CHAPTER 26 #2
Wickham’s smile thinned.
“Come, Darcy. Do not be so delicate. I only wondered whether you had found a way to repair your fortunes.”
“My fortunes do not concern you.”
“Everything concerns me when Pemberley’s name may be used unwisely.”
Darcy looked at him then.
Not because Wickham had spoken of Pemberley as if Darcy had been robbed of it. That wound was old enough to be endured. But because Wickham had spoken of the name as a possession loose in the world, something to be guarded only because it might be applied, borrowed, attached, or spent.
“Pemberley’s name,” Darcy said, “is not coin.”
Wickham’s expression altered.
Only a little.
“Names are spent every day.”
The cold moved through Darcy more thoroughly than the January air had done.
For an instant, the room seemed to gather every danger into itself: Darcy’s name used once already; Pemberley’s name being used now; Miss Bennet’s name, if Wickham learned it, waiting like an unsealed letter; Georgiana’s name protected by no one near enough to see what was being done with it.
“You will leave now,” Darcy said.
“Will I?”
“Yes.”
Wickham laughed once, softly, but his eyes had become colder. “You should be careful. A reduced gentleman seen too often in the affairs of a rich young woman may be pitied at first. After that, he is named.”
Darcy reached the door and opened it.
“You mistake malice for wit.”
“Sometimes,” said Wickham, taking up his hat. “Malice travels farther.”
He paused in the doorway.
“I do hope she is generous.”
Darcy’s control held by so narrow a margin that for a moment he felt nothing but the shape of Wickham’s throat beneath his hand.
Then he stepped aside.
“Good night, Wickham.”
Wickham smiled, because he had at last obtained something.
“Good night, Darcy.”
He went down the stairs without haste.
Only when the outer door had closed did Darcy return to the sitting room. He did not sit at once. The fire had sunk lower; one coal shifted in the grate and fell inward with a small sound. The papers waited upon the table with admirable patience.
Darcy left them there.
He had never been told, in any useful legal sense, what remained to him.
His father had not explained settlements, trustees, entail, or right. He had not summoned lawyers, opened papers, or made clear what anger could legally perform and what it could only wish to do. He had only pronounced sentence.
Darcy was no longer to consider himself his son.
No longer his heir.
No longer a man whose return to Pemberley was expected, desired, or permitted.
The allowance had ceased. Letters had gone unanswered.
Georgiana, still young enough to be protected from truth and therefore delivered into danger, had been placed beyond him by silence, distance, and the hands that governed access.
If any legal uncertainty remained beneath it all, Darcy had not then possessed the means, the steadiness, or the allies to press it.
He had possessed five thousand pounds left to him by Lady Anne, a little interest accumulated during his university years, and an uncle who had not believed him perfect, but had believed him.
It had been enough to begin again.
It had not been enough to keep Wickham from Pemberley.
That was what chilled him now. Not the old dispossession. Not even Wickham’s satisfaction in it. But the manner in which Wickham had spoken of Pemberley’s name, as if it were a thing loose in the world: a credential, a purse, an excuse.
A name could be detached from the person who bore it.
Darcy had learned that. A signature could be copied.
A debt could be made to speak for another man.
A woman’s reputation could be turned until it pointed where Wickham wished.
Pemberley itself, if handled by the wrong hands, might become not a house, not a duty, not a trust, but an instrument.
Darcy did not fear losing what had already been denied him.
He feared what might be done with it.
Wickham had remained close enough to Pemberley to spend what was not his.
He had Pemberley’s belief, Pemberley’s shelter, Pemberley’s money, and Pemberley’s good name to borrow in rooms that knew no better.
He had Darcy’s father’s confidence and Georgiana’s daily world.
He had John Wickham, his father, in the steward’s office, shaping papers, explanations, accounts, and memory itself.
He had Mrs. Wickham speaking in the language of obligation, Lady Anne’s memory, poor relations injured by pride, old kindness made cruel by suspicion.
He had the advantage of every lie already believed.
Yet he had come into Darcy’s rooms to discover what else might be taken.
Darcy moved at last, but not toward the neglected papers. He crossed to the writing table, trimmed the candle, took out a sheet, and sat down.
For several minutes he wrote nothing.
His first anger had been for himself, and he despised it almost as soon as he recognized it. Wickham had entered his rooms, looked about them, and found their reduction amusing. That was not new. It was almost ordinary now.
But Georgiana remained at Pemberley.
His father remained there too—proud, ill-served, and fortified against truth by the very people who had profited from his refusal of it.
Every morning Wickham Senior might enter the library with papers in his hand.
Every afternoon Mrs. Wickham might speak of loyalty, old obligation, Lady Anne’s gentleness, dependence injured by accusation.
Georgiana might pass them on the stairs and be expected to smile.
His father had not been left in ignorance. He had been warned. His own brother had written. Doubt, at least, had been placed before him; caution had been offered where repentance had been too much to hope.
He had chosen Wickham still.
Darcy dipped his pen.
My dear Uncle,
I am sorry to trouble you again upon a subject which has already cost you more pain than usefulness. I do not know what this letter can achieve; nevertheless, I think you ought to know that Wickham called at my rooms this evening.