Chapter Fifteen #2
“That’s another problem,” he said. “Typically, I should just say that George must stay away whenever we are near my sister. But he would not bear that, I do not think, not the way things currently stand—”
“You are not even a little angry at him for trying to steal me away?”
He paused, letting out a breath. He let go of her hands.
“Go and speak to him,” said Elizabeth.
“Could I send for him to come here, so that we might all speak?” he said.
“I think it must be just you and him,” she said. “I think that having me in the middle of it is complicating matters. I think you must speak to each other alone.”
“I have no idea what to say to him,” said Darcy.
“Go and ask him why he wished to take me away.”
“Well, will he not be angry with you if I reveal that you have told me that?”
“Perhaps,” she said. “But we must find some way through this, do you not think?”
WICKHAM WAS PLAYING patience, a solitary card game, in the downstairs sitting room when Darcy came in. “Darcy, do you fancy a game? What’s something with two players?”
Darcy crossed the room to him. “You tried to convince my bride to leave with you?”
Wickham looked up at him. “She told you that?”
“Furthermore, you have told all the servants you are a doctor, when they know you are not a doctor?”
Wickham cringed. “That was perhaps not my best idea, I admit.”
Darcy sat down opposite him and began to take his cards.
“What are you doing? I was in the middle of something, there.”
“I thought we were playing,” said Darcy, sweeping up the cards into his hands and tapping them against the table to line them up.
“I thought you were throwing me out.”
“Yes, George, this will be the thing that you do that makes me throw you out.” He was sarcastic.
Wickham thought about that. “I suppose I have done a number of things that might make you wish to throw me out, haven’t I?”
“You have, but we have also been rather awful to each other in numerous ways, I think,” said Darcy.
Wickham studied the other man’s face as he began to shuffle the cards. “What are we playing?”
“I haven’t any idea,” said Darcy. He continued to shuffle the cards. “You wish it to be her and you and to leave me out of it? Is that it?”
“No,” said Wickham with a shrug. “I think I wish that I wished that.”
“What?”
“Oh, it is shameful to feel that you are not quite complete without some other man in the mix, is it not?” Wickham shrugged again. “We could play piquet.”
“Rather complicated,” said Darcy. “How about ving-et-tun? If we are concentrating on talking at the same time?”
“Yes, all right,” said Wickham. “You deal. You’ve got the cards.”
Darcy dealt Wickham the ten of hearts and himself the three of spades.
“This is going badly already,” muttered Wickham.
“Not necessarily,” said Darcy, dealing out the facedown cards.
Wickham looked at his.
Darcy looked at his. He raised his eyebrows.
“Fine,” said Wickham. “Another card.”
Darcy dealt him another. He dealt himself one too.
They turned over their cards and Wickham had gone over and Darcy won, but he’d come only barely close to twenty-one.
“Again?” said Wickham, shoving the cards across the table.
Darcy began to shuffle again. “She says you and I need to talk.”
“Yes, she said that to me, too,” said Wickham, sighing.
“I don’t know what she wants us to talk about.”
“Well, neither do I,” said Wickham. “She did say a number of things to me last night that I have been thinking about since. I don’t know what I am to make of them.”
“What did she say?” said Darcy.
“Well, it comes down to something like this, I suppose,” said Wickham.
“If I were truly your equal, Fitz, if I had my own estate and my own servants and household and everything else, you and I could not really do this with her. But because I am not, because I am lesser than you, it’s possible.
I can be tucked away in your household somewhere, someone who serves you, someone who travels with you both, and this can work.
But in order for it to work, I have to accept that. ”
Darcy nodded at him. “Yes, you are convinced that you are less than me because women want my wealth, and I am convinced I am less than you because women only want my wealth.”
Wickham furrowed his brow. “What do you mean?”
“If they want you, it’s because they are actually attracted to you,” said Darcy.
“No,” said Wickham, shrugging. “I am charming and I make them promises and I do all manner of untoward things. I am a sham. You are the real thing.”
“You are not a sham,” said Darcy.
“Always have been,” said Wickham. “Sham of a son to your father. Sham of a gentleman. Sham of—”
“No, I won’t hear this,” Darcy interrupted. “You have been beloved, George. He loved you. I love you.”
