TWENTY-THREE #2
“I must ask your discretion regarding what I am about to tell you,” he said. “My cousin Colonel Fitzwilliam and my sister Georgiana can attest to it if ever required. Wickham himself cannot prove a single word of what he has told you, nor anything contrary to what I now tell you.”
“You have my discretion entirely,” said Elizabeth.
Darcy looked ahead across the common.
“Three years ago, Wickham attempted to elope with my sister at Ramsgate. She was only fourteen. He cultivated her acquaintance deliberately, and she was young enough to imagine herself in love with him.” He swallowed once, rather harder than before.
“His object was her dowry. Thirty thousand pounds.
I arrived in time to prevent it, though the damage to Georgiana's peace of mind was not so easily undone.”
Though the wind still moved across the common, though Jane and Bingley’s voices drifted faintly ahead and birds called somewhere in the distance, the silence that followed felt complete.
Elizabeth could not speak for a moment. She became suddenly aware of a very particular kind of horror, not the loud sort, but the quiet sort.
The kind that settles slowly when something half suspected proved not only true, but worse than imagined.
She thought of Wickham’s easy manners, his ready smile, the effortless warmth with which he had first addressed her, and felt something cold and precise settle within her chest.
“That is the kind of man he is,” said Darcy.
"My sister Lydia is quite fond of him," Elizabeth said at last, more quietly than she intended.
"From what she has told me, he has been attentive enough in Meryton.
Though he has never once called at Longbourn, which I had thought rather peculiar.
" She paused. "And he did not attend the Lucas ball.
Mr. Denny claimed he suffered a stomach complaint, but now. .."
“Now it seems considerably more probable,” Darcy said, “that he learned I would be present.”
“Yes.”
He remained silent a moment. Elizabeth herself was still struggling to gather either words or indignation.
"Had I been more about the neighbourhood these past weeks, I would have known he was here sooner," said Darcy, with a quietness edged beneath by something harder. "I shall speak to Bingley. Colonel Forster ought to know the nature of the man within his regiment."
“I think that very wise.”
“Do not misunderstand me, but I must ask that you remain watchful regarding your sister.” He looked at her directly. “Wickham always has some object in view. He does not act without purpose.”
Elizabeth nodded, the coldness within her settling gradually into something nearer resolution.
Yet the reality of it still struggled to sit properly within her understanding.
She had not believed Wickham entirely — she had known that much about herself — but she had listened, and considered, and allowed the possibility to occupy her mind far longer than it deserved.
That was its own kind of foolishness, and she felt it now with uncomfortable precision.
“He made himself remarkably easy to pity,” she said after a brief pause.
“He even complained of learning of your marriage and your accident only through old acquaintances. He gave the impression not that he retained resentment himself, but rather that you continued to harbour one so strongly you excluded him from the wedding despite his considering you almost a brother.”
Whatever relief had briefly appeared upon Darcy's face at having explained the truth regarding Wickham disappeared almost immediately into something quieter and harder to name.
It lasted only a moment and was gone quickly enough that Elizabeth could not have properly described it afterward.
It was not grief, though grief existed somewhere within it.
Nor was it quite anger. It was there, and then it was not, and she was left with the distinct impression that something in what she had just told him had landed somewhere entirely unexpected.
She did not question him about it. It was not the moment.
"Clara — my late wife — was the person who persistently urged me to go to Ramsgate.
She had called at Pemberley in the first month of our courtship and met Georgiana and her governess, Mrs. Younge.
She noticed an illicit fondness between Mrs. Younge and Wickham and could not in good conscience remain silent.
She wrote to warn me when Georgiana subsequently left for Ramsgate with Mrs. Younge as her companion.
I owe my intervention entirely to her." Darcy paused, somewhat longer than his usual pauses.
“After Ramsgate, she wanted nothing to do with him entirely.
By the time of our wedding, I had banished Wickham from my life.
Even had I wished to invite him, I did not know where he was.
" He paused once more. "Nor did I particularly desire to know. "
Now it was Elizabeth’s turn to feel puzzled, for something about the account did not sit entirely right.
“Mr. Wickham did not leave me with the impression he had known your wife at all,” she said slowly, “or even that he was aware of your engagement. He spoke entirely as though he had heard of the marriage casually and secondhand.”
Again, that same shadow crossed Darcy’s face, quicker this time and more deliberately suppressed.
“I see,” he said.
He offered nothing further.
Elizabeth did not press him. But she stored the moment away with the instinct of a woman who had already begun to understand that the things Fitzwilliam Darcy chose not to say frequently mattered as much as those he did.
The remainder of the afternoon passed more easily than Elizabeth had expected.
"Darcy asked after her favourite walks with an attentiveness that suggested he genuinely wished to know the answers, and she found herself describing routes she had known since childhood with a warmth that surprised even herself.
He mentioned Oakham Mount and declared he should like to see the lower meadow.
Elizabeth replied that the ascent itself would likely prove difficult.
He answered that the meadow would satisfy him perfectly well, then added, almost absently, that Clara would certainly have climbed to the top, simply and without visible grief, speaking not of a wound newly struck but one long learned and carried. "
Elizabeth said she believed it. Nothing further appeared necessary.
When she asked about Pemberley, Darcy spoke not of the estate itself but of the house.
The river in autumn. His housekeeper, Mrs. Reynolds, whose manner Elizabeth thought bore some resemblance to Hill’s.
Caesar sprawling across the library hearthrug with sovereign disregard for everyone else’s convenience. Georgiana’s devotion to the pianoforte.
Elizabeth listened and thought — not for the first time but more certainly than before — that she had been wrong about him.
What she had once taken for pride now seemed something altogether different.
It was reserve shaped by grief and long habit rather than arrogance.
Beneath it was simply a man who had loved deeply, suffered greatly, and was only now, haltingly, beginning to find his way back to the ordinary comforts of living.
By the time the party returned toward the carriage, Elizabeth had ceased revising her opinion of him altogether.
There was nothing left to revise.