Chapter Four A Question of Stamina #2
He followed his cousin’s gaze. Miss Elizabeth Bennet was standing near a large, gilt-framed mirror.
For once, she was not flanked by her youngest sister or Mrs Forster.
She was alone, holding a fan and attempting to press herself into the floral wallpaper as though she hoped the plaster might open up and swallow her whole.
“Richard, no,” Darcy said, his voice dropping to a panicked register.
“Richard, yes,” the Colonel replied. “We must be polite. It is the foundation of civilised society. Come along.”
The Colonel set his disgusting punch on a passing tray and began to weave through the crowd. Darcy had no choice but to follow. If he stayed behind the fern, he would look like a coward. If he followed, he would look like a fool. He chose the option that at least kept him moving.
The walk across the ballroom was a journey across a vast, hostile desert. By the time they reached the mirror, Darcy’s heart was hammering against his ribs with a force that threatened to crack them.
“Miss Elizabeth,” the Colonel boomed, stopping before her with a bow. “Are you hiding from the dancing, or admiring the wallpaper? It is a very robust shade of green.”
Miss Elizabeth jumped slightly, her eyes snapping to them. A faint flush of pink rose to her cheeks. She looked at the Colonel, and then her gaze shifted, inevitably, painfully, to Darcy.
“Colonel Fitzwilliam,” she said, offering a polite curtsy. “Mr Darcy. I am merely... recovering. My sister Lydia has just exhausted her third partner of the evening, and just watching her requires a great deal of stamina.”
“Mr Darcy,” Darcy managed to say, and winced internally. He had just greeted her by stating his own name. He was a master of ten thousand a year, and he had completely lost the ability to speak the English language.
He quickly executed a stiff bow, hoping she would attribute the verbal catastrophe to the noise of the room.
Miss Elizabeth did not laugh, nor deploy the wit that had defined every interaction they had ever shared. She merely stood before him, her fan held tightly in her gloved hands, looking exactly as uncomfortable as he felt.
The Colonel, having successfully dragged them into each other’s orbit, took a step back, but did not walk away. He merely folded his arms across his chest and watched them with the unblinking focus of an owl observing two mice in a field.
The silence between Darcy and Miss Elizabeth stretched, pulling taut until it hummed. It was a void filled with everything they could not say. Darcy searched desperately for a topic. The weather. The roads. The appalling quality of the punch.
Miss Elizabeth spoke first.
“I understand,” she said, her voice dropping so low that Darcy had to lean forward a fraction of an inch to hear her over the violins. She was not looking at his eyes; she was addressing the knot of his cravat. “A mutual acquaintance has recently returned to Hertfordshire. To Netherfield.”
Darcy’s heart stammered.
The world around them—the heat, the terrible music, the swirling red coats—ceased to exist.
“He has indeed,” Darcy said, the syllables feeling like stones in his mouth.
Miss Elizabeth looked up, her fine eyes finally meeting his. There was a vulnerability in them that dismantled the remaining walls of his composure.
“My family,” she continued, her voice trembling slightly before she forced it steady. “My eldest sister, in particular, has found her spirits greatly restored by this return. We had feared his absence was... permanent.”
She stopped and took a slow, shallow breath. “I know the return did not happen by accident. I believe I have a great deal to thank you for, Sir.”
Darcy had braced himself to endure her chilling civility, her eye-rolls, her dismissals. He had constructed an entire emotional fortress to withstand her disdain.
He had absolutely no defence against her gratitude.
The knowledge that she had read his letter, that she had believed his accounting of the truth, and that she was now standing before him acknowledging his attempt to repair the damage he had caused—it was too much. It was too much feeling for a man trapped in a wool coat.
He was overwhelmed and the swell of emotion in his chest was so vast, and as a result, his instinct was to lock it down.
“It was nothing,” he said. His voice emerged clipped, harsh, and devastatingly brief. “An error in judgement required correction. It warranted no thanks.”
Miss Elizabeth flinched.
It was a small movement, but he saw it. The softness in her eyes instantly vanished, replaced by the familiar, guarded suspicion. She mistook his brevity for arrogance, he realised. She thought he was dismissing her, waving away her gratitude as though it were an unwanted nuisance.
He wanted to seize the words back. He wanted to explain that his heart was beating so hard it was bruising his ribs. But the words were gone, and the damage was done.
“I see,” she said, her tone cooling to match his own. “Then I shall not trouble you with it further. If you will excuse me, gentlemen, I believe I must locate my sister before she attempts to dance a reel with the entire regiment.”
She offered a final, perfectly executed curtsy—a masterful display of dismissal—and slipped away into the crowd, her skirts vanishing behind a sea of dancers.
Darcy stood rooted, feeling hollowed out, as though someone had taken a spoon and scraped out his insides. He had been handed a miraculous olive branch, and he had snapped it over his knee.
He turned his head to look at his cousin.
The Colonel was no longer smiling. The amusement had vanished from Richard’s face. He was not laughing at Darcy’s misery, not even offering a mocking quip about Darcy’s atrocious conversational skills.
Richard stood there, his arms crossed, watching his cousin with disappointment.
