Chapter 9
Within Lord Matlock’s book room, confusion reigned.
“Georgiana?” Darcy asked.
Fitzwilliam walked slowly towards Wickham. “What have you done to Georgiana?”
Wickham leered at Fitzwilliam. “Why, no more than what I taught her to do to me.”
Fitzwilliam would have leapt upon the cur, but Darcy stopped him, his hand shaking with rage, fear, and any manner of emotion he knew not how to name. The thought of Georgiana sickened him, but for now, he must focus on this business of his wife. “What about Elizabeth?”
“Elizabeth who?”
Without a word further, Fitzwilliam slapped Wickham, and Wickham reeled back, cursing. “What the devil!”
“Answer the questions!” Fitzwilliam ordered. “Mrs Darcy! Mrs Elizabeth Darcy!”
Wickham’s eyes narrowed to slits. “I am scarcely acquainted with Mrs Darcy! I danced with her only once, and she likely still does not know my name.”
A tumult arose in Darcy—he knew not how to act. Turning from the scene, he paced, a memory arising within him of the ball at Netherfield when Elizabeth referred to Wickham as Whitman. Had it been an act? Surely this deception was not so well founded.
Turning back, he closed the distance between himself and Wickham, who still held a hand to the cheek that Fitzwilliam had slapped. “You will answer me,” he said. “Truthfully and solemnly on our fathers’ graves, and damn you to hell if you try to deceive me.”
Wickham made a little grunt of assent.
“When did you meet my wife?”
“Bingley’s ball at Netherfield.”
“November?”
Wickham nodded. “Is that when it was? Then, yes.”
“Never before?”
“No.”
“Have you met her since?”
Wickham finally dropped his hand from his bruised and swollen cheek and shook his head slowly.
“Why were you seen coming to and fro, sneaking from my house?”
With a mean sneer, Wickham replied, “Because your sister likes to dance the blanket hornpipe in her own comfort.”
Fitzwilliam lunged again, but Darcy stopped him. His mind would not accept it, would not allow that Georgiana had willingly engaged in her own ruination with George Wickham, even as another part of his conscience whispered yet you thought it of your wife.
“Of Georgiana, I cannot speak, not now,” he said. “But do not think you will not be called to reckon for that. This, however, you must confirm.”
He reached into his pocket, removing the handkerchief, the lock of hair, and the note.
At once, it all seemed quite silly. Even in the dim light of very early morning, he could see that Wickham’s hair was darker, more fine, and less curled than the bit in the handkerchief.
He held it up anyway, squinting at it while Wickham scoffed.
“I assure you, I never give any woman a lock of my hair, not even your sister, Darcy, and do believe me when I say she has asked for it.”
The letter received more serious consideration, Wickham cursing when he saw it. “I always tell her to burn the notes.”
“Elizabeth?”
“No! Darcy, pay attention. Your sister.” Wickham sneered a bit. “When she is my wife, she will need to be more attentive to my orders.”
“That day will not happen under my command,” said Fitzwilliam. “I would see her married to my batman first.”
“Unless she is with child.”
“Please,” Saye said with a chuckle. “You have been all about town with nary a by-blow to show of it. I daresay those tallywags of yours have more wag than tally in them.”
Perversely, this was the first thing of the whole that Wickham seemed insulted by. “You do not know of what you speak.”
“How many have you tupped since school? A hundred? Two?”
“Too many to count!” Wickham protested.
“Miss Harper, for all your reported effort, remains—”
“The art of the dry bob—”
“Face it, Georgie,” said Saye with a mean grin. “Your flute is silent.”
“Enough of this,” Darcy roared. “Wickham, I must know for certain. Have you had relations with my wife?”
Wickham rolled his eyes, beseeching the heavens.
“Can someone please get Darcy to stop with the questions of his wife? No! How many times must I say it? If you do not believe me, think of it this way—why should I waste my time on Mrs Darcy, who might give me only a bit of her pin money here and there, rather than apply my efforts—”
“And the waning strength of his doodle,” Saye added, to receive only a glare from Darcy.
“—on Georgiana.”
“On Georgiana’s thirty thousand pounds, you mean,” said Fitzwilliam.
Wickham, far from being insulted, nodded. “Never let it be said I am not prudent.”
Darcy clutched the back of a nearby chair, needing something to keep him upright. His mind simply would not make sense of it all. Georgiana, ruined. His wife—good Lord, his poor wife! Was there someone else? Some other GW? Was it all a lie? He felt himself sag under the weight of his confusion.
“Get him out of here,” he ordered, and Fitzwilliam did so, removing Wickham from the house.
