the guys on Saturday.

Lord Darcy looked around the room filled with mortals whirling in what he thought he must call dances, though he was not sure at all why he should call them that, since they looked clumsy and slow and not like the dances of fairyland.

He had hoped… He didn’t quite know what he had hoped, except he’d thought he could talk to the girls’ mother. She was an adult and though these creatures lived ridiculously short spaces of time and could barely be called any more than addled juveniles when compared to fairy kind, the older one would have lived much more than the younger and therefore should be able to make decisions.

But it took him no more than two seconds after meeting the Mrs. Bennet creature to realize that he could never make her understand anything. Her eyes were vacuous and she seemed preoccupied only with having him notice her daughters and have them make a good impression on him.

Prince Darcy had run into this before. It was not unusual in fairyland itself. As the only grandchild – the only descendant in fairyland itself – of great Oberon himself, he would one day rule all of fairyland. That day might be very distant – since the life span of fairy kind was so extended – but it would still come, inevitably, and many Lords and Ladies of fairy kind bid fair to present their daughters to him all hoping he would honor them with his heart and his hand. His announced intended alliance with Carola had protected him from a lot of this. In fact, Darcy sometimes thought it had been the intent of his grandfather when he had demanded that Darcy become engaged. For surely, there could be no great hurry in Darcy’s producing heirs. Not when neither Oberon nor Titania would die soon.

He was however grateful that he was no longer under siege by the matchmaking mamas of fairyland. The attitude was not any less off-putting coming from mortals. He ran his gaze, disinterestedly above the heads of all five girls. They were girls, and he supposed they were healthy enough, in the animal way of mortals. He saw little beauty and no breeding. That creatures such as these could have the blood of his ancestors seemed amazing. B ut then, he knew, sometimes people left fairyland and conjoined their blood with mortals. The results were plainly not pretty. It was all he could do not to shudder at the thought.

And meanwhile Carolus Bingley – Carolus, almost as well-born as Darcy himself – was smiling at a blonde, and taking her away with him to the dance floor. What could he be thinking?

Darcy distanced himself, going away a bit towards a wall where no one seemed to be. Carola came after him, always solicitous for his comfort. “Do they have vermin, you think?” she asked, interested. “My father once spent a whole week among mortals, oh, a few hundred years ago, and he said they had lice and fleas and all these creatures that fed on them. He found it very interesting, but then my papa is ever the natural scientist, ready to take an interest in all the lesser species.”

“Oh,” Darcy said, not knowing what else to say. The creatures might be stupid and they might be doomed to short lives and disease. But hearing Carola speak like this, Darcy couldn’t help but feel a pang of something. Something he couldn’t quite put a finger on. It wasn’t so much anger at Carola, as an irrational need to defend these creatures whom he held in no esteem at all. “I… they’re not so bad. We must remember they’re similar enough to us that we can have children with them.”

“And what children!” Carola said, waving her fan rapidly. “How could your grandfather…. But on this, it would perhaps be better to be silent.”

And Darcy who both agreed with her on his grandfather’s behavior and who could not but think it would be much, much better to be silent, only inclined his head.

Presently, Carola moved away to dance with a human, no doubt feeling herself very charitable for doing so.

And Carolus descended on Darcy, a huge smile on his good-natured features. The smile alone made Darcy feel queasy. It was just like Carolus. He took these enthusiasms to places and things. Darcy remembered when Bingley had found a particular grove he found beautiful above all others and refused to leave it for weeks, even though there was nothing better to do than watch the fish on the stream. And he remembered the many fairy ladies with whom Bingley had thought he was madly in love for a week or maybe two.

“Come Darcy,” he said. “I must have you dance. You can’t stand about in this stupid manner.”

“I beg your pardon, I have no intention of dancing,” Darcy said. “You know why we came here, and it was not to dance.”

Bingley bowed a little, but laughed. “Indeed, but how can we do anything else if we don’t dance first?”

“Bingley!” Darcy said, exasperated. “Return to your partner, enjoy her smiles.” He didn’t add that his friend would tire of those smiles in a week, but he hoped Bingley knew he was thinking it.

“Oh, Darcy, she is an angel. More beautiful than princess or duchess. She is perfection itself.”

A reluctant look, cast from beneath Darcy’s lashes, registered with some surprise that indeed the blonde girl was indeed beautiful – she had perfect features, eyes of a blue as deep as the summer sky and lips as red and soft as the rose petals in an enchanted garden. But he wasn’t willing to admit to Bingley that he knew the girl was a rare gem. So instead he said, churlishly, “You’re dancing with the only beautiful girl in the room, Bingley.”

“Oh, not so. Her sisters are also very beautiful. Look, there sits one. She is very beautiful too, and I dare say, very pleasant.”

As he spoke, Bingley gestured towards a girl who was sitting in the nearby chairs, clearly one of the creatures who could not find a partner even amid gross mortals. Darcy turned his disdainful eye her way, ready to wither Bingley’s pretensions with a single look. Words about girls who were neglected by other men were on the tip of his tongue.

And stopped. The girl was, it is true, no beauty. Her features had those slight irregularities, those imperfections that could not help but offend eyes trained on the beauties of fairyland.

Her nose was slightly too big. Her eyes were too far apart. No careful hand had shaped her eyebrows which were too straight and far too dark.

But under those eyebrows shone eyes that could blind even immortals – large and golden, like the leaves in autumn when they had just turned, or like the golden throne of fairyland.

Prince Darcy looked, and his gaze was arrested. He looked and felt something – he couldn’t say what.

There was a memory in his mind: a grove of trees, the smell of autumnal leaves and a woman’s voice calling to him.

He did not know where the memory had come from, nor what it meant, nor who the woman might have been. The memory struck him as strange, because the woman didn’t speak the language of fairyland, but the language of these people. How odd. He must ask his grandfather if he’d had a mortal nursemaid.

Somehow he’d approached the girl. He didn’t remember making a decision to, and suddenly he found himself bowing to her, while she appraised him with her cool eyes. There was interest and… suspicion? In them.

“Miss…” He floundered. “Miss Bennet.” That was fairly safe, since that was the family name. “Would you do me the honor of this next dance?”

She seemed shocked. “I…” she said, and floundered in turn, and seemed not to know what to say.

Prince Darcy was not used to having a female hesitate to accept his invitation to dance. Any woman honored with his interest could not but be grateful. He was so surprised, so sure there must be a mistake that, almost without meaning to, he projected a glamoury towards her.

He saw her frown, then sigh, and, suddenly, her brow cleared. “I…” She said. “I thank you, yes.”

He should have felt guilty about tampering with her emotions. He knew that. But he could feel nothing but elation as he led her to the dance space. She felt light as a feather in his arm, and smelled like newly-opened roses.

Prince Darcy could not remember ever having led a more pleasing partner to a dance, not even in fairyland.