Chapter Four
THEY ARRIVED AT Longbourn and the letters that had been sent ahead had not, in fact, arrived ahead of them, so everyone was quite surprised.
But upon understanding that Mr. Darcy had asked for Elizabeth’s hand in marriage, the surprise and consternation all faded into celebration, at least on Mrs. Bennet’s part.
The younger girls were all happy as well.
Mr. Bennet seemed a bit miffed over it all, but he went away to discuss the matter with Mr. Darcy and came back seemingly accepting of everything.
Mr. Darcy stayed for dinner with her family and announced that he thought a short engagement would suit him fine, and Elizabeth didn’t know what to make of that.
Perhaps he wanted to do it quickly, before he lost his nerve, or perhaps he was afraid that his family would intervene and stop it all, or perhaps he really was as eager for her as he claimed to be.
They did not speak alone.
He left, and she understood he had gotten permission from Bingley to stay at Netherfield, on his own, since the Bingleys were still in London.
That night, in bed, Jane inquired, gently, if Elizabeth was ever going to explain all of it to her.
“What is there to explain?” said Elizabeth, lying on her back, the covers up to her chin. “He is apparently in love with me.”
“Well,” said Jane, “you do not like him.”
Elizabeth was quiet for a time. Eventually, she said, “There are things I like about him.” She could not very well explain that when she had allowed Mr. Wickham to ruin her—even if she wasn’t truly ruined—she had given up hope on a certain kind of marriage anyway.
She had thought she could have had it with Wickham, but Mr. Darcy was right, any other marriage she would have would hinge upon her concealing her transgressions from the man in question.
To some degree, she would always belong to Wickham in some way, as he had staked the prior claim. So, it would be a pall over any union.
“I was surprised at how easily he conversed with our aunt and uncle,” said Jane.
“I was given to think that he should not be caught dead in that part of London, but he was willing enough to break bread there, and he was quite lively at dinner tonight. Usually, he is so grim and quiet. Perhaps he is the sort who does not open up in front of strangers?”
“Yes, I think so,” said Elizabeth.
It was quiet.
“He is very handsome and wealthy and proper,” said Jane, sounding sort of wistful.
And Elizabeth wondered at herself, not having spent much time at all on the first part of Mr. Darcy’s letter, wherein he admitted to having separated Jane and Bingley, or the way that Colonel Fitzwilliam had described it to her, as something that Darcy had been proud of.
She glared up at the darkness of the ceiling.
Well, he was going to undo all of that. She was going to make him.
But then, she didn’t see him.
He did not come back to call, and he did not even send any notes with servants, nothing at all. He simply disappeared.
When the banns were read at the church for the first time on that Sunday, she was practically astonished that he had seen to that. He was not in attendance, however, but the members of the regiment were, and Wickham heard.
After the service, he offered her his congratulations, but there was something hard in his expression, something furious. She shrank from it.
“You never walk to town anymore with your sisters, Miss Elizabeth,” said Mr. Wickham, glaring at her.
“I have been away in Kent for some weeks,” she said.
“Yes, of course,” he said. “But you are returned now. You will walk again.”
It was an order.
She did not know if she could refuse. That anger in him, though, she was not sure that she wanted to be caught up in it.
MR. GEORGE WICKHAM sought Darcy at Netherfield, but he was not there.
From the servants, he understood that Darcy had gone to London to bring back Mr. Bingley, who was still renting the place.
It was not known what day he would return, but he would be back, for he was planning to marry one of the Misses Bennets in a matter of weeks.
But yes, Wickham knew that.
His Elizabeth.
Not that Wickham was entitled to have such things, not in Darcy’s mind, for to Darcy, he wasn’t really a person, he was a thing to be used, to be taken advantage of.
People like Darcy were careless. His father had been that way, too.
They were rich and they were soft and they were used to the world working their way.
They thought of other people as having been put here on earth to do their bidding.
They actually believed it was ordained by God.
They thought they deserved it because of their blood and their birth. They were arrogant and they were awful.
He wished to be one of them with every fiber of his being.
And he never would be.
Darcy didn’t understand anything at all.
