Chapter Two
THEY FELL OUT over money, but Wickham had made it into quite the grudge that he held over Darcy’s head, all these years, doing wretchedly awful things like what he’d done with Georgiana.
Darcy remembered Wickham’s pointed jeer at him.
Is that what I am to you, Fitz? Am I just a whore you pay?
And all until that point, Darcy had never even realized that Wickham had felt like that about it, though he supposed he should have.
It had begun as Wickham seeking his favor, after all, but Darcy had not taken that to be done out of affection, truly.
He had thought that Wickham wished to ingratiate himself, to create some kind of intimate relationship between the two of them, one that Wickham could count upon to keep him in good stead, and Darcy hadn’t even begrudged him it.
He and Wickham had grown up like brothers but not, for it was made quite obvious, over and over, that Wickham was not an actual son and that he should be grateful for the charity being bestowed upon him. This was said, in so many words, often, by nearly everyone.
His father said things of that nature all the time, and the other servants said it, and whenever anyone met Wickham, they would be told of the situation and they would say something like, Oh, what a thing to be given such advantages. You must be ever so grateful.
It made Darcy annoyed, truthfully, for he could not see how a person could truly accept something if they were constantly being told that they should not actually be given it, that it was a gift bestowed to one so unworthy of it.
So, Darcy assumed that it would make Wickham feel insecure. He assumed that the things that Wickham did were about making himself feel more secure.
Darcy had been quite young when Wickham offered to share the girl with Darcy. Well, give her to Darcy was more the way it had been framed. The servant girl was Wickham’s, but he had spoken to her and she had agreed to it if Darcy wanted.
But Darcy hadn’t liked it, hadn’t like the idea of taking things from Wickham.
Even so, he’d wanted… oh, he didn’t know.
He’d been aroused at the idea of it, he couldn’t deny that.
There was something so very wrong about the idea of it, another man’s woman, and just taking her, and that had given it some layer of excitement that he could not shake off, would now, he supposed, perhaps, never shake.
It was the one fantasy he always returned to, the one he wished to act out again and again, the thing that he and Wickham had done, sometimes with women that really belonged to Wickham, sometimes with women they paid to pretend they belonged to Wickham.
They had acted it out every such way it could be conceived.
Anyway, perhaps if he’d left Wickham out of it, as the offer had gone, if he’d simply accepted the offer of the girl in his bed, and taken it for whatever it was, Wickham giving him the opportunity to have a woman for the first time, it would have been different.
But Darcy hadn’t liked the idea of taking things from Wickham.
He knew the girl, Wickham’s girl, who was a servant in the household, had agreed to it so readily because she likely thought that she might be able to soften the young master of the house towards her, to get things from him, and she likely might not have minded bearing Darcy’s bastard, for there might be advantages in such a thing for a girl like her.
So, there was no loyalty on that score, and he had thought that Wickham was desperate for some sense of security, and so Darcy had said, Stay. Watch. And later, Join in.
But it hadn’t been the reason that Wickham had done it.
Darcy hadn’t realized that, not then, not until later, when Wickham’s face was twisting in hurt and anger and betrayal.
No whores that night, none that they could find together, drinking from flasks they hid in their jackets as they prowled the seedier parts of Cambridge.
They had come across a girl or two, but all of them had objected to the both of them at the same time, all of them had refused Darcy’s escalating offers of coin.
So, back they had gone to Darcy’s rooms at the school, and they had been drunk, and Darcy hadn’t thought anything of it, of Wickham’s forwardness, or his parading around without his shirt or the way he got on his knees for him, the way he undid Darcy’s trousers and put his mouth on him, even as Darcy told him he didn’t have to, even as Darcy stroked the back of his head, even as Darcy was drunk and wondered if it made it different if they were doing this when a woman wasn’t there.
They did sometimes, use their mouths on the other, sort of a courtesy. If one was busy with a woman and the other was needy and throbbing, it seemed…
Darcy had never thought of it as being about the two of them, not in any real way. He was always so headily aroused and usually drunk at the time, anyway, and it all seemed sort of hazy, and Wickham could make anything, any bit of sinful indulgence, seem as if it were truly nothing.
And after, when Darcy said it, he hadn’t meant anything by it. He usually gave Wickham the money to pay the girl, gave him too much, and he expected that Wickham kept the rest of it, because Wickham didn’t have money, and Darcy knew this. This was just a fact of their existence.
So, when he said it, when he said, “I’ll give you a bit of coin before you’re on your way,” he had only meant it as…
But Wickham had been hurt.
