Chapter Fourteen #2
He must always remember that.
As much as this seemed perfect, the joining of just the two of them, there must always be space for them as a threesome. They had come together that way and they would continue on that way. He would not have it else.
ELIZABETH’S BLEEDING GREW heavy and her cramps grew intense and she could not bear the idea of anything other than being in bed with a book.
She couldn’t face either of them, so she sent word in a sealed letter to Wickham.
She did not think he would be that upset about it, since they had been together alone before.
He gave no response, and she was feeling so poorly she begged off dinner as well. She dozed in bed, waking to try to concentrate on the words on the page and then drifting off again.
Eventually, her maid roused her to get her ready for bed, and she yawned through being undressed, her hair taken down.
She had been asleep for hours when she woke to someone sitting on her bed.
She rolled over, blinking away sleep. “George?” He was holding a candle, which illuminated his features.
“If I asked you to leave with me, would you?” he whispered.
She pushed up in the bed, sitting up straight, now wide awake. “What are you saying?”
“I do not know how we would make our way, my Lizzy, but I should find something. I have never been exactly what anyone might term industrious, but if I put my mind to it, and I had you as my guiding star, perhaps—”
“You mean leave him?”
He set the candle down on her bedside table.
“You aren’t serious,” she said.
“You would never consider leaving him,” he said.
“George, first of all, I am in love with him, and you are in love with him, too.”
“Oh, Lord, Lizzy, I don’t know if it’s love.
I have spent my life jealous of him, wishing to have what he had, and finding ways to take anything that is his.
And somehow, in the course of that, in the course of some mad and awful path of being perverse to him, I have accidentally fallen in love, truly in love, with you.
You’re the one pure thing in all of this, and everything with him is tainted—”
“Stop that,” she said. “That’s nonsense. This is why you need to speak to him, don’t you see?”
“What shall I say to him? I have wronged you, Fitzwilliam? I have robbed you of things you ought to have had? I engineered the way you lost your virginity so you would owe it to me? I saw when you were unsure of yourself and exploited it, because I took some unnatural pleasure in your weaknesses? I wanted you to be weak and me to be strong, because I knew I was never going to be anything compared to you?”
She nodded. “It’s a start, George. Yes. Say that to him.”
“He would be very angry.”
“I do not know that he would.”
“It would pain him. It would shame him. I cannot do that to him.”
“Well, you cannot stay here with him and leave it as it is, without clearing everything between you both. You must have it all out between you.”
“I cannot stay here with him,” he said. “Not now, not when I realize how I have taken advantage of him. However, I cannot leave you.”
“I am not running away with you,” she said. “Even if I did not love him, and I loved you instead, I should be mad to do it.”
“Because you do not trust that I could care for you. And you may be right. All I have ever done—”
“Because I should be shamed and disgraced,” she said.
“I should lose all contact with my family, who would shun me for such behavior, unless there was some good reason for my running. He would have to be beating me or grossly neglecting me or something of that nature before I should be allowed to leave. And even if I did, the proper thing to do would be to live out my days all alone like a spinster. I should never marry again, and I certainly couldn’t be with you.
I am his wife now, for better or worse. To leave this marriage would be disaster for me. ”
His shoulders slumped. “Of course.”
“You do not think things through,” she said to him.
“It is why I need you,” he said, with a little laugh. “Or him, I suppose. I am too impulsive.”
“You are brave,” she said. “We would not have come together, the three of us, if you had not taken liberties with me in that wood. I should have continued to hate him, and you should have gone off on your own and… I don’t know… run off with some other girl like you did with his sister—”
“He might have surprised you,” said Wickham.
“My point is only that we need you,” she said. “You are the fearless one of the three of us. Fitz and I are far too cautious. You are our own George, and we both wish you here.”
He licked his lips.
“But you are going to have to accept it,” she said, her voice soft.
“Accept what?”
“You will not like hearing it,” she said, sighing. Perhaps she should not say it at all.
He tensed.
“Go to bed, George. I shall try to speak to him for you, and I shall continue to carry messages between the both of you, since you are both too stubborn to simply speak to each other.”
“Tell me,” he said. “Say it.”
She shook her head.
“Lizzy, you cannot tease that and then not follow through. Say it.”
“You wish to be his equal, and you are not and shall never be.”
He got up from the bed, getting the candle. “All right, well, then.”
“I do not mean it in some true sense, George,” she said. “I love you both equally, and you are equally important to me. I do not mean in the eyes of God or nature or anything else.”
“What do you mean, then?” He peered down at her.
“I mean, in the eyes of society,” she said.
“You are what you are. He is what he is. You have roles, and it is not possible to fight these roles, not without ruining yourself in the process. Maybe they are bad roles, I know not, George. Maybe there should not be men who have so much more than others. And maybe the virtue of both of you being men, having that power over me, maybe that should not be either. I know not. I only know that it is. And I can accept it or go mad from misery otherwise.”
He was still. “Go on.”
“That is all,” she said.
He clutched the candle.
“I suppose,” she said, “you must see that he and I are married, and that you and I shall never be married. I can bear your children, but you can never be my husband and you can never claim those children the way he can. And this is all that is available to you. Not from us, not from Fitz and me, for we can love you as if you are our husband, but to the world, you will never be that. You will have to choose some other role, some acceptable role, to fill from the outside, and this is the only way we can have a continued relationship.”
He swallowed. “He was saying something like this to me, I suppose.”
“It is perhaps the worst for you,” she said. “I shall not pretend that I can understand how it will feel for you. And it already pains you to be lesser than him, so you must make peace with it or it will niggle at you, at all of us, forever.”
He sighed. “Oh, you are right. I had not thought about it in quite that way.”
“You do not think things through,” she said quietly.
He nodded.
“You must talk to him.”
He came back over to the bed, set down the candle, and kissed her. “I cannot, Lizzy. I cannot.”