He couldn’t deny this, but here they were again, at this crossroads, where Darcy could not understand… but it all came down to what she had said, didn’t it? He had to accept his place in the world.
If he did, it could be quite a comfortable place, a place here as Darcy’s cosseted favorite. He could live in the man’s house and eat the man’s food and even fuck the man’s wife. It was all quite, quite comfortable. Nothing to complain about.
All it cost was that he lower himself.
“He treated me like… like I mattered,” said Wickham softly. “Your father did.”
“Have I treated you as if you do not matter, because I do not think—”
“No, this isn’t an accusation,” said Wickham. “I am saying that it gave me ideas. It made me think that I do matter.”
“You do.”
“I don’t,” said Wickham. “That’s the real trouble with me, Fitz. I am always and forever trying to be something that the world will not allow me to be. And here we are, right now, at these crossroads, and in order to have her, to have the woman I love, I must…”
“You don’t have to cease to matter, George. She and I, we both think of you as—”
“Yes, I know, and it should be enough,” said Wickham. “I want it to be enough.”
It was quiet.
Wickham gestured. “You should deal the cards.”
Darcy set the deck aside. “Explain it to me. Explain to me why this is such a problem.”
“I want to be your equal, Darcy. I have always wanted it.”
“You are my equal.”
“I am not. I have nothing compared to you, and everything I do have, you have given me, or else your father has given me.”
“If we were truly brothers, you know, it would be much the same. One of us would inherit and the other would not.”
Wickham considered. “Perhaps I had not thought of that.”
“But thank heaven you are not my brother, or we could not do the things we do to Elizabeth together.”
Wickham smirked. “Ah, that is true.”
“So?”
Wickham tried to find the words. “It is hard to explain.”
“Because it doesn’t make sense?”
Wickham shot him a withering look. “Let’s forget all this. We can play cards, and if she is not severely out of sorts this evening, I want my night with her, the night you promised—”
“I am sorry I said that,” said Darcy. “About it not making sense. I do actually want to understand.”
Wickham spread his hands. “It is like this, Fitz. You are taken to a table every day and the table is full of all the good things in the world, everything you like, everything you enjoy, and you are fed from it until one day, you are not fed from it anymore. And everyone says to you, ‘Oh, you were never meant to be at that table. You were meant to be at this table.’ And that table is sparser and meaner and more difficult, and you try to sit at it without complaint, but some part of you is twisting with the pain of being cast out of paradise. And you look up at that table, and there he is, sitting there.”
“That’s me?” said Darcy.
Wickham nodded. “And you, Fitz, are enjoying everything at the table and when I come to beg for some of it, you tell me that I am a wasteful spendthrift and that I must learn to stop eating at this table, for it is beyond my means, and no matter what I do to get a spot here again, you shut me out, everyone does—”
“But you are here,” said Darcy. “You are in my sitting room, under my roof, and I am letting you fuck my wife—”
“I know this.”
“And it’s not enough?”
“Letting me,” he said. “You are ‘letting me.’ It will always be that way. Your wife. Your house. Your sitting room.” He gestured. “Your damnable cards.”
Darcy let out a breath. “But I cannot… what did you wish me to do? Allow you to marry her?”
“We have been through this already,” said Wickham. “I could not have been the husband to her that you are, that you will be. And if we are both to have children with her, it is better for the children that they be yours. So… no, given the situation, Fitz, it is all best this way.”
“Well, all right, then.”
“It is only that the situation is not ideal,” said Wickham.
“You mean, you wish you had been born into a different position than you were born into,” said Darcy. “We can all do this, all day long, George. I could spend all my time bemoaning the fact I am not a prince or the son of a duke or—”
“Stop it,” said Wickham. “It is nothing the same, and you know it is not. I am saying that she said to me last night that I must let it go, that I must accept my station in life, that I must accept that I am less than you. I am thinking on it. I am trying to do exactly that.”
“Well, all right, then,” said Darcy again.
“Deal the cards,” said Wickham.
Darcy shuffled in silence and then he dealt the cards out.