Darcy swallowed hard. The verbal mockery he could endure. But his cousin’s judging silence was infinitely worse than anything the man could have said. It was a confirmation of his own catastrophic failure.
The truce was over before it had even truly begun.
Without a word, Darcy retreated to his favourite spot by the wilting plant.
He pressed his shoulders against the cool plaster of the wall, closing his eyes against the glaring candlelight.
The assembly room at the Ship Inn had fully transitioned from a social gathering into a humid, breathless endurance trial.
He needed to focus. He was not in Sussex to drown in his own romantic incompetence. He had a purpose.
He opened his eyes and began to survey the room for George Wickham.
Locating a specific red coat in a room infested with red coats was a taxing visual exercise, but Wickham had an unmistakable stature.
It was the posture of a man who firmly believed the world owed him its undivided attention, combined with the relaxed indolence of someone who had never paid a tailor’s bill in his life.
Darcy found him.
Wickham was standing in a recessed alcove near the tall, draughty windows.
Darcy’s gaze swept the immediate vicinity, his heart performing an erratic stutter as he searched for Miss Elizabeth. He found her on the exact opposite side of the room, trapped in conversation with a deaf dowager who was shouting at her about the price of mutton.
A wave of relief washed over him. Wickham was not anywhere near her.
The relief lasted exactly three seconds before it was murdered by horror.
Wickham was not alone in the alcove. He had successfully cornered Lydia Bennet.
Darcy observed the interaction with sickening clarity, exactly as if he were watching a carriage slowly roll to a cliff edge.
It was the Ramsgate design, unfolding before his very eyes.
Wickham had positioned himself perfectly.
He stood with his back to the majority of the room, shielding Miss Lydia from casual observation while simultaneously forcing her to look only at him.
It was a masterful display of predatory geometry.
He was leaning in close—far closer than strict societal propriety allowed—his head tilted down to catch her every word, creating a fabricated bubble of intimacy.
The girl was tapping her closed fan rapidly against her chin, her eyes wide, her cheeks flushed. She let out a sudden shriek of laughter, tossing her curls back and leaning into his space.
Wickham did not flinch at the piercing volume. Instead, he smiled.
Darcy’s stomach executed a slow, dreadful roll. He knew that smile. He had seen it deployed in Derbyshire drawing rooms and London gardens for a decade. It was the smile that said: You are the only person in this room who matters. You are fascinating. You are understood.
With Georgiana, Wickham had utilised a gentle, melancholy approach, preying on a shy girl’s desperate desire to be useful and loved. Lydia Bennet required no such subtlety. Miss Lydia operated on a daily diet of vanity, and Wickham was feeding her with a shovel.
Darcy watched as he murmured something else. Miss Lydia gasped, swatting him playfully on the arm with her fan. Wickham caught her wrist.
It was a brief touch. A fleeting, inappropriate contact dressed up as a jest. But Darcy saw the calculation behind his eyes. He was testing the boundaries, measuring the girl’s resistance.
She had none. She looked at Wickham as though he had just invented the concept of joy.
Miss Elizabeth was still trapped with the dowager, but where was the appointed chaperone? Darcy’s eyes darted around the alcove. Where was Mrs Forster?
He located Mrs Harriet Forster three sets away, engrossed in a fierce debate over bonnet feathers with two young ensigns. She was functionally useless. She was not a guardian; she was a toddler who had been left in charge of a bakery and had wandered off to look at a shiny button.
Darcy looked back at the alcove. Wickham released Miss Lydia’s wrist, offering another low, confiding remark that caused her to lean even closer, hanging on his every syllable.
The puzzle pieces clicked together in Darcy’s mind, forming a picture so ugly it made his jaw ache.
Why her? She had no fortune. Her connections were negligible. She had nothing of tangible value to a man who lived exclusively on credit and artifice.
But she was wildly eager for attention. And, Darcy realised, she was available.
Wickham was running out of options. His debts were legendary and his reputation, in circles that mattered, was ruined.
He could not secure an heiress with a vigilant family.
But an impulsive sixteen-year-old girl, far from home, with a guardian who had the intellectual weight of a decorative cushion?
Miss Elizabeth was there, yes, but she was not old enough to command the authority of a proper chaperone.
Miss Lydia was the perfect leverage. An elopement with a gentleman’s daughter—even a poor one—would force a desperate family to negotiate. It would secure him a sum to disappear. It was a despicable, ruinous gamble.
And she was Miss Elizabeth’s sister.
If Wickham ruined this girl, he ruined the entire family. He ruined Jane Bennet’s future with Bingley and any hope Miss Elizabeth had of a respectable life. George Wickham would completely destroy the woman Darcy loved.
Darcy’s hands balled into fists at his sides, the fine fabric of his gloves creaking in protest. Passive observation was inadequate.
Standing by the potted fern was no longer a viable strategy.
The hunter had selected his prey, and the trap was being baited while the rest of the room danced the boulanger.
He stared across the sweltering assembly room. The noise of the violins and the chatter of the dancers faded. His focus narrowed exclusively to the red coat and the yellow silk.
The mission had fundamentally changed. He was no longer a watchman.
He was going to have to stop him, and he needed Miss Elizabeth on his side.