Read Suspense and Sensibility Or, First Impressions Revisited: A Mr. & Mrs. Darcy Mystery for Free Online Page B

contest. Both he and his friend Chatfield were men of varied interests who did few things by halves, and their mutual pursuit of perfection extended to their training at Angelo’s fencing school. Several years ago they had established a standing weekly appointment to cross foils whenever both were in town, an engagement Darcy considered one of the highlights of any trip to London.
    "When you left town with Mrs. Darcy in December, I did not expect to enjoy the challenge of your blade for some time," the young earl said. "I hope nothing urgent called you from Pemberley?"
    Darcy laughed. "That is a matter of opinion. To my mother-in-law, chaperoning my wife’s sister through her first London season is a matter of utmost urgency."
    "Ah, the obligatory premarital promenade! You have my deepest sympathy. How many times have you endured Al-mack’s thus far?"
    "None."
    "You truly lead a charmed life. You cannot avoid it all season, you know."
    "I can if Miss Bennet meets an acceptable gentleman elsewhere."
    "Any prospects yet?"
    "Perhaps. A Mr. Harry Dashwood has come to call. Do you know him?"
    "Dashwood," Chatfield repeated as he and Darcy removed their gloves. "I think he’s a friend of my wife’s youngest brother, Phillip. Bit of a wild bunch, their set. Most of them barely finished university – more interested in learning sixteen different ways to tie a cravat than in learning anything from a book. Tumbled out of Oxford and into town to pursue a full-time occupation of general carousing. Too much money and not enough responsibility. You know the type."
    Unfortunately, Darcy did; it was all too common among his peers. Born into privilege and untempered by duty or conscience, many of his fellow "gentlemen" behaved like anything but. They lived lives of self-absorbed leisure, frittering away their time and fortunes on meaningless pursuits. The worst of them carried this extravagance to excess – slavish attention to clothes, overindulgence in drink, high-stakes games of chance, fast horses, faster women – and in many cases ultimately found themselves undone by it.
    "I am sorry to hear this of Mr. Dashwood. For Miss Bennet’s sake, I had wanted to like him."
    "Those are just my general impressions of Phillip’s crowd, Darcy. I’ve heard no genuine harm of Mr. Dashwood in particular," the earl said. "Say, he isn’t related to old Sir Francis Dashwood, is he? Now he was a hell-raiser."
    "Let us hope not." Sir Francis Dashwood, though dead more than thirty years, had been a libertine so notorious that schoolboys still talked of him in the dormitories of Eton and Westminster when they wanted to impress younger schoolmates with their worldly knowledge. Perhaps, Darcy mused, that is why Mr. Dashwood’s name had sounded familiar.
    "So, you are here long enough to find a husband for Mrs. Darcy’s sister, and then it’s back to Pemberley. Is that the scheme?"
    "Essentially. I do hope to locate a good clergyman while in town. I recently received word that the vicar of Kympton is taken quite ill, so the living will likely become vacant by year’s end."
    "How much is it worth?"
    "About four hundred a year."
    "You have not already sold it? A living that valuable? I should think someone would have paid you handsomely to hold it for him."
    Darcy had never much cared for the practice of accepting payment from a gentleman or his family in exchange for appointing him as a parish priest. Fortune and connections had their place in the worlds of business, law, politics, and the military, but not, he believed, in matters of the spirit. The men who guided their parishioners from baptism through death, who married and buried them, who counseled and consoled, should be selected for their office on the basis of merit alone.
    "According to my father’s will, it was to be held for an individual who has since elected not to take orders," Darcy said. "When the living became vacant about three years ago, I granted it to the best candidate I