Chapter Nine
As it happened, Miss Bennet had gone after Mr. Wickham with a poker because he had attempted to expose her to other men in the taproom. She should not have been in there in any case, for it was no place for a proper lady like her.
Richard told me she had been quite fierce, or so the innkeeper had said, and the innkeeper had indicated that he would not have stood for such behavior from Mr. Wickham anyway, but I had to admit that I had my doubts about that.
The innkeeper was there to make his coin, and he would be silent as long as he was getting paid, that was what I thought. There was the fact, I supposed, that the innkeeper had turned him out after Miss Bennet had brought a poker down on his head.
At any rate, I had to admit it sounded like Mr. Wickham. He was not the least bit respectful of women, and it was one of the many reasons I would not stand for my own sister being united with him.
We rode with all haste towards the bawdyhouse that Richard had spoken of, but we came across a carriage along side the road several miles before we could get there.
It had been abandoned, the horses taken, the driver and anyone else gone.
Richard rode on, but I stopped to look inside.
It was Wickham.
He was sprawled out on the back seat of the carriage. There was quite a lot of blood. He was already dead.
I called Richard back and we climbed in and checked for a pulse to make sure.
We peered down at him.
“I suppose the driver of the carriage wanted nothing to do with this,” I said.
“Yes, when he realized Wickham was dead, he must have bolted,” said Richard. “He would not have wished to be associated with a man who had been asked to leave the inn for terrorizing a woman. He would have wished to be clear of it all.”
“I suppose Miss Bennet swung the poker rather hard,” I said.
“Yes, good for her,” said Richard.
“We cannot tell her she did this,” I said. “She would not wish to know.”
“You do not think so? Perhaps she’d be pleased with herself for having dispatched him.”
“What were we going to have done with him if we’d found him and killed him ourselves?” I said. “Buried him somewhere, told no one?”
Richard nodded. “Yes, that would have been the way of it.”
“So, that is what we shall do with him now,” I said. “And we should have said nothing of it to anyone, of course, so we shall say nothing of this either.”
The colonel nodded. “Yes, I’m quite in agreement.”
Upon arrival back at the inn, it was late afternoon. We went in to check on Miss Bennet, who we found lying curled up on the bed in the room we had rented, swathed still in that same quilt.
When we entered again, she sat up and said, in a very small voice, “I wish you would not have left me alone. Could I not have come along?”
“No,” said Richard. “No, Miss Bennet, that would have been a very bad business.”
“You found him?” she said.
“No need to worry about him anymore,” I said.
Her gaze met mine, her eyes widening in alarm, and then she looked away. She hunched into her quilt and looked down at the floor. “You must be wondering why I went with him in the first place.”
“No, no,” I said. “We are not here to cast any blame. I know the man, and I know that he can spin tales and make things seem differently than they are. I know he can convince other people to do things they regret.”
“That is kind,” she said, looking up at me. “I had not thought you would be that way. But I suppose I had taken his word about you, and I now see I should not have trusted him.”
It was quiet.
“We must make haste, I think,” said the colonel.
“If we can get back into a carriage, the three of us, we have a chance of making it back not too long after nightfall. We shall take you to your mother, Miss Bennet, and we shall hope your father and brother turn back and do not go all the way to Scotland seeking you.”
“My brother and my father went after me?” she said. “I did not think they would do that. I left that letter, after all. I thought they’d wait for my return.”
“Well, your father was quite out of sorts, I understand,” I said.
“What he must be thinking of me!” she cried. “And if my father rides all the way to Scotland—”
“All right, all right,” said Richard. “We shall get you safely back home and then we’ll go in search of your brother and father.”
“No, I cannot ask you to do that,” said Miss Bennet. “I have caused far too much trouble already.”
“You mustn’t talk that way,” I said. “Mr. Wickham is to blame for all of this, not you.”
“He most certainly is,” agreed Richard stoutly.