It was one thing to give Wickham three thousand pounds and to assume that Wickham could simply live on three thousand pounds for the rest of his life, but it was another thing entirely when Wickham had been raised right alongside Darcy himself, with servants to dress him and to fetch his meals and to shine his shoes.
He had been raised like a rich man, but he had no riches.
He therefore behaved like a rich man, and he did it for too long, mostly sort of without realizing it.
It sounded idiotic, to think that he was incapable of doing the figures to see how much money was going out to all manner of things—clothing, servants, rent, whist games, horses, shoes, bottles of port, nights at gaming hells—and seeing that it was too much, that there was absolutely nothing coming in and that he must budget it.
It sounded idiotic, but the truth was, he wasn’t familiar with the idea of conservation.
Darcy didn’t conserve anything. His father didn’t.
Or if they did, they didn’t speak about it, for such a thing was considered uncouth.
They did not teach classes in college on how to assume one’s proper station in life, though perhaps they should.
The problem, of course, was that it was all so painful, and Wickham didn’t know why.
It was this glaring feeling of being no one and belonging nowhere.
Not being a rich man, though having been treated more or less like one his entire life, and not being a servant, owing to have been never treated that way, though everyone now expected him to take up that identity, as if it were natural for him.
It is what you are, they all seemed to be saying as they turned their backs on him.
Yes, he’d gone through three thousand pounds far too quickly.
Yes, he understood now that he could not live that way.
Yes, he was going to do it all better now.
Yes, and why could Darcy not see why it had been difficult for Wickham to understand it?
Why could he not give him another chance?
Why must he act as though it was some character flaw that Darcy himself didn’t possess, when, quite clearly, Darcy was just as wasteful and greedy and as much of a spendthrift as Wickham had been.
It was only that Darcy was allowed to be that and Wickham was not.
Perhaps he shouldn’t have tried to elope with Georgiana.
There were always these elements of it that he was getting wrong, these times when he kept thinking, wrongly, that he was part of the family, when he was not. He was never going to be. He was a servant.
Servants don’t marry in or use dowries to make themselves into gentlemen, they don’t get to be brothers, even if they have been treated like brothers for some time—just not recently, of course, not recently.
He came back to Netherfield each night, waiting to see if Darcy was there, and finally, the place was lit up and Wickham presented himself at the door, and the servant seemed shocked to think he could actually just go in, like a guest.
Perhaps it was an odd time of day for guests, but it was more than that.
It was this understanding that Wickham should have come round to the back entrance, should have spoken to the servants, should have had Darcy come down and deign to see him, not ask to be presented in the sitting room, not to hold his head high and think of himself as worthy of joining their company.
Bingley was there but neither of his sisters had come down from London. The two men stood as Wickham came in to the room.
Wickham sat down on a couch opposite chairs they sat in, an expanse of a low table between them, and he looked across at Darcy’s face, and he wanted to scream.
He wanted to hurl himself at him, uttering some kind of animal cry.
He wanted to hit the other man, really hit him.
He stayed composed. “You are marrying Elizabeth Bennet,” he said.
“You know of that,” said Darcy, inclining his head.
Wickham’s nostrils flared. No, stay calm, he told himself, though any gentleman in this situation would not be calm. “You knew how I felt about her, however.”
“I understood you were pursuing some heiress named King?” said Darcy carelessly.
“Well, I hadn’t the funds to make love to a woman like Miss Bennet.”
“You haven’t anything to make love to a woman like Miss Bennet,” said Darcy, raising his eyebrows.
Bingley was looking back and forth between them.
“And she’s beneath you,” said Wickham. “Did you do it just to hurt me?”
Darcy scoffed.
Wickham lowered his voice. “Why are you so obsessed with me, Fitzwilliam?”
“I obsessed with you?” Darcy scoffed. “Be serious, George, it’s quite the other way around. This conversation is over. I’ll ring for someone to see you out.”
“No, it is not,” said Wickham. “We have a number of things to discuss.”
“Perhaps, but not here, not like this.” Darcy looked meaningfully at Bingley, who was wide-eyed, quite rapt.
Good, thought Wickham. Let him wonder. Let him wonder all about it. “Yes, we must always only speak to me in my proper place, below stairs.”