Darcy ran his hands over his face, thinking of the tears she wept the day he told her that he intended to send her to Yorkshire, the times she had tried to speak to him, the hurt in her eyes.
He had always said it was an act, a falsehood.
Was it? From whence came the handkerchief?
The hair? It had to belong to someone. Did it not?
Georgiana had just sat down to her breakfast when the door was unceremoniously thrust open and her brother and cousins entered. She immediately set down the cup of chocolate she had just sipped, her hand flying to cover her mouth at the unkempt and wild appearance of the three of them.
“Where have you all—”
“Is it true?” her brother asked. “What have you done, Georgiana?”
“What do you mean?” she cried, while Saye ordered the footman to leave them and told Darcy to sit down. Darcy paid him no heed and walked to the window.
A pulse of fear went through her when Fitzwilliam sat beside her and pulled his chair very close.
“Georgiana, we three learnt something very disturbing tonight, and I wish, before anything else, to hear your version of the tale.”
Her brother turned, but thankfully remained at the window. “Have you allowed George Wickham to ruin you?”
“Wha—? No! Of course not!”
Darcy sagged visibly. “I knew it was all lies.”
“Lies?” Georgiana repeated.
“No? His account of it was quite different,” Saye replied, leaning towards his young cousin. “He said that he intended to marry you and had already taken the liberties of marriage.”
Georgiana felt herself turn pink, and she could not keep her cousin’s gaze. “We are in love,” she said softly. Hearing the groans and scoffs of the room, she raised her eyes again. “We are! George is not the reprobate you all think, and simply because of…of misbehaviour of his youth—”
“What was it then, Cousin?” Saye asked. “Has he fondled your bosom?”
Georgiana felt her pink cheeks turn to a more scarlet hue. “I cannot answer—”
“Answer him,” Darcy said, his gaze hard.
What followed became painful, and she wept a little, humiliated as Saye forced her, with excruciating plainness of speech, to explain what she and George had shared in private moments.
Saye had no regard for the sensibilities of a lady, insisting upon detail in the crudest possible language.
It would have been shocking were she not so terrified.
At her brother, she dared not look; indeed, she mostly just looked at her hands, twisting white and pale in her lap.
“At least I did not…” she said, and they hung on her words. “I had not yet allowed him…”
After a too-long pause, Saye asked, “Your maidenhead? From my calculations, it seems a slim distinction—but not wholly unimportant.”
“That was…it was going to be on my birthday.”
Saye cursed, and Fitzwilliam leant back and said, “Lord almighty,” then shook his head with unmistakable disgust. “Splitting hairs, but nevertheless, it is something. At least we know Wickham was only bluffing when he mentioned the possibility of a child.”
“No!” Georgiana cried. “No…I…of this we may be sure, I am not with child.”
Then her brother extracted the note he had shown her before and waved it at her. “This, then, was to you?”
She nodded. Too much had been disclosed to dissemble about a note.
“And what about this?” Darcy walked towards her and laid a handkerchief in front of her.
“N-no,” said Georgiana, relieved to finally be able to deny something. “I have never seen that before.”
“We are surprised to see you in town,” said Caroline Bingley as her brother joined her at the breakfast table. “I should have thought you and Mrs Bingley would be cosy and content at Netherfield for some time.”
“And so we might have been,” Bingley owned, “save for the strangest letter that Jane received from Lizzy.”
The sound of that name spoken so familiarly by her own brother made Caroline’s lip curl. “Oh?”
“Very peculiar indeed…almost a code. Something about an unhappy truth… We came straightaway to speak to Darcy about it and be assured all was well.”
Caroline, filled with delight as she was, spoke unguardedly, “I assure you, Brother, all is very much unwell, if I am not mistaken.”
Her brother paused in the act of stirring his coffee, looking at her curiously. “What have you heard?”
Caroline leant towards him. “It could not have escaped your notice how these Bennet girls were in Hertfordshire. Flirting and making a spectacle of themselves. Not Jane, no…” she hurried to add, seeing rare anger crease his brow.
“But the younger girls? Quite unseemly. And there were quite a few rumours about Eliza and George Wickham.”
Bingley was shaking his head, discounting her before she even got the words out. “No, I heard nothing of that.”
“Perhaps you did not hear of it because you heard nothing but the sound of your wife’s whisper in your ear,” Caroline retorted. Realising she spoke too loudly, she lowered her voice. “A letter was found and Wickham’s handkerchief with a lock of his hair—right in Eliza’s bedchamber.”
His coffee forgotten, Bingley leant back in his chair, frowning. “That cannot be. Surely not.”