Richard fell asleep in the carriage. He and I were on one side of it, and Miss Bennet was on the other side, still wrapped in that quilt of hers. We were barely back on the road before Richard was snoring on my shoulder.
I pushed him off, annoyed, thinking he’d wake, but he did not. Cheek against the carriage window, he continued to sleep.
Miss Bennet eyed me. “It’s odd,” she said. “My brother told me that he thought you had some preoccupation with me, and I said it wasn’t true. I said you thought me entirely beneath you and not worthy of your attention. But here you are.”
“Your brother told you that, did he?” I gazed at her. “Well, I suppose none of it matters anymore.”
“No, I suppose it does not,” she said. “You were correct when you said I was ruined, and that is that. I shall have to go back and beg the forgiveness of Lady Susannah, but she will be disgusted with me for having flown into the arms of a man, and then, what with the state of my reputation, she may not wish to associate with me, and I may not get the inheritance from her after all, and I shall be the downfall of my entire family.”
I did not know what to say. She could be correct about all of that. The consequences for all of this could be dire for her.
“You wouldn’t have married me in any case,” she said. “My brother told me that as well.”
“I could not,” I said.
“Why did you come back to Hertfordshire?” she said. “Was it truly because you thought you could stop thinking about me if you did?”
“Does your brother faithfully repeat every conversation he has with absolutely everybody back to you?” I was a bit irritated.
She gave me a wan smile. “We are quite close. We have always been so. Until lately, that is. And now I’ve gone and gotten myself ruined and everything is calamity. I am ever so ashamed of myself.”
I knew I had said we were not going to cast blame, and that I had avoided her comment on this in the first place, but I found myself asking her anyway, “Why did you go with Mr. Wickham in the first place?”
“Jealousy, I think,” she said, squaring her shoulders.
“Jealousy?” I was quite confused. That made positively no sense.
“If it had been James, he wouldn’t have been jealous,” she muttered.
“James is so very good, you know. He is so honorable and so trusting and so willing to see the good in absolutely everyone, and he thinks that his…” She glanced at the sleeping colonel.
“His attraction to men is some flaw that he must compensate for, but he has no flaws. He is my perfect and wonderful elder brother. I have looked up to him my whole life. I thought he and I would spend our lives traveling the world together. We had such plans.”
“You were jealous of your brother,” I said. He had said something similar, in fact.
She nodded, looking miserable. “I wanted a Mr. Bingley of my own, I suppose.” She tilted her head to the side. “Well, I have thought of a solution to all of it, actually, one that will mean that I am able to be with James forever, and one that will save my reputation if done quickly enough.”
“You have?” I was astonished.
“Mr. Bingley can marry me,” she said.
I did not like that idea at all.
“He won’t mind, you see, whatever it was with Mr. Wickham—”
“What was it with Mr. Wickham?” I cut in. “You have said that he did nothing to you.”
“Oh, well, I am quite intact and all of that,” she said.
“I had told him, when we left, that I wished to wait until my wedding night, that it was important to me. Even though we were eloping, even though in the eyes of society, it was already done, I said that in the eyes of God, we would not be married until we had stood over the anvil in Scotland, and I wished to wait. He was all solicitude when I said that. He was all solicitude up until the point we were in the carriage together, and then he became… awful.”
“I am sorry,” I said. “He pressed you, then?”
“At first he was nagging me about it, about wishing for more liberties than I wanted to give him. And then he put his hands on me and I struggled and then he hit me, so I hit him back. Then he was quite cross with me.” Her lower lip began to tremble.
“If it bothers you to recount it, you needn’t,” I said.
“I think I must,” she said. “I think I must get it out, say what happened, say what he did.”
I gave her a solemn nod. “All right, then.”
“Well, then, he told me he was not going to marry me at all. He said he was going to… to have me, though, and he would make sure that I was already…” She drew in a breath.
