Fifty Shades of Mr Darcy: A Parody by William Codpiece Thwackery Page A

damned soul towards the light.
    ‘Sit!’ Lady Catherine barked, and Mr Darcy returned to his place beside the doorway and knelt, wordlessly, once again.
    Lady Catherine turned to Elizabeth. ‘Now, Miss Bennet, I insist upon hearing you play the pianoforte. Mr Darcy shall turn the pages for you, with his teeth.’
    The evening continued in excruciating fashion, Mr Darcy performing the work of a humble servant, and Elizabeth and the Collinses in a constant state of mortification and distress. The only
person who enjoyed herself was Lady Catherine, who seemed to delight in both Mr Darcy’s humiliation and her guests’ discomfiture. Try as Elizabeth might to turn the conversation towards
innocent pastimes, such as flower arranging, Lady Catherine would insist upon turning it back to subjects such as fisting and genital clamping. And not once did Mr Darcy so much as glance at
Elizabeth, despite her best efforts to catch his eye.
    ‘She is the most interesting woman, is she not?’ declared Mr Collins as the carriage journeyed back to Hunsford. ‘Unusual hobbies, though, I admit.’
    ‘I confess, I find her taste in dress a little outlandish,’ commented Charlotte. ‘I had never imagined that it was possible for a lady to wear earrings
down
there
.’
    Mr Collins beamed at Elizabeth. ‘And how, cousin, do you find Lady Catherine? She seems to take a particular interest in you.’
    ‘She is a complete and utter bi…’ Elizabeth began, but Charlotte’s pleading look arrested her mid-sentence. ‘She is,’ she began more diplomatically, ‘a
law unto herself’.
    ‘And a slag,’ her Inner Slapper added.
    But chief among the impressions that particular evening at Rosings had left upon Elizabeth was her fresh determination to save Mr Darcy from his errant ways. The burden weighed heavily upon her,
and she slept fitfully that night, dreaming of firm buttocks in leather hotpants, and scratching out Lady Catherine’s eyes.

    Over the next few weeks, as Elizabeth’s sojourn at Hunsford continued, Mr Darcy was a frequent visitor to the Parsonage. In fact, he had a habit of appearing when
Elizabeth least expected it. Once he surprised her in the garden when she was trimming Charlotte’s box; several times she stumbled across him in the woods – though quite what he was
doing concealed in a pile of leaves was beyond her – and he even tapped upon the window of her bedroom when she was using the chamber pot, ostensibly to talk about new harnesses and fittings
for his pony trap. It was all beginning to have a detrimental effect upon Elizabeth’s nerves.
    ‘You always come unexpectedly!’ she accused him when next they met, in the lane behind the Parsonage.
    Mr Darcy’s eyes narrowed. ‘Who have you been talking to?’ he said in a low voice.
    ‘I mean to say,’ Elizabeth explained, ‘that you never give notice of your visits.’
    ‘Why Miss Bennet, I like to pop up and surprise you,’ he said with a sly smile. ‘Indeed, I am popping up right now as we speak.’
    Their talk was usually of Longbourn, Pemberley or the weather, and Elizabeth did not feel she could raise the matter of what she had seen on her last visit to Rosings. Why did Lady Catherine
have such power over Mr Darcy? He had money of his own, property and prestige, and, she was informed, a joint share in her beauty spa business. Why did he need to debase himself in such a fashion?
And those leather hotpant … She could not quite erase the memory from her mind.
    Late one morning, a few days before she was due to depart, Elizabeth was roused by the sound of the doorbell. Her spirits were made a little anxious by the idea of it being Lady Catherine, who
had threatened to come down and take tea with her. But this idea was soon banished, and her spirits were very differently affected, when, to her utter amazement, she saw Mr Darcy stride into the
room, his grey flannel breeches hanging halfway down his hips and his definitely not-ginger hair