CHAPTER 36 #2
That was perhaps the worst of it.
“Was she alone?”
“No. Not in any meaningful sense. Mrs. Pratt’s room, Miss Hall nearby, Bingley and his wife somewhere in the company. Miss Bingley too, I am told, though I cannot imagine her assistance would have been of the practical kind.”
Darcy shut his eyes for one moment.
Bingley and Jane had been there. That was something. Miss Hall had been near. That was more. Elizabeth had not been isolated. She had not been followed into some side passage or drawn into the false privacy in which Wickham preferred to make his claims seem confidences.
And yet Darcy knew too well that Wickham did not require privacy to do harm. A lowered voice in a public room might be worse: enough concealment to evade witnesses, enough display to imply intimacy.
“What concerns me,” Fitzwilliam said, “is not only that Wickham has been made absurd, though I confess that part gives me pleasure unsuitable to Sunday reflection. It is that he has been made absurd by Miss Bennet.”
Darcy opened his eyes.
Fitzwilliam was watching him plainly now.
“You understand him better than I do. But even I know this: Wickham forgives advantage sooner than humiliation.”
Darcy said nothing.
“He will not enjoy being laughed at by the sort of houses he has spent years persuading. And if he believes Miss Bennet did it for you—”
“He must not go near her again.”
The words came out too sharply.
Fitzwilliam did not smile.
“No,” he said. “He must not.”
Darcy crossed the room once, then stopped.
He had nowhere to go. The papers on the desk seemed a mockery now: obligations, provisions, access, repair.
He had been writing protections for houses while leaving Elizabeth with half a warning against a man who converted every gap in knowledge into a weapon.
He had told her Wickham was not safe.
He had not told her how he was unsafe.
He had told her not to trust.
He had not told her what retaliation might look like.
His own old reluctance—pride, pain, caution, the habit of silence beaten into him by years of being disbelieved—had stood between her and knowledge she might now need.
“You mean to call,” said Fitzwilliam.
“Yes.”
“I thought you would.”
Darcy looked at him.
“I should have told her more before.”
“You could not have known Wickham would seek her out.”
“I know Wickham.”
“You do not command every room in London.”
“No. But I know what he does with names he wishes to use.”
There was no answer to that, because both men knew it was true.
Fitzwilliam’s eye fell upon the Marwood papers and, for once, he did not smile.
“You were working on her leases.”
“Yes.”
“Then they have done their duty for the day.”
Darcy looked at him.
“They kept you at your desk until something more important required you elsewhere,” said Fitzwilliam. “That is more than most papers accomplish.”
Darcy almost smiled, but could not.
Fitzwilliam took up his gloves.
“My parents will not defend you because Wickham has offended them. Do not mistake that. My mother’s dislike of the Fenwicks is not justice, and my father’s contempt for presumption is not loyalty.
They abandoned you when alliance ceased to profit them.
They will laugh at Wickham because he gives them an opportunity to despise downward.
That may still be useful, but it is not love. ”
“I never mistook it for that.”
“No,” said Fitzwilliam, quietly. “You would not.”
The room settled around the sentence.
Darcy thought, unwillingly, of old rooms and older silences.
Of Lady Matlock’s cool withdrawal, Lord Matlock’s practical regret, Lady Catherine’s outrage dressed as principle.
Of every relation who had found his disgrace an inconvenience to be solved by distance.
Of Wickham moving through the same world with easier manners and a story polished by repetition.
Then of Elizabeth Bennet, with a cup of tea in her hand.
She had known only a fraction of the truth and had still judged better than those who had known him from childhood.
That fact did not comfort him. It struck too deep for comfort.
Fitzwilliam went to the door, then paused.
“Darcy.”
“Yes?”
“Do not begin by reproving her for the tea. She may improve upon the first cup.”
Darcy looked at him.
“I had not meant to reprove her.”
“No,” said Fitzwilliam, and now there was kindness in it. “I did not suppose you had.”
He hesitated.
“Whatever Wickham said, she did not bear it.”
Darcy’s throat tightened.
“No.”
“And whatever comes next, that is no small thing.”
When Fitzwilliam had gone, the office was at once too quiet and too full.
Darcy stood for one moment among the opened leases and found that he could not read a word of them.
Cotton Lane, Manchester Square, the remaining Marwood houses—all the proper machinery by which he had tried to make usefulness stand in the place of every forbidden wish—lay in patient order upon the desk.
They might wait.
Miss Bennet had met Wickham. Wickham had sought her out. Wickham had been made ridiculous by her before half the houses in London had time to admire him. Darcy knew too well what Wickham did with humiliation. He turned it into grievance, grievance into charm, and charm into injury.
Darcy had warned her that Wickham was unsafe. He had not told her enough to make her safe.
He rang.
“My hat,” he said, when his clerk appeared.
The young man glanced once, very briefly, at the unfinished papers.
Darcy closed them.
“They may wait.”
For once, obligation did not lie in the leases.
Within half an hour he was in Portman Square.
The house received him with its usual order.
That order, which had more than once calmed him against his will, did nothing for him now.
The servant took his card; a door opened; his name was carried inward.
He stood in the hall and heard, from some upper room, the faint domestic movement of a house proceeding as if its mistress had not been exposed to George Wickham the night before.
It was intolerable.
Then the drawing-room door opened, and he was admitted.
Miss Bennet sat near the window with work in her lap and Mrs. Doddridge at a little distance, as composed as if Saturday afternoons existed for no more violent purpose than thread, tea, and calls made in proper order.
She looked up.
There was colour in her face. No visible alarm. No tremor in the hand that set down her work. Alive, unhurt, and regarding him with a quick surprise that would have amused him at any other hour.
The relief struck so sharply that, for a moment, he could not bow.
Then he crossed the room with less composure than he had intended.
“Miss Bennet,” he said, and the formality barely held. “Pray tell me you are quite well.”