“Already soiled, so that I could not protest any further. So, we got to the inn and he dragged me into that taproom and he tore my dress, and he tried to bare my bosom to everyone in there—to all of the travelers—and that is when I got free of him and looked for something, anything, to stop him with.”
“And you hit him with the poker?”
“Not just once. It went into him, into his skin, and I pulled it out, and I brought it down again.” She shuddered and pulled the quilt close. “I am ever so stupid.”
“You’re not, Miss Bennet,” I said. “In all truth, I lay a great deal of the blame at your brother’s feet, for he should not have let you in on so much of his secrets. Your brother, even though you think he is good, is caught up in unnatural—”
“It is not James’s fault!”
I was quiet.
“I am stupid,” she said. “Stupid to trust Mr. Wickham. Stupid not to heed what James said, when he said he was a fortune hunter, and that he had taken advantage of other women. You were the one who told him that, I suppose. You knew Mr. Wickham since you were boys.”
I nodded. “I did. I stayed to try to save you from him, but I seem to have failed at that, rather spectacularly.”
She gave me a sad smile. “Would that I would have listened to you.”
“Would that I would not have said that stupid thing to Bingley about not finding you handsome,” I said. “That has turned everyone against me, I think, including your brother, at first. And it’s all so foolish, because you are breathtakingly beautiful.”
She scoffed. “That is not why I did not listen to you. Lady Susannah and all her ideas, that women don’t need men, and here I was thinking that I could have whatever I wanted.”
“Well, that does not make sense to me, I must say,” I said. “If you do not need a man, why elope with one?”
Elizabeth laughed softly. “Yes, indeed, quite. I did not need him, though. I thought I should be quite well cared for. I thought I should have the inheritance from Lady Susannah, and I thought I should have my brother looking after me always, and so I did not need to marry anyone. I didn’t do it out of necessity. I simply… I wanted him.”
I could not help but grimace. “You wanted Wickham?”
“He is…” She met my gaze. “Was.”
I looked away.
“Was handsome and charming and pleasing to speak to and look upon. And James and me, we would talk about men in that way, I suppose, and I got used to finding… thinking…” She hunched into her quilt.
“It is not that way for women, though. We do not get to pursue men as objects of our pleasure. I should have realized.”
She wanted him for pleasure.
I sat back against the chair of the carriage and looked at her, and I realized perhaps that made me jealous. I did not go after things for my own pleasure, as a general rule.
Even when I tried, I often knew that I could not have them, for propriety dictated otherwise, my responsibilities dictated otherwise. I was not the sort of person who could pursue my own gratification.
“I suppose I have had my own little adventure,” she said with a soft laugh. “It has ended quite, quite badly, which is a shame, but I suppose I did have it, in the end. I shall be glad of whatever it was that I managed. I only hope I do not destroy everyone along with me.”
I squared my shoulders. “Miss Bennet, I do not see why anyone has to know.”
“What do you mean?” she said.
“I mean that your brother keeps a secret that could destroy your whole family, and it is ongoing. Concealing that this happened should be a quite easy task.” After all, I had concealed it when it happened to my sister, though it had not been nearly this bad, I had to admit.
“Easy?” she said. “I have been gone overnight. I shall be returning on the second day very late, in a carriage with two men, without a chaperone. I left a letter. All of the servants must know. My father and brother are still gone, looking for me. I do not think it can be concealed.”
I considered this. She was correct, that was quite a lot of elements to suppress.
“It’s good of you, Mr. Darcy, to want to try,” she said. “I am sorry that I judged you the way that I did. I have heard from James what you say happened with Wickham’s inheritance. I am inclined to believe you and not him.”
“I shall not let you be ruined, Miss Bennet,” I said.
“I have told you, I shan’t be. James will make Mr. Bingley marry me.”
“But you can’t marry Bingley,” I said. “If you went off on this little excursion in the pursuit of pleasure, you must know he cannot give it to you.”
Her eyes were shining. “Well, it was quite foolish of me to have done that, was it not, sir?”