Darcy tried to dig himself out of it. “All right, I’m sorry, but you spent while you were at me, and I would have just brought you myself, and then I suppose we’d have been even, but—”
“It’s what I am, after all, your servant,” said Wickham, eyes flashing. “I’m to do your bidding, hop here and there, and I am to simply take my payment—”
“Well,” said Darcy, “why else would you put your mouth on my prick?”
Wickham’s face had frozen. “You do it to me sometimes,” he whispered. “Why do you do it?”
“I don’t know. I suppose I’m so caught up in it that it doesn’t seem entirely disgusting, but—”
“Disgusting,” repeated Wickham, and Darcy heard it, then, heard the little shard of it.
That was when it suddenly all made sense. Why would a man give another man his woman? Why would he stay when that man said to watch? Why would he eagerly join in when invited? Why would his hand shyly seek out the other man’s hardness, why would he stroke it with a certain reverence?
Wickham was in love with him.
Darcy thought this had been about Wickham finding some way in, wanting to know all of Darcy’s darkest secrets, wanting to make himself indispensable to Darcy as his most trusted servant.
Yes, Darcy had thought of them that way. Darcy above Wickham, Wickham beneath. In the end, as much as Darcy had pretended to wish to think of Wickham as equal, it had been almost impossible for him to do so. It was being confronted with this that made him feel guilty.
The idea of another man loving him like that, in that sort of Greek-tragedy way of love, he may have taken that in stride.
Perhaps it was Cambridge. It was easy, when one was at college, to allow oneself to be open to all manner of ideas. They seemed like intellectual propositions, thought experiments, and they called out to be explored. It was a time to stretch one’s mind and one’s experiences.
There were other boys in other rooms doing the same thing, and everyone knew about it. Some of them were even calling it love, in that way of young men, of adolescence, where everything is a poem, one written half-drunk and half-dressed.
So, he felt guilty about assuming that Wickham had intended to use him, guilty about agreeing to the arrangement with such gusto, most especially because some part of him had thought he was doing Wickham a favor, giving Wickham the security he needed.
He had been saying, each time he showed Wickham his naked body, Don’t worry, I would not trust you with this if I didn’t intend to keep you in my household, forever.
Don’t worry, I shall look out for you. Don’t worry, I shall make a place for you, always.
Don’t worry, I shall be the best master you’ve ever had.
He thought Wickham was grateful, but Wickham was insulted, and well, he should be.
Nothing was the same after that.
It wasn’t that the business with the women stopped, exactly, though.
It slowed.
They would go months, years, without, and then Wickham would appear with some woman or other—the last was Mrs. Younge.
Darcy hired her to be Georgiana’s companion after that, which was a stupid and terrible idea, to hire a woman you have used as a mistress, a woman you have shared with another man, to hire that woman to look out for your innocent and vulnerable sister.
But Darcy could always be talked into doing stupid things by George Wickham.
Wickham brought the women, and after, he demanded coin.
And Darcy paid him, chagrined, ashamed, guilty.
Then there were other expenditures, because sometimes Wickham wanted money for other things.
Everything Darcy had written in the letter to Elizabeth was true.
He and Wickham had agreed that Wickham was no clergyman and Darcy had given him money to study law, and Wickham had come back with his hand out.
Darcy hadn’t given him nothing then, actually. He had given him more money. He simply hadn’t given him the rectory position in Derbyshire, the one that Wickham wanted.
“You can’t have a profession in the church,” Darcy had said. “You and I both know this.”
“Anything I’ve done, you’ve done,” Wickham had retorted.
“True, and I am not angling to be a rector either,” said Darcy.
“Your father wanted me to have that position,” said Wickham. “He would have wanted me looked after.”
“That position is already filled,” Darcy told him, and it was filled. He gave Wickham money.
Wickham protested it wasn’t worth the same.
Darcy told him that he’d already gotten what it was worth.
And Wickham looked at him in such a way that told Darcy that he hated him. Well, hated him in the way where love has been twisted from hate to love.
The business with Georgiana happened after that.
Wickham tried to elope with Darcy’s sister, and Darcy was furious and Wickham had said, “Oh, but it’s about her dowry, don’t you see?
It’s just about money, after all. It’s all I care about.
” He’d been sarcastic, spitting the words at him, and Darcy had felt guilty and he had not retaliated against the man for what he’d done to Georgiana.
Not at all. Darcy may have given the man money, in fact.
Money that Wickham had likely used to get this commission that he now had in the regiment, when he appeared in Meryton while Darcy was staying there with Bingley.
And that was when everything had changed between them. All because of Elizabeth.
There had been women before, but it had never been about the women.
Now, her… she was different.