This time Wickham got the two of hearts and Darcy got the three of diamonds.
He dealt out the facedown cards and they both got another card.
Wickham had twenty. Darcy had seventeen.
“I wish to, erm, I know you did not have a night with her alone last night,” said Darcy, “but I feel as if we should all be together tonight.”
“Oh, you do,” said Wickham. “Well, she is your wife, and you are ‘letting me’ at her, so I suppose—”
“For God’s sake, George.”
Wickham sighed.
“It cannot always be this way,” said Darcy.
“No, I know,” said Wickham. “But if you cannot give me a night with her, Fitz, if you cannot surrender just that much of her—”
“It’s not quite surrender, truly, I only feel…” He gestured with both hands. “It was torture, all alone, and I cannot bear it.”
“I am often alone when you are with her.”
“That is because you remove yourself. You leave in a huff. You do that quite often.’
“It is not always why. Sometimes, the two of you are invited to dinners where I am not welcome. And there will be more of that, will there not? Balls and the like?”
“We need to come up with the right story, and you can be part of our social lives, obviously,” said Darcy. “And we need… we need to work out what to do about Georgiana.”
Wickham flinched.
It was very, very quiet.
Wickham reached for the cards. “I wish you to understand that I have never done anything untoward with your sister. I did not so much as hold her hand. What I did was not done because of wanting her in that way. It was only done because I wanted to be part of your family.”
“I suppose I have gathered that,” said Darcy. “But I do not see how to explain that to her.”
“How… is she?”
“She is… fine.”
“She is in London even now?”
“Aye. She was here, but I arranged for her to go and stay with the Hursts when I knew all of this was coming about. They were coming back to London, and it seemed convenient. I knew she could not be under the same roof while you were here.”
“What does she say of me?”
“She and I never speak of you,” said Darcy in a hard voice.
“Perhaps I could speak to her.”
“No.” This was flat.
Wickham looked at the ceiling. “You are still angry with me about this, then, I see.”
“How could I be anything else?”
Wickham thought about it. “I suppose I did not see it from your perspective before. I did not think of it the way it obviously looked. You thought I was manipulating a very young girl against her wishes, and that I was going to take sexual advantage of her, and this was after our…” He gestured back and forth. “No wonder you cut me out after that.”
“I did not cut you out, George. Witness the fact that you are, even now, in my sitting room, playing cards with me and putting your seed in my wife’s cunny.” But Darcy was seething now.
Wickham shifted uncomfortably. “I did not think it through, Fitz. I’m sorry. I’m sorry to Miss Darcy as well. I should like the chance to apologize to her face to face, if you—”
“Just leave my sister be.”
He nodded.
Darcy picked up the cards and riffled through them. “God, why are you, even now, in my sitting room and in my bed? Why do I forgive you everything you do, George? What is it about you?”
Wickham ducked his face down. “I suppose, until now, you have needed my assistance in order to secure amorous congress.”
Darcy threw the deck onto the table, grimacing.
“I have been rather abominable to you, Fitz, I think. In a number of ways. It was mostly borne of jealousy on my part. I thought it excused things, when it never did. I am sorry. I am truly sorry. It’s all horrid, considering you are the last person I really wished to hurt.”
“Not tonight,” said Darcy quietly. “Tonight, it will be all three of us. You may have her cunny, but not on your own. All right?”
Wickham should nod. He should agree. But… “I know it’s not the time, Fitz,” he said quietly, “but I cannot be in something, a lifetime of a thing, if it is to be your ordering me around and restricting access to the woman I love.”
Darcy’s nostrils flared.
“I am only saying we must find some other way through it if we have disagreements. Your word cannot be law. It cannot only be how you wish it. My desires must matter and her desires must matter too.”
“It really is not the time,” said Darcy tightly.
“But you see what I am saying, do you not?”
“I see that you are always and forever going to stir up mischief, that you are never satisfied, and that no matter what I give you, it is never enough.”
Wickham nodded. “I supposed that’s what you would see.” He got up from the table.
Darcy looked up at him. “Are you going somewhere?”
“This is never going to work,” Wickham said tightly. “I think, deep down, we all three know it.”