Chapter Nine What Wickham Wants
He had always found that the best approach to any situation was the accurate one.
This was not a moral position. Wickham had not organised his life around moral positions in any useful sense for a very long time, and the positions he had once attempted had proven expensive in ways he had not anticipated at nineteen and had ceased to invest in before he was twenty-two.
What he meant by accurate was practical: you looked at a situation as it actually was, you counted its components without flattering yourself about any of them, and you proceeded from the count rather than from what you wished the count might be.
This approach had served him well. It had not made him rich, which remained an outstanding problem, but it had kept him from most of the varieties of disaster that overtook men who operated on less accurate assessments of their circumstances.
He sat at the small writing table in his quarters and considered his circumstances.
The regiment was in Meryton for the winter.
This was agreeable: the neighbourhood was welcoming, the hospitality was genuine, and the social life, while not precisely what one might have chosen for its intellectual content, was warmer and more immediate than the alternatives.
He had made himself liked here, which had not required any particular effort because being liked was something he did naturally and with the same ease that other men breathed, and the neighbourhood had responded to this with the enthusiasm of a place that understood good company when it arrived.
He had also, in the first three weeks of his residence, made the following accurate assessments.
Miss Jane Bennet was the neighbourhood's acknowledged beauty and was engaged, in everything but formal declaration, in a situation with Bingley that would resolve itself one way or the other by spring and was of no professional interest to him.
He liked her well enough in the abstract way he liked most people he had no use for.
Miss Elizabeth Bennet was a different matter.
He thought about her the way he thought about all instruments: in terms of what she could do, what she could not, and what the current circumstances made her useful for.
She was clever, which was both an asset and a constraint.
Clever people saw more, which meant you had to be careful about what they were positioned to see.
But clever people also had the specific vulnerability of their cleverness, which was that they trusted their own analysis in the way that less clever people trusted authority, and the result was that if you could locate the right information to give them, they assembled the case themselves and found it all the more convincing for having built it.
He had given her the shape of his history with Darcy.
He had not given her the details yet, which was the correct sequencing.
You gave the shape first and let the mind fill the space, and then the details arrived as confirmation of what was already believed rather than as argument, which was the difference between persuasion and proof.
People accepted proof. They needed to argue with persuasion. He was not interested in arguments.
He considered what he knew about Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy.
She did not like Darcy. This was clear and had been clear from his first conversation with her.
The quality of her not-liking was specific, which was interesting, because general not-liking was the ordinary kind that came from the same impression everyone else had formed of a proud and disagreeable man, and Elizabeth Bennet did not deal in general impressions if she could help it.
Her not-liking had the texture of something personal.
Something grounded. He had not pressed her on it because pressing clever people produced resistance, but he had noted it and found it very useful.
She was, he thought, the best-positioned person in Hertfordshire to believe what he had to tell her about Darcy.
This was not because she was credulous. The opposite.
It was because she had already formed the foundation of the belief herself, on whatever evidence she had privately assembled, and what he was providing was architecture rather than ground.
You did not have to build from the ground up when someone else had already laid the floor.
He thought about Darcy.
This required a different quality of thinking.
With most people he thought about them from the outside, from their utility or their constraint or their position in the arrangement of a situation.
With Darcy he had to think from a longer acquaintance, which meant from a history that he had the professional sense not to think about too directly, because the direct version of it had components he preferred not to organise into a sequential account.
The living was real. He was clear on this and had been clear on it for years. Old Mr. Darcy's intention had been real and the failure of it had been real and he had not imagined the expectation or the disappointment. These were facts.
The rest of what he had told Elizabeth was curated with the care he brought to all curation, which was to say that nothing he had told her was invented, which made everything he had told her something he could hold to without the cost of maintaining a fabrication.
The version he had given her was the true version from the inside, which was the version he lived in, and which did not require him to account for the version Darcy lived in, which would have been both inconvenient and unnecessary.
He had not mentioned Georgiana. This was a decision he had made before he opened the conversation and which he reviewed periodically and consistently found sound.
Georgiana was a complication that added nothing to the account he was building and had significant risk of creating questions he did not want asked.
He had left her entirely out and the architecture was cleaner for it.
He also thought about Miss King.
Mary King was fifteen miles from Meryton, had recently inherited ten thousand pounds from a grandfather who had died in October, and had, from their one meeting at a neighbouring assembly, the quality of a young woman who was not unaffectionate and whose guardian, an uncle she appeared to find not entirely agreeable, would be practical about settlements.
He had written twice. He had received one reply, which was encouraging.
He was not allowing himself to attach too much certainty to this line of investment, because certainty in advance of confirmation was the kind of error he had made at nineteen and had learned not to repeat, but he was attending to it with the steady peripheral focus of a man who had several possibilities in active development and was not allowing any one of them to consume the attention required by the others.
The situation with Caroline Bingley was worth noting.
She had been, in the early weeks of the regiment's residence, warm to him in the way that women were warm to handsome officers in good regiments who did not require them to think very hard about why they were warm.
Lately this warmth had cooled by several degrees, which suggested that Darcy had said something, which was not surprising but was worth tracking.
Caroline Bingley did nothing without reference to what Darcy might think of it, which was the clearest piece of information available about her inner life and its primary governing principle.
If she was cooling, Darcy had spoken. If Darcy had spoken, Darcy was paying closer attention to the neighbourhood's social landscape than he usually troubled himself to.
This was not a problem. It was a data point. Darcy paying attention to the neighbourhood meant Darcy was invested in something or someone in it, and invested men were men whose attention was divided, which was always a preferable state in an adversary to the undivided kind.
He filed this.
He looked at the letter he had been composing on the writing table. It was to a friend in London, a man of his general social class and general approach to life who was in town for the winter and had written asking after the Meryton posting and whether it had any features worth reporting.
He wrote that it was agreeable. He wrote that the neighbourhood was warm.
He wrote, in the tone of a man finding something mildly diverting, that the Bennet family were people of no great connexion or fortune but considerable personal interest, and that one of the daughters in particular had the quality of wit that made an evening pass very agreeably.
He found this sentence accurate. He felt, as he often did when he thought about Elizabeth Bennet, something that was not quite warmth and not quite professional calculation but somewhere between the two, in the space that his life had arranged for things he appreciated without needing to acquire.
She was genuinely good company. She was the kind of person he would have liked to know in a different arrangement of the world's facts, which was a thought he entertained once and then set down because the world's facts were not differently arranged and he was an accurate man.
He was not worried about her.
He had given her the shape of the account.
The details would follow at the right moment.
She had received it through a filter she had already built, which meant she had done the heavy work herself, and when the time came for Darcy's name in Hertfordshire to remain exactly what Wickham had made it, she would be the one sustaining it, and she would be sustaining it on the basis of her own intelligence and her own careful analysis, and she would not, because she was too proud of her own judgment to easily reverse it, be looking for reasons to revise.
He had chosen her well.
He sealed the letter.
He crossed to the window of his quarters and looked out at the Meryton street in the late afternoon light, grey and still and entirely ordinary, and he felt the mild satisfaction of a man who has reviewed his position and found it sound.
He was not, he thought, doing anything that required justification.
He was managing his circumstances with the tools available to him, which was what everyone did, and the primary difference between himself and other people was that he was honest with himself about the tools he was using, which was a species of integrity that most people lacked the courage for.
This thought, like all his most useful thoughts, was not examined too long or too closely.
He left the window. He had a dinner to attend at the Phillipses', and the Phillipses kept a good table, and the evening would contain Elizabeth Bennet and several other people whose company he found agreeable, and he went to it with the ease of a man who had nowhere in his recent history found serious cause for concern.
This was accurate.
It was also, like all the most precisely accurate assessments of incomplete information, missing the single variable that would have mattered.
He did not know what she had heard in the doorway at Meryton.
He did not know it because she had not told anyone, and because there was no mechanism by which he could have discovered it, and because the foundation on which he had so carefully built his account was not, as he believed, her general impression of Darcy confirmed by his testimony.
It was a wound.
And wounds, in his experience, were more reliable than impressions. They did not revise as easily. They did not respond to counter-evidence in the ordinary way. They had the specific durability of something that had cost enough to make you reluctant to have paid it for nothing.
He was right about that.
He was simply wrong about being the one who had made it.
He went out into the Meryton street and walked toward the Phillipses' with the comfortable confidence of a man who had conducted his review and found everything in order, and the evening received him with exactly the warmth he had arranged to find there, and he found it, and was satisfied, and did not look back.