CHAPTER 29 #2
“To bring news you will dislike and to watch you attempt not to dislike it.”
“Wickham.”
Richard’s humour thinned.
“Yes.”
The name entered the room and altered it. Darcy had known, since Wickham’s visit, that the matter was not finished. Wickham never came merely to appear. He came to measure what might next be used.
“Where?” Darcy asked.
“Several places. None of the first rank, if that comforts you.”
“It does not.”
“No. I thought it unlikely. He has been seen in gaming rooms where a man may call himself a gentleman if his coat is good enough and no one examines his vowels too severely. He has won a little, lost more, paid enough to be tolerated, and promised enough to be remembered.”
Darcy’s hand lay still upon the desk.
“Who saw him?”
“My brother first. Then two men he trusts less but believes on this point because they were both eager to say they had met a man connected with Pemberley.”
“Connected.”
“His word, I gather. Or something near enough. He speaks of Derbyshire with feeling. Of Pemberley with intimacy. Of your father with gratitude. Of you—” Richard stopped.
Darcy looked at him. “Say it.”
“With regret.”
The word was so well chosen that Darcy almost admired the viciousness of it.
Regret suggested generosity injured by another’s conduct.
Regret allowed Wickham to lower his voice, to imply what honour forbade him to state, to turn silence into proof.
Regret could be carried into any drawing room by people who thought themselves too delicate for slander and therefore repeated only the shape of it.
“He has always had talent,” Darcy said, “for sounding pained by the injuries he has done.”
Richard’s mouth tightened. “He is also using Darcy House.”
For a moment Darcy heard nothing but the wheel of a carriage passing below.
“How?”
“Rooms when convenient. Letters received there. Servants answering him. Your father’s name smoothing what his own cannot.”
“Then he is not merely using it,” Darcy said. “It is being lent to him.”
Richard did not answer.
“Pemberley guarantees him.” Darcy looked down at the papers before him without seeing them.
“My father may call it kindness. Wickham Senior may call it old service. Mrs. Wickham may call it family feeling. George calls it whatever serves him at the table where he is losing money. But the result is the same.”
“Yes,” Richard said. “That is the result.”
Darcy rose and went to the mantel. There was no fire in the grate; chambers did not indulge feeling with comfort unless one paid extra for coal, and Darcy had long ago learned the value of distinguishing between necessity and consolation.
“There is more,” Richard said.
“There is usually more.”
“My father has had a letter from Mrs. Wickham.”
That struck more nearly than the clubs.
Darcy turned back. “Asking for money?”
“No. That would have been simpler.”
“Then what?”
“Society. Introductions, if they may be had. The occasional reception. She writes that London is a perilous place for a young man of gentlemanly expectations if he is left among inferior companions.”
Darcy looked at him.
Richard’s mouth tightened. “Yes. I thought you would admire that.”
“Inferior companions are generally Wickham’s first choice.”
“Not in Mrs. Wickham’s account. In Mrs. Wickham’s account, George has been bred to better things, attached since childhood to Pemberley, beloved by your father, and made unhappy by a coolness she does not presume to understand.”
“She understands it perfectly.”
“No doubt. But she does not write as if she does. She writes as a mother alarmed for her son’s prospects, and as a poor relation reminding my father that she is not quite a stranger to Lady Anne’s family.”
Darcy turned away.
There it was: not the full claim, never the full claim.
Mrs. Wickham had always understood the value of standing just within the family shadow.
Born a Fenwick, connected by blood where it served and by dependence where blood failed, she could make neglect look like cruelty and assistance look like duty.
“She wants Matlock House to wash him clean,” Darcy said.
Richard’s brows lifted. “A legal man’s expression, I collect.”
“Receive him once, and he may say he is received. Introduce him once, and he becomes a man unfairly excluded by others. Let him stand in a Fitzwilliam room for an hour, and by tomorrow he will have been intimate there for years.”
“That is very nearly my father’s view.”
“Then your father may yet be wise.”
“My father,” Richard said, “has not yet decided whether ignoring a poor relation is worse than receiving her son.”
Darcy looked at him.
Richard’s expression had lost all humour. “Which means he is already considering it.”
Of course he was.
Lord Matlock would not call it weakness. He would call it balance: family pride against family obligation, public appearance against private doubt, a small civility against the unpleasantness of refusal. He would tell himself that receiving Wickham once need signify nothing.
Once was precisely what Wickham required.
“He must not receive him,” Darcy said.
“I agree.”
“Will he listen to you?”
“He listens. He does not always obey.”
“No.”
Richard watched him. “If Wickham gains even a little countenance through Matlock House, he will use it.”
“He will not need much.”
“No. He never does.”
Darcy returned to his chair, but did not sit. “And Lady Catherine?”
“Not yet, as far as I know.”
“That we know of.”
Richard’s silence agreed.
If Mrs. Wickham wrote to Lord Matlock, she might write to Lady Catherine.
Or perhaps she had already written, and Lady Catherine, who believed herself equal to any disturbance and superior to all information, had not thought to mention it.
Rosings was another instrument if touched correctly.
Lady Catherine did not love the Wickhams, but she loved principle, blood, obedience, and the discovery that someone had behaved without consulting her.
Wickham, Mrs. Wickham, Wickham Senior, Darcy House, Lord Matlock, perhaps Rosings. The old machinery had begun to move again, quietly and in separate pieces.
Darcy looked at the desk where Miss Bennet’s invitation lay.
Richard followed his gaze.
“She must be warned.”
Darcy’s answer came at once. “Yes.”
Richard blinked. “That was less argument than I expected.”
“I have made enough mistakes by mistaking silence for protection.”
“Good.”
Darcy gave him a look. “Do not look so pleased. I have not yet determined how much she must be told.”
“That is not the same as whether she must be told.”
“No.”
“And you will not persuade yourself that because she is clever, she must somehow know what no one has said?”
“No.”
Richard sat back. “Then I have been of service and may retire before I become too fond of my own wisdom.”
“You passed that point some years ago.”
“Family affection requires tolerance.”
Darcy returned to his chair. “The warning must be particular enough to be useful and not so particular that it burdens her with my whole history in a drawing room before dinner.”
“Is this a drawing-room warning?”
“No.”
“Good. Because I should hate to see you explain forged debts and injured women between soup and fish.”
Darcy’s expression must have altered, for Richard’s face sobered.
“I know,” Richard said more quietly. “It is foul.”
“It was designed to be.”
“To make denial sound like pride.”
“Yes.”
“And now Wickham will use the same art where he can. He will not need to say you are guilty of every old charge. He need only imply that Miss Bennet, in her generosity, has been drawn into believing too much.”
Darcy sat at last.
There it was: the shape of what he had feared and not yet said aloud.
Miss Bennet’s kindness, turned into folly.
Her trust in him, turned into evidence of manipulation.
Her wealth, turned into motive. His presence at Portman Square, made not honour but encroachment.
Every paper he had corrected, every dinner he had attended, every room he had entered by her wish might be rearranged by Wickham into a story in which she had been careless and he had been calculating.
And yet to withdraw now would not protect her. It would only leave her ignorant of the design.
“A friend like me,” he said slowly, “must be honest enough not to injure her by concealment.”
Richard was quiet a moment.
Then he said, “Yes.”
Darcy looked up.
Richard’s face held no mockery now. “If that is the name you are giving it.”
“It is the only name I may give it.”
“That is not what I asked.”
“I know.”
The two men regarded one another across the desk, and for a moment they were not colonel and lawyer, not younger son and disgraced heir, but boys again in a house where Lady Anne had once laughed and no one had yet learned how thoroughly affection could be used after death.
Richard looked away first.
“You care for her very much.”
Darcy almost said, Yes.
The word was too small.
“I would marry her tomorrow,” he said, “if I could do it without bringing the whole weight of my circumstances upon her.”
Richard stilled.
There. It had been said.
Not all of it. Not the heat of it, nor the dreams, nor the shame, nor the hunger that made the smallest domestic kindness almost unbearable. But enough.
Richard did not answer carelessly. Darcy was grateful for that.
“At least,” Richard said at last, “you are no longer pretending this is an enthusiasm for well-managed leases.”
Darcy’s mouth moved despite himself. “The leases are well managed.”
“I am sure they are. May they be very happy together.” Richard rose. “As for Miss Bennet, you will attend the dinner.”
“I have accepted.”
“You will not look like a man attending his own execution.”
“That may be beyond my powers.”
“Make an effort. Ladies are known to dislike it when guests arrive with the air of having been sentenced.”
Darcy picked up a paper merely to put it down again. “Is that your military counsel?”
“It is my cousinly counsel. My military counsel is that if Wickham enters any room in which Miss Bennet is present, you do not murder him before witnesses.”
“I had not proposed